[Al Bergstein]

Paul, most major TV stations do not accept 7D footage out of hand. Check out the “Red Books” at PBS or the BBC standards. You may find that you want to look into the Canon xf300, Panny AF100, Sony Camcorders, or some other “broadcast accepted” camera. There are many upsides to those cameras, but if you find that the web is your real delivery mechanism, then there is no reason not to use a 7D. Also, if you have TV stations on board already, or have talked to them, find out if they will accept 7D footage.

That said, if you still want to do a film with a HDSLR, or find that you can shoot with it for the tv stations you are working with, then the 7D is excellent, when paired with lenses that are environmentally protected, like the 70-200 zoom from Canon. It will hold up to any weather you throw at it. Do some research on that issue. The 7D is probably the best for really nasty outside conditions, but pro shooters shoot with many camcorders all over the world.

There are a huge number of discussions in the last two years over these issues, so do more searching first on this rather than expect a huge discussion on this often discussed topic.

I think you need to really look at your budget carefully, and decide whether for your ‘run and gun’ style, that a camcorder, once you have bought a bunch of lenses, audio gear, etc. won’t be the same or less. I have a full complement of 7D, and XF300 gear, and let me tell you, the final price between those two kits are almost identical! They are two tools that do similar but different jobs. I would only take the 7D worldwide for convenience, not for what you describe. I would take the xf300 for that. While someone like Philip Bloom usually shoots on HDSLR, his delivery for his work is usually the web, and he also makes money training folks like you and me. He has traditionally shot commercial work with an EX from Sony, and currently seems to be favoring the C300 from Canon. (I took one of his excellent day workshops, well worth the price).

I would add that you should practice a *lot* with your camera before leaving. You don’t want to miss a once in a lifetime shot because you didn’t know how to properly expose it!

Best of luck!

Hi
I am new to this site and seek advice on a project that I am about to embark on. I aim to make a travel documentary for TV. The doc will be made in Africa and will cover 12 countries from South Africa along the east coast all the way up to Egypt. Filming will be in a range of environments from savanna to snow.

This is an open call to anyone willing to offer any insight, advice and info on such a project from a filming perspective. I also have numerous questions (listed) and I would welcome any input:

1. What is the recommended quality that footage needs to be in order to be able to played by a TV station?
Based on preliminary research I am leaning on a DSLR type of camera (probably Canon EOS 7D). My main reasoning is price for the quality that it gives. I have some basic media training about 10 years ago but I feel this isn’t enough to go on. So my main concerns are:

2. Is a DSLR relatively easy to learn in order to be able to film “decent” footage?

3. What lenses (if any) would be advisable for shooting in environments like desert and rainforest?

4. For DSLR format what memory cards would be advisable? I have read that the speed of the memory card makes a big difference on the final product.

5. On the Canon 7D I believe the max for filming is 12-13m which takes up around 4GB. Realistically speaking for filming shots of 6-7m would it take up half the memory (is that how it works?)

6. Is overheating a realistic problem on DSLR’s? As I will be filming animals will I have to wait for the Canon to cool down? Furthermore I am hoping that with the 2 memory slots I will be able to film continuously longer. Is this correct? (if one runs out the other will kick in)

7. Any advice on comparable cameras like Nikon / Sony etc?

8. Can I get a similar quality result by a camcorder type of device? I have looked into the Sony HDR-CX700V but some youtube footage seems to indicate DSLR is better. Any advice on this?

9. Are there any other cameras that I should consider?
My budget is around 1500USD for the camera and still undecided on lenses.

Al

[Al Bergstein]

Ok, so at least the basics are out of the way. It’s not the monitor refresh or something like that.

As to the GTX 470, it appears on their ‘previous generation’ page, however the 450 appears on the still produced list. (why?) so I believe it’s been at end of product life. It does appear that it has more cores, but I’m unclear as to whether the engine is specialized for gaming or video rendering. I assume it’s fine though with that many cores.

