[Adam Smith]

I assume you’re talking about how fades don’t progress linearly, but have more of a curve with accelerated start and stop. As I understand it, this is a function of having Premiere Pro set to use GPU hardware acceleration which requires Linear Color blending. (I hate it!) (Clarification – I hate how the fades work, I am very much a fan of GPU acceleration!)

I’ve read people say to just deal with it, there’s no ‘fix’ as it’s not broken. The only real solution is to turn off GPU acceleration when you output movies, which should render as expected but at potentially drastically increased output time.

You can try stacking a fade transition with a simultaneous (but longer) manual fade via Opacity keyframes, sometimes that helps me avoid the biggest bumps, but it’s not perfect or quick. I haven’t found any type of fade transition that works as I’d expect it to.

-Adam

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Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

The HPX500 does not output HD from the viewfinder connection, and since it’s an SD feed you’re viewing you might try adjusting the downconvert mode on the camera (letterbox / squeeze / crop) and see if that makes a difference in what you see in the VF.

I do think it makes a difference on the flip-out LDC panel, so perhaps it affects the viewfinder as well… but I’ve only got the stock VF so I’m just guessing here.

-Adam

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Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

Hi Anne, I’ve got two quick-and-dirty ideas for you:

I don’t know how consistent you were with lighting, but my first thought is to place footage of one of the other headshots behind this one. You might need to feather the top edge of your foreground shot a bit, but hopefully it could be an easy fix.

If the grey gradients are too different, then I’d export a frame for Photoshop and make a patch. You can try scaling the top lines up to fill the hole, but you may get stripes that you’d then have to blur, and then you might need to add grain to match the rest.

-Adam

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Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

I wonder if it’s your audio tracks and not the encoding.

I’m NOT an audio guy, but I know if you mix the exact same audio on two tracks, with the phase on one side inverted, you’ll get something similar to what you describe… the trick can actually be used to create a simple karaoke track from standard recordings. For whatever reason the two tracks cancel out at certain frequencies (same theory behind noise reduction headphones and the like), but it seems to focus more on the frequencies including human voices and leave quite a bit of the music behind.

Now how an issue like that could wind up in your program I have no idea. I may be way off base here, and I’m sure someone else could speak with more accuracy, but that’s where I’d start. Have you tried monitoring from the edit station with all tracks centered (mono)? Or playing your initial output file in the same manner, before encoding to the delivery format?

-Adam

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Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

[Michael Morabe] “We just find it hard to believe the PCD20 is already crapped out. I’ll have to bring up getting another reader to test out. I still don’t like that even through Firewire 400 it still has a possibility to cause issues.”

If you suspect the reader, you can always connect the 200 or 500 via Firewire/USB and try a direct offload to see if anything changes. I always write-protect the cards before mounting too.

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Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

You generally double the shooting frame rate to get the “standard” shutter speed, so shooting 24p would be a 1/48th shutter, which is the same as shooting at a 180 degree film shutter.

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Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

I’d look into actual carry-on bags from PortaBrace or the like… they’re not going to lug as much gear as your main case would, but they’ll get your camera small enough and protected enough to carry-on. I’ve seen some where you remove the lens, and others where the case is almost more like armor than a bag.

I’d also make sure you don’t have the camera TOO stripped down, as you may be required to power it up and show that it works. Of course this means you’ll need a battery right there with the camera, but I believe most batteries are carry-on these days anyways. Do some research on Lithium Ion batteries if you have them, I believe they’ve relaxed some in the past few years, but there may still be strict rules on how and where they are packed and even what sizes of batteries you can fly with.

Generally you’re only allowed one carry-on (plus one small bag) so if you’ve got two cameras, I hope you’ve got a travel partner.

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Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

2/3″ chips are not small, unless you’re comparing to a DSLR or one of the new digital cinema cameras.

The HVX-200 and 200a both use 1/3″ chips. However you’re right in that both 200 and 500 use pixel-shift to pull a higher resolution image from their sensors. In my understanding, this makes them a little softer but more light sensitive, and any image noise will be smaller than comparable cameras.

As to the original question – I’ve had a 500 for several years now and I’m a big fan, but I’d have to do a close feature and image comparison these days to decide between the 500 and 370. The difference in Depth of Field would be the biggest issue for me in picking the 370, but honestly, these days if you want DOF there are lots of choices that do it better. Not saying it’s a slam-dunk for the 370, but for roughly half the price and 3 years in tech advancements… it’d certainly be up to the older camera to prove that it’s worth the difference.

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Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

I have a HPX-500 and while I played with the first 250 I didn’t get far enough to know whether they function the same for offloading… but I’d still venture to say that if you have any sort of camera control, you should not expect the P2 volumes to mount.

On my camera I have a button to switch between the 3 modes, CAM (camera), MCR (playback) and PC. MCR would be the mode I would use if I wanted to control the camera via Firewire while capturing from it like any other tape camera – either via firewire (for valid formats) or SDI etc connections to a capture card.

If I wanted to mount the P2 cards for archiving and use Log & Transfer for all the benefits of tapeless workflow, I’d put my camera into PC mode. In this case all you need is the firewire cord. The cards should automatically show up on the desktop (might take a minute). Once they are up FCP and Premiere should easily see and capture the footage. Note that in PC mode there is NO remote camera control because you’re not driving the camera to pick footage, the edit software is merely browsing the contents of the P2 cards like any other disk.

One quick note! As a safety precaution, WRITE PROTECT your P2 cards before mounting. You don’t want the system writing anything strange on your cards. Never had a problem here, but I’ve seen people who have.

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Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

Hi David, thanks for the reply.

I know we really need to do a full wipe, but the boss just wasn’t ready to take that step. We’re going to run a full backup tonight and discuss in the morning. We just found out that we have a few weeks of AppleCare left and it would be stupid not to run it down to the Apple store for a checkup, and we kinda suspect whatever they do will wind up wiping the HD.

Regarding the Matrox drivers, what I was trying to say was that the Matrox software had not been addressed since the rebuild, and even tho it’s not being used, having the drivers still in there could be a factor. If I’d been thinking yesterday I would have uninstalled the MXO2 at the same time we removed FCS2.

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Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor