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FCP tips & tricks
I was going to pass along a couple of my personal favorite FCP tips on this board, but I decided to turn it into a web page where I could compile more stuff, and give lengthier explanations.
So … you’re invited to take a look. Use something from there if you like, or yawn and say, “Been there, done that”. The most important articles there, in my opinion, are the ones on Making Broadcast Quality Quicktimes, and “Filmlook”. Also … if you’ve got suggestions, criticisms, or a favorite tip, feel free to pass them along.
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14 Replies
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Hmmm….I wouldn’t call h.264 “broadcast quality.” If I submitted a tape with that compression it’d get kicked back.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net -
What would you use? Or would you?
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Mark
First of all, more resorces for people to learn is always good. I know the ammount of time it takes to write something up.
Was a bit NTSC orientated though. There are a lot of PAL users out there 🙂I would be interested to see some comparisons between filmlooks, one straight deinterlace, one your photoshop method
and maybe ‘our graeme’s’ smart deinterlace.Peter
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If I shot on DV, then I’d use the DV codec and when I output, use a capture card and output to the required tape directly. Or if I have a lot of text and graphics, and I need to go out to digibeta, I upconvert the footage to 8-bit uncompressed. If I am working with digibeta footage from the start, I’d offline at DV res, then online at 10-bit uncompressed. (DV is an 8-bit format, digibeta a 10-bit format).
H.264 is web delivery and a form of HD DVD only…NOT a broadcast format by any stretch of the imagination.
Broadcasters convert everything they send out over the airwaves as MPEG-2. But very high end MPEG-2.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net -
NTSC … Never Twice the Same Color. Well, that’s all I’ve ever worked in. PAL reminds me of Bart Simpson’s quote when asked if he knew “sentence structure”. He replied, “I know OF it”.
I was pleased with the results I got from my PhotoShop de-interlace method, although I don’t use it very often. I developed it about 4 years ago when I wasn’t satisfied with what I was getting from other methods and plug-ins in Media Composer. I only use FCP now. I’m sure there are some things out there that I don’t know about.
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Video definitley displays more than hundreds of colors. Just render a codec with thousands of colors and you’ll get horrific banding. The reason film and video look different is latitude of exposure. And the difference can be corrected in video during a shoot with zillions of little lights and nd filtering, bringing every element of the scene into the exposure range of the video ccd. Example, when shooting film, your object of exposure, a face possibly, might be a certain exposure. Film may be able to capture the details up to 5 fstops above and below that exposure, while video may only be able to capture detail up to 2 fstops above and below. Anything above or below that is clipped to pure white or pure black with no details to ever be recovered. But why does film look so good when transferred to video? Because that range is then mashed into the video spectrum. Just like playing with levels in photoshop. So if you really want video to look like film-to-video, you have to bring down all the bright highlights and bring up all the deep shadows to be closer to the medium exposure of your subject during shooting. The end result will be much closer. However, unless you shoot video at a lower frame rate, it will still look unnatural because you still shot it at 1/60th shutter speed instead of 1/24th. The latter creating more natural motion blur.
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I’m pretty sure my trusty old TV antenna and color tv isn’t receiving Mpeg-2. What do you mean they convert everything to mpeg 2?
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I think you make a couple good points. I used the thousands of colors (film) vs hundreds of colors (video) comparison because that was the way one of the experts on another of the forums described it. I went along with it, but I was never comfortable with it, and you’re right about the banding at thousands of colors. I’ve seen that. So I think I’ll change that.
The lattitude of levels info you had sounded sensible, but I only understood 63.79% of what you said.
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Hi Mark,
I can acces http://www.mcpvid.com/prodguide.htlm, but not the ‘tips”.
Salud,
Rafael -
my guess is Shane is talking about digital transmission, whether digital terrestrial, satellite or other.
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