Al Bergstein
Forum Replies Created
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Thanks Jeremy. I’ve been using the COW now since I think 2009,and never have noticed those check boxes. I wonder if they are a relatively new feature?
Anyway, as a small business owner who has invested thousands of dollars in Apple and bought into the ‘future’ of FCP as a professional tool, I won’t reward the behavior that Apple pulled this year any longer. Adobe is willing to treat me as a business customer, and I’ve already started investing in their future vision of editing.
While I am only a small player, I know I’m not the only one, and many of my video friends here in the Pacific NW have or already are moving away. And I’m sharing my learning as I go. I think Apple’s Guy Kawasaki called this “Technical Evangelism”. Maybe someday down the road Apple may catch up to where they were (are) prior to X, but for me and many others, it will likely be too late.
I always remember, these are only tools. Not religious artifacts like the Shroud of Turin. (even though it may have Steve J’s holographic image embedded in the screen – grin)
Happy New Year to all of you.
Over and out.
Al
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To answer your questions Mike:
Yes. We did white balance to a card before starting. I have been trying a variety of white balance and color balancing tools, from Frederick B.’s (fbmn-software.com) to Sony’s and BCC but the problem seems to be that AVCHD is inherently more contrasty, even on a large sensor 7D, than the beautiful rich tonality of the xf300 at 50Mbps. AVCHD seems to favor blues, and shifts wood tones, like the old wood floor in the studio I shot in, to a more reddish hue. No amount of nudging of the wheels, or ‘matching’ in BCC/Sony/FBM could get the colors to really match up. But, I don’t have a true reference monitor,just a LED that has been tuned with Spyder.
I lowered the opening NASA audio and will upload the fixed version tonight. Thanks for your feedback. I’ve appreciated reading your posts over the years. I’ve only been back at this kind of work for a few years now, trying to make champagne on a beer budget.
Al
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OK. Not sure why the COW didn’t like this. But here is the Vimeo link.
Al
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Apple’s FCP conversion is not the way that companies that court the business market operate. All major vendors, from MSFT’s Business software group (SQL Server, Windows Server, etc) along with Oracle, HP, Adobe and others, go to great lengths not to do what Apple did with FCP. They hold non disclosure months, even years in advance, and they also hold developers conferences where they really disclose required information to have significant 3rd parties on board at launch. This most certainly did *not* happen with the X launch. And I can bet I know why.
I consider what happened as an internal battle at Apple between the FCP group and the iMovie group, with the outcome being that the conversion to 64 bit was the killing point and that, given the economy back then, the iMovie group won out. The decision to move the company to a consumer only model is also shown in the lack of high end servers, workstations and the like. It’s all of a piece.
But this is all water under the bridge. I stumbled on this thread in the Canon forum, why I don’t know (Shane this really should go under the FCP/FCPx forums). I’m on beyond FCP now, getting to love Premiere, and really like a company like Adobe where I can actually get their dev teams and other knowledgeable folks on the forums answering questions. Adobe is doing a really wonderful job of trying to become the next leader in this field. AVID certainly seems to have the Hollywood production teams sewn up to a great degree. Apple never seemed interested in actually participating in the community, except at once a year events, it seemed to me. But Adobe is hands down doing the best job to win my business in my mind. I hope my business and others like it keep them profitable!
Al
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It *can* cause problems, but maybe not serious, in that you have to wait for the drive to spin back up again. Given that, some programs, and video production is likely one of them, might not handle this sleep mode well. I never buy them, choosing to spend more to get a non green drive. You might want to see if the drive has an override in software to help turn that function off, but I think it’s in the ROM of the drive.
Al
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Buy the 7200 RPM. It’s worth it.
Al
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I think you did well with the gear you had to use, but the story doesn’t do it for me. My dad has/had a house in Tucson, which I am currently selling as the estate executor, so I know something about the Tucson market. I didn’t get any sense of why this place is any better or different than any of the other places in Tucson. Your clips do not do it justice, and I could not care less (pardon my bluntness here), about driving into the place.
Remember, you have 5 to 10 seconds to show me why I should care about this place. The opening needs to be something cool to grab me. Some questions for you to ponder: Who is your audience? Are they young buyers or retirees? What is the price range of these homes? What does the facility really look like? I have no sense of what this place is like by seeing your video. Where exactly is it? You just say, south of Tucson. That could mean the dumps out near the airport, or Green Valley, or someplace in between. Be specific. If I wanted to live in Tucson, I would want way more specifics than this.
Marketing is about really knowing your audience, and appealing to them. I don’t sense you have any knowledge of who your audience is here. Or how your are really going to get them excited about buying a home there.
Best of luck.
Al
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Right. I’m speaking specifically of the metadata in Bridge. But I think I’ve solved this. Adobe Premiere does it’s own Metadata management, and Bridge does consume it but doesn’t really add to it. On Location seems to be the real ‘bridge’ to Premiere metadata. Hope Adobe doesn’t kill it!
Al
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I found after many years of building my own that it was much better to buy pre-built for video editing. The issue of dealing with various third party mother board upgrade problems is really an iceberg waiting to trip up the unwary and unexperienced. Companies like Dell and HP spend a lot of engineering time working through issues with ROM upgrades for issues that crop up on various hardware configurations. They do test their machines pretty extensively for compatibility issues. Things can go wrong, but by and large I’ve had good results getting my machines fixed quickly by Dell, for example. Add to that making sure that you don’t accidentally create a static electricity charge into a mother board as you are installing it in a dry part of the US. Having worked in a manufacturing plant that produced medical devices that were essentially computers, I can tell you that static electricity is a real concern, and can lead to flakey issues in your system. It doesn’t always kill on contact. So I try and stay out of my internals and always use a static mat, grounding myself.
I have found that I prefer Dell over HP, as I’ve had better experiences of long life with Dell, and their on site repairs (I’ve had to use them in the last year for a monitor on a laptop and a DVD that died on the same laptop) have been excellent. Pretty fast and always fixed it on the first try. My last HP tower lasted one year and a few days. Mother board died. That has never happened with my two last Dell towers (which span a total of 6 years of work). But I would be tempted to look at the high end HP towers if I was buying today. They are engineered differently than than the lower end models.
Ultimately, it likely will be a better value long term to buy the workstations rather than home towers. In the Apple world, you only have that choice, which is why people complain that they are ‘high priced’. But my MacPro is still chugging away well and it’s about four years old. No complaints on that front.
Al
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Did you just buy this box? If so, return it. If not, buy a new machine capable of supporting W7 64 bit. And it’s almost impossible to not run some kind of solid malware killer anymore, unless you are not connected to the Internet. I’ve been using Windows Security Essentials and it seems to not affect my machine performance in any way that I can tell.
Best of luck!
Al