Kodak Play Touch video and Final Cut Pro

[Mark Suszko]

I guess I have to believe you, I just liked that answer because it explained a lot. Are you using a digial zoom in the camera, or moving the camera in close to get close-ups? Because digital zooming will degrade the picture, and is to be avoided.

How about posting a still frame here, as I outlined?

[Megan Brown]

Final Cut is on my own personal Mac and I had to leave it at home today, so that won’t be possible today.

Lastly, do you have any idea if the Play Touch video typically would be quality enough to play on a large screen … even a T.V.?

[Steve Eisen]

I think I answered that the first time. We are talking about a consumer point and shoot video camera. Usually outdoor footage on a bright day look decent. Indoor or dark footage won’t look good. Only an expert colorist can make bad footage look decent.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group

[Megan Brown]

Alright– thank you very much for your help.

[Mark Suszko]

It’s actually harder to shoot a “pro” looking project with the consumer cams a lot of the time, because their automatic ersponses to conditinos can make mistakes in judgement that manual controls could override. The Zi8 kodak was a darmed good camera for shooting people at arms’ length in good lighting, and shooting wide scenery if the camera was held still… Plus, it had the external mic input so you could hang a “real” microphone on the subject and get credible sound. The main innovation on Megan’s camera over the Zi-8 seems to be the touch screen interface and not so much an improvement in the shooting electronics.

I’m not going to give up on my thieory that this is “pilot error” in some setting gone awry, though. We just have not yet pinned down where in the chain the error happened.