Andrew Rendell
Forum Replies Created
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In the UK that was completely overdone in a series called Def II, which ran from 1988 the 1994 and was part of the “youth TV” genre which was a popular bandwagon at the time. Unmotivated fast cutting as you describe, pointless text boxes, presenters looking like they had a drug problem. I think it probably put those of us who were in our 20s at the time off that kind of thing for life.
OTOH, I’m not above the occasional stylistic parody, but I’m generally of the opinion that if something’s interesting, it’s interesting, and if it isn’t, then no amount of visual editing tricks will make them so.
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If I may just pick up on Todd’s explanation of why H.264 isn’t an editing format and expand it a bit:
H.264 doesn’t compress individual frames, it compresses into blocks containing a series of frames called GOP, which stands for Group Of Pictures. When a computer plays an H.264 file it has to decode blocks of frames to display them, which isn’t a big deal (it’s technically quite complex but modern computers are well up to the task). But when you want to edit the pictures you want to end one clip on a particular frame and start the next clip on a particular frame and there’s every chance that those frames won’t be the last one of a GOP on the outgoing and the first frame of a GOP in the incoming, so to do the edit the computer has to decode the whole of the GOP containing the end frame of the outgoing shot AND the whole of the GOP containing the first frame of the next shot AND create an new GOP showing what you need to see. That’s quite a big processing and memory load for even the most up to date computer (and that re-compressing to make the new GOP is where the picture quality drop that Todd mentioned happens). So what happens is that you can see your clips when you play them and you’ll do a couple of edits and all will appear to be well, then you’ll do another couple of edits and the computer will slow down and pretty soon it will grind to a halt because it’s got too much work to do. Some software and hardware will cope for longer before running into problems, and if you’re working with high quality (broadcast standard) pictures you’ll “hit the wall” much quicker than you would with lower data rate material.
Most editing codecs, like ProRes, compress each frame separately (which is known as all I-frame), but it’s actually a bit more complicated than it might seem – Sony’s XDCAM is actually a GOP codec but one which does accomodate editing (I could make an educated guess for why that’s the case, but I’m not certain).
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I’ve got Sorensen Squeeze, Apple’s Compressor and MPEG Streamclip and TBH each one does something differently to the others which makes it slightly more convenient than the others for a particular job. Where you get the difference in quality isn’t really in which one you use, but which settings you choose for the job in hand.
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First, export from FCP in current settings. Then use Compressor to make separate DVD compatible video and audio files – it has presets for 150min best quality and fastest encode in the settings, under Apple – DVD (there is a big trade off between quality and time), I’d suggest making a 1 minute clip and seeing how long that takes for each setting on your kit, in order to work out roughly how long it takes on each setting as it can vary a lot between computers. Those files are then your assets in DVD Pro.
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That happened to me a while back. I never worked out why, but all I did was make a copy of the sequence from before sending it to Color, deleted the video and copied over the vision from the sequence returned from Color (so that the audio hadn’t done the round trip, only the video) and that was fine.
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Think of the maths. What do you need to multiply 90 by to get back to 100? It’s not 10% is it…
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+1 to Michael’s post
You need to download and install Canon’s E1 plugin, then when you go into FCP’s Log & Transfer window you select which codec to use in the import settings pane, then it transcodes as it imports.
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An old CRT tv is going to be SD and SD signals are interlaced, so a digital receiver has to be giving an interlaced output for the tv to work, whatever’s being transmitted. I have a digital receiver feeding an old CRT tv in my kitchen and it’s fine, so my guess is that’s not something you need to worry about particularly.
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In the UK it’s basically a 10 hour day (including the breaks that Mark mentions) but sometimes I have the flexibility to, for example, take only a half hour lunch break and leave that bit earlier at the end of the day if I want to.
Sometimes I’ll agree to a buy-out on hours rather than be paid overtime after 10 hours (which is my usual arrangement), depending on what the fee is and whether I’m really interested by the job or want to work with that director, but that’s not very often.
In my last staff job we were originally paid overtime after 10 hours, then the company imposed new contracts where we were expected to work whatever hours they wanted without overtime payments. Sadly but rather unsurprisingly, the company ended up closing down because over the next few months we all left and they didn’t have any staff to do the work they had. (The editors and the facility manager ended up much better off in what we all moved on to, but it was tough for the junior people there.)
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What actually gets broadcast is a version of Mpeg which is highly compressed, long GOP. Encoding for broadcast is a job in itself, which is quite separate from originating and editing.
The default position in the UK (where I am) is that origination and editing should be at a minimum spec of 4:2:2 50Mbps, although 35Mbps (e.g., XDCam HD) is usually accepted, see your particular broadcaster for details.
Codecs are less of a specific requirement, although the general principle that each change of compression degrades the quality still applies, so you should do the fewest possible conversions. I normally edit in either the native codec for the camera (as long as it’s not a long GOP one) or the standard for the equipment in use (which is ProRes for FCP and DNxHD for Avid, those being the systems I regularly use).