Andrew Rendell
Forum Replies Created
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Yes, you need the tracks to be separate rather than a stereo pair. If you highlight a stereo pair in the timeline and press Option and L together that’ll unlink the tracks, then you can set the pan and levels separately for the two tracks.
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I guess you’ve got in and out points marked, so you’re moving all the keyframes between the marks together. Delete