[Al Bergstein]

I just downloaded the 64 bit version of Boris Continuum and compared their chroma key to my work with Sony’s native Chroma key. Day and night. Much better output with the same tool with no different work. I’ll send pointers to the files side by side over the weekend, but now I’ll test for stability and compare with native FCP green screen on my second editing bay.

If the stability is consistent, and easier to use, I’ll likely buy the package. I’ll try to remember to come back in a week or two, but if you don’t hear from me, it’s likely that there were no problems.

Thanks.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

I am looking for a better chroma keying tool for Vegas 10.a but worried about this thread. I’ll check with the Boris web site, but wondering if this is still a problem. I too have a similar configured system. i7, dual quad core, 8 GBs RAM. W7 Ultimate 64 w/Vegas 10a.

Willing to buy but not sure it will work? Crashes I don’t need at this moment…if ever…(G).

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

If that doesn’t work, perhaps split the video and manually sync or use Pluraleyes? I’ve had to be creative with SD footage that was also recorded at 44 onto decks hooked up off the board, and looked at editing and stretching it at moments when their was a non lip sync situation. For example: check out the video at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3iK5x1FJ1o This was recorded at 44, and because there was ‘drift’ I was able to sync when the piano player was doing his solo. Everyone agreed it ended up being ‘voodoo magic’. The opening intro is in the old footage off the camera, the rest of it was recorded off the board onto a SoundDevices professonal deck.

Alf

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[Al Bergstein]

I just produced blu ray versions of a production last night. With a Blu Ray player in your Mac Pro, output the files in Compressor for BR. Then use Toast to burn them, as Apple hasn’t negotiated a deal with Sony for BR yet. That would at least get you a BR disk for the showing. Burn two to make sure that the player on the other end can read them. I’ve had problems where a computer BR player could not play my Mac created BR disk, but a Sony consumer player could play it.

TEST it out before the show.

DON’T use DVD Studio Pro to make the beautiful chapter based DVD because it apparently can’t. (or is there something I don’t understand about DVD SP?) I wasted hours once finding this out. You can make great SD DVDs but it won’t translate to BR at all.

It should work just fine, but given your deadline, find someone locally who can get this done right.

Which brings up a different related question. What are people using to do one DVD menu of the same footage, only output in two different formats? Example: If he wants to spend hours fine tuning a DVD with chapter markers for both SD and BR burning, what are you folks using to do this? Just taking it to a 3rd party? My take on this is that I have to go off of FCP and even Apple because I can’t find a professional tool that will do it… Toast is entirely too consumer oriented in it’s templates.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Sorry you feel this way Jim, but I went through similar agravating experiences with Final Cut Pro. DVD production on Vegas is easier, but neither are cake walks. There are tutorials out there. You need to go through them. I had to. Otherwise just burn it right out of the pull down menues as you did. There have been critical support questions asked that you have not answered. Since we can’t see your computer it’s pretty critical to help us help you.

I’ve had frustrations with many DVD burning packages. Overly complex, incapable of simple things, such as on Apple their high end DVD production package can’t burn a Blu Ray disk even if you have a Blu Ray player in the machine. You have to use Toast. Sheesh.

So give us a bit more clues here, and maybe we can help you out.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Thanks Chris. Interesting looking tools. Unfortunately I am on FCP and also Vegas. I’ve not seen enough reasons to move to adobe, yet.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Best of luck Steven. I always get a laugh out of reading these kinds of comparisons. Windows users always gripe about the price they pay would have to pay for anything Apple, then immediatetly talk about upgrading their new ‘cheap’ Windows hardware to get the right performance out of it. Pay me now or pay me later. Given Apple’s share value compared to Windows for the last ten years, the general population is finally waking up to this arguement, and paying more now. And just so folks don’t think I’m an Apple Fanboy, I own two Windows 7 machines ( a state of the art Samsung laptop and HP desktop for Vegas) and two Apple machines for my work. While there is much to love in Windows, it’s much vaunted cheapness is a mirage.

As much as I could work on either machine for my personal machine (not talking about my Vegas production desktop or my Mac Pro for FCP needs), I find that I instinctively reach for my Macbook pro for the kinds of things you say your wife does daily. While not a tablet, it comes out of sleep almost instantly, compared to my new Samsung, and I use it for Facebook, Email, Web surfing, Netflix, NY Times online, etc. much like your wife would. I would never trade the weight of my MBpro (or it’s much faster boot & wake up from sleep mode) for the slow response time of a ‘cheaper’ netbook with a tiny screen, cramped keyboard, or underpowered CPU with little upgrade capacity. I might though for an iPad. The iPad is fast, extremely lightweight, it’s battery runs for hours longer than a Netbook, it doesn’t need a CPU, memory or hard drive upgrade out of the box, you can get it without a subscription service and simply use Wifi, the apps are outstanding, many of my friends have abandoned Quicken for instance, and I finally use an apple app on my iphone and really track my mileage effectively. I’ve been amazed at the utility of my iphone over every other cell phone I’ve ever used. It’s light years ahead of the pack. And there is nothing even close to the Apple app store yet. The nearest competitor, Google, has a bunch of apps that are sort of 1.0 compared to the polish of the Apple apps.

If you really can’t function without a keyboard, yes you can upgrade and get a dock that works with it.

Oh well… sorry for the long rant, you know your wife best. It *could* be that she’s very comfortable with Windows, mine is! In that case,just buy her a netbook. And save the money for your own iPad down the road.

Best of luck!

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Yeah I see it there now, but when I installed the SPV2 I used the installation instructions from them (as probably most people would ). They had listed a lot of the earlier versions of Vegas, and I think it’s a fair assumption to make that maybe nothing changed since V6 for something like this plug in. A lot of the keystrokes for these basic functions likely haven’t changed much, or that’s what I thought.

But yes, it’s all there. Works great now.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

I’ve had a card failure also, on a T2i. I lost half a days’ shoot (!).The dirty little secret to these cameras is that the pro versions ought to have a dual card setup, for redundant recording. The smaller SD cards are certainly small enough to put it in the camera, and there should be a cheap outboard firewire, USB or plug in hard drive adapter to run it to for the 7d. (any enterprising engineers out there?). It should not be a $700 version of what should cost about $75.00 (how about a hard drive with CF and SD adapter slots that automatically download the files when you plug in the card? How hard would that be?

By the way, while my T2i card had files that *should* have been recoverable (i think the last file didn’t close properly), all I could recover on it were jpegs. I tried a number of supposed recovery packages and none of them worked on video, though they *claimed* to be able to do so.

I have sold the T2i and upgraded to the 7D, mainly due to environmental sealing. I’ll certainly be dumping card data to my laptop much more frequently, given your post!

Interestingly I’ve never had a card failure (knock on wood) with my SD cards (same cards as the T2i used), on my Panasonic HMC150. I don’t know whether there is something more “robust” about the way that
‘real’ video cameras are engineered, and maybe I’m just lucky, but that’s been my take.

I would also recommend never opening the door while the light is still on (shooting). That may have been what happened to me with the T2i. I’m not sure but it’s the only thing I could figure.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Thanks John! The manual for this thing is it’s weakest link. You’d think that they would mention that in it!

Alf