Al

[Al Bergstein]

My bet is that it’s the video card. I have that one, I think, and I find that scrubbing is a bit like you describe. Seems to need to load into RAM. Once in RAM (after the initial few seconds) it seems to scrub fine. I’m exploring stepping up to the 4000 series from nVidia. Maybe someone else on the board could comment if that seems like overkill.

You didn’t mention your monitor but you might check to see that it’s refresh rate is fast. I know that some monitors (especially a few years old) don’t have a great refresh rate. And how is your monitor connected? DVI or HDMI I assume?

Al

[Al Bergstein]

I’ll let others chime in, and perhaps you should post this on Adobe’s site. But it seems that you may have a corrupted file or timeline. Given that you can still start the program and create new projects

Al

[Al Bergstein]

Karen, do you have any friends that could conceivably open these files? It would quickly eliminate whether the files are corrupted in some way. It sounds as if you cannot even successfully open PP5.5. Is that correct? If so, then reinstall the program, as an option. If it opens but the files don’t, then try my first suggestion.

Was there any upgrades you installed from either Apple or AMD?

Hopefully you have a backup of the files, maybe a time machine install you can return to?

Al

[Al Bergstein]

I would agree that you might focus on the video card to start. The biggest problem you might face is building something with a large enough power supply and ports to support the growth of your system.

HP and Dell have nice high end, lower end machines, desktops that for well under a $1000 have decent expansion and enough power supply capability to handle a lot of expansion. Try the Dell XPS series for example. You might find a tower refurbished by Dell on their web site.

I did have an HP who’s mother board fried after less than a year. So I went back to Dell towers.

The best long range purchase is a true workstation, with lots of expansion and a large hard drive. While some folks do end up having a good experience building their own, my experience has been that sometimes motherboard driver incompatibilities are not worth the savings. The major players send out updates on the bios, and other issues. Just go to this link at Dell to see that there have been 39 driver updates by Dell on this one model alone. The standalone board makers don’t have to do this kind of support, as they are not integrating the pieces. It can get very aggravating to have to track down problems, and the major vendors do spend money and manpower fixing these issues.
https://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/usgen1

Also, be aware that if you are in a location that has static electricity issues (and most places do), you should at least invest in a static mat and ground yourself if you are working on a motherboard or card. Static is very problematic, and can lead to very hard to troubleshoot random crashes of hardware once you have accidentally zapped a component. When in Arizona a while back, which has really bad static issues due to dry climate, I bought one of these to work on my machine.
https://www.google.com/products/catalog?client=safari&q=anti+static+wrist+strap&oe=UTF-8&cid=12083641902956018804&ei=LpeRT4OgJIzoigTpx6DQBQ&ved=0CDEQrhI

An ounce of prevention and all that…

Al

[Al Bergstein]

Thanks for this info Mark. I’ll go back and see if it helps get it right. I’ve not experienced it since using this particular footage.

Al

[Al Bergstein]

If you need that many cameras, I think you need to stick to Vegas for a while. The good news, having used both Vegas and Pr for multi camera editing, is that Pr doesn’t crash like I’ve found Vegas does. I have never, repeat never, had my session end under Pr like what is an all to often occurrence with Vegas. We both know that Vegas continues to have stability problems, quite well documented on their forums, by people like me (G), for years now. Perhaps you’ve been lucky with your configuration and see less crashes than I did.

My experience with Pr is that while a bit of an odd workflow, (Vegas multi cam is quite a nice fluid workflow), it does work. Now that I’ve finally got it down, it doesn’t seem too difficult (the notion of having to mark sync points is not intuitive, as in Vegas you simply slide the audio into sync, nor this weird idea of nesting mcam timelines). I’ve not needed Pluraleyes with it yet as syncing via marking points with just a couple of cameras is fine. There are things I’d like to see differently, like actually being able to see the audio waveforms better on the timeline, without constantly messing with the window sizes. (maybe with voice recognition I can just shout, “hey, open that damn window!” whenever I want the audio timeline to expand…but not sure how my wife would take to that…

Since you have so much more camera experience than I do, (I can’t imagine using that many cameras!), you might want to play around with it if you have time, and see what you can do. Likely they will remove this limitation of multi camera in some future version,maybe even 6, and the ability to integrate with the rest of Adobe’s professional line of tools is worth the effort. There’s so much more you can get done with AEs for example, than the lame set of buggy titling tools that comes with Vegas (the NewBlue tools constantly crashed my machine after having had no problems with ProTitler). I had to go back to doing titling by starting a new timeline each time I wanted to do the simplest title beyond basic, render it out and then add it to the main timeline…sheesh. That issue is moot now.

Good luck, and I would go to Adobe’s web site and put in a feature request for 32 camera multi camera editing.

I’ve not tried Avid, if you are needing to get off Vegas, then you might download their trial. But as Conan’s editing team mentioned, well, you’ll have to listen to it yourself. Enjoy.
https://www.photographybay.com/2012/03/15/adobe-premiere-pro-cs6-teased-via-conans-editors/

Al

[Al Bergstein]

Anthony, to be clear, you are attaching the monitor as a DVI or similar digital feed, but your current drivers change it into an analog signal when Windows boots? Are you on Windows 7? I would assume that your monitor is fully capable of handling the digital signal. Is it able to be booted on other hardware in digital? (i.e. can you hook up a laptop to it in digital and does it work properly?)

If your monitor is digital, and the signal is digital, why would you want to run it in analog mode? Maybe I’m not understanding something here. My monitor is digital and the resolution is always the same from start to finish, once the drivers load. Obviously, if I boot into Windows in recovery mode, and the computer doesn’t load the drivers, it uses a generic driver set to run Windows, which would give a low res analog like view.

So what version of Windows?
What is your actual hook up? DVI? HDMI? etc.
What is the make/model of the monitor?

thx

Al

[Al Bergstein]

Hi Christopher. While I will let others with specific knowledge of in depth use of these programs on these machines answer, it really comes down to whether the graphics card will do the job, and whether you will be able to get by with the limited expansion capabilities of the all in one unit. On my Mac Pro, I’m able to easily add eSata, which at this moment is cheaper and more varied that Tbolt. Having the ability to put in a really high end card with CUDA capability is also pretty important for special effects. But if you really are only editing HDSLR without a lot of fx, then the lower cost unit would likely be enough. I tend to ‘trade up” when I need it, and consider the lost cost as a *rental cost*, rather than beat myself up over it. I bet you could make do nicely with the lower cost all in one, if you are doing so today. It’s a shame Apple has not updated the Pro. I did buy mine used on Craigslist. Haven’t had any problems with it, have had it two years now, saved a lot of money. But these units are now quite antiquated, and as such, shouldn’t be worth what is being asked. I’d negotiate hard on one.

The other option, as much as I hate to say it, is that you can get the performance of i7 in an expandable system by using Windows 7. Windows desktops are dirt cheap, and though they have limited power supplies, you can put a high end card in them if you don’t stuff it full of other stuff, and they usually include an esata port on the motherboard. (my Dell does). Dell’s XPS systems have pretty good power supplies for a bit more money. I use both Mac and PC now because the rendering on the Mac Pro was pretty slow (odd how speed is relative), and I could buy a very high powered machine for a lot less than Apple. As much as I like the Mac interface (I use a MacBook for my laptop), when it comes to Adobe, they are doing a good job of making it cross platform. I find I don’t use the Mac Pro as much as I used to. I have multiple eSata drives hooked up to my W7 system, and don’t have less problems in general than on the Mac. Might be a good intermediate method of working, though you might find a lot of ‘clients’ demanding or needing ProRes input or output. You’ll have to check that out in your area. I don’t find I need it.

Al