[Andrew Rendell]

Well, actually it is important that the fields come in the correct order because the way in which the lines are combined can change. Hopefully this won’t get too confusing…

Lines are always numbered in the order in which they are scanned, so for a progressive picture the lines go 1, 2, 3, 4, etc, down the screen. But for an interlaced scan, the lines in field 1 are numbered 1, 2, 3, etc, and the lines in field 2 go 563, 564, 565, etc, and those slot in between the lines in field 1. (That’s the numbers for an HD picture but the principle is identical for SD).

Swap the fields and, for example, line 566 won’t be displayed in between lines 3 and 4, where it should be, but it’ll be shown between lines 2 and 3.

So if you have a shot where a diagonal line should display like this:
*
**
***
****
*****
******
*******
********
*********
**********
etc

what the screen will show when the field order is wrong will be this:
**
*
****
***
******
*****
********
*******
**********
*********
************
***********
**************
etc

Hence the jagged lines.

TBH, I don’t know why different software would tell you different things because I don’t know how they work it out.

[Andrew Rendell]

One thing that comes to mind is that studio shots never matched the outside stuff.

For studio, very flat blanket lighting. They did use 3 point lighting but the fill would be so high that you’d hardly tell. Direct colour recording – Quad was actually very sharp in the luminance channel, but softening the chrominance and adding a little YC Delay would add some period vibe. A bit of comet-tailing on highlights would be a nice touch and some microphony on loud noises (watch what happens to the picture when an explosion happens on set during Tom Baker era Dr Who or Blake’s 7 to see what those effects are/were).

Outside it was routinely pretty crappy 16mm reversal. Soft and low res, frequently with a slight green cast, grain, dirt and slight cratches, but all that soft as well (early telecines were pretty soft even if the film itself was sharp). Quite a lot of gate weave and vertical jitters on cuts (tape joins, they were never cement joined in a lab).

Am I giving away my age here? I remember the stuff that Look Around You is spoofing from my childhood and actually started as a trainee at the BBC in the ’80s, just when technology was making a big leap, but there was still some of the old kit around (2″ Quad VTRs, twin lens telecines, etc).

You can get the general low contrast/low saturation with the 3 way colour corrector, but I’d go to bad tv and bad film effects myself.

[Andrew Rendell]

Avid doesn’t do a paste attributes in the same way as FCP, but are are a few ways of doing a very similar thing.

A thing I do a lot is to drag the effects to a bin, rename tham so that I know what each one does, and drag them onto each media clip that I want the effect on.

If you want the same effect across a sequence, put the effect(s) on the video layer(s) above the cut shots, using add edit to set the start and end points for the effect on the track. [If you don’t already know, you can use clip effects for transition effects in this way.]

If a shot has several effects on it that you want to duplicate, sometimes it’s worth duplicating that shot (with it’s effects) into the place where you want to see the new shot, then step in and replace the old shot with the new one at the “bottom” level, below the effects as it were.

[Andrew Rendell]

XDCAM is a GOP format, so although FCP kinda works with it (better than it does with most GOP formats) I’d only ever use it for a short, simple, fast turnaround job, certainly not anything with effects in it.

The one bit of information that I don’t see there is how your SSD is connected. If it’s an external drive the connection will be the bottle-neck, it needs to be Firewire800 at the very least and preferably faster than that.

One more thing: 60Gb should be fine for headroom on your drive, but do keep an eye on it, it’s very easy for FCP to fill up space with tens of gigs of renders without you noticing.

[Andrew Rendell]

Just to be confusing, some Canon’s use MXF as well as Sony’s, but they’re not the same. I’ve got both manufacturers utilities on my system: for Sony MXFs it’ll be Import-XDCAM but if they’re Canon MXFs it’ll be Log & Transfer and select the format in the L&T preferences.

[Andrew Rendell]

I think you have a field order problem.

Basically fields in an interlaced stream are easy to understand (field 1 is the first field to be recorded/displayed, field 2 is the second one to be recorded/displayed, calling them top/bottom, odd/even, whatever is just bullshit jargon, you can find the proper description of fields on here https://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/bt/R-REC-BT.709-5-200204-I!!PDF-E.pdf ), BUT there is an issue with the way that different codecs encode the data and if you’re not careful you can end up having the fields displayed in the wrong order, i.e., field 2 before field 1, which has the visual effect of jagged edges and shimmery motion.

Most codecs need to be encoded as top field dominant (don’t get hung up on the jargon, just go with it for now) but the DV codecs are bottom field dominant so to get the field order right on playback you have to switch the field dominance to bottom on the export settings when you make your DV50 files.

Hope that helps.

[Andrew Rendell]

Funnily enough, not only would I recommend it but I’ve just done exactly what you describe for an upcoming job (installed the latest version of Canon’s MXF utility and converted to Pro Res 422 during the Log & Transfer.) It takes a while for 100 gigs of material (I left it going all evening while I did something else) but TBH converting it all to Pro Res is the most stable way of going about it, a little time spent now will save a lot of potential timewasting later.

[Andrew Rendell]

I don’t get much timecoded location stuff these days.

IMO tc was such a massive timesaver for syncing up that I think it’s a real retrograde step to have gone back to non tc equipment and claps.

[I had a job which had 7 cameras, three stereo “live” mixes and thirteen separate mic feeds over roughly 50 hours of filming earlier this year. Everything was timecoded and it was a pleasure to work on. But that’s incredibly rare these days.]

[Andrew Rendell]

My early 2011 i5 MBP is a significant step up in performance from the Core 2 Duo iMac. (The i7 is better than i5, but it’s nowhere near as big a difference as going from the Duo to the i5 when running FCP7).

The other thing to bear in mind with editing is that screen size is an issue – I wouldn’t advise anything less than the 17″ screen model unless you’re going to plug up a second screen as a matter of course, which rather negates the portability aspect of using a MBP.

[Andrew Rendell]

Speaking as an editor, I’m bound to say DON’T LEAVE ANYTHING ON AUTO, AT ALL, EVER.

Having said that, some cameras have a useful feature that you can flip the auto on to get a quick setting (e.g., exposure) which stays there when you flip the auto back off so you can use auto to your advantage in some circumstances, as long as you turn it off before pressing the record button.

And if you’re not certain about exposure, edge towards a slight underexposure – blocked out blacks are far less aesthetically displeasing (within reason) than clipped highlights, so a shot thats underexposed by a stop will probably still be useable but a shot that’s burnt out probably won’t be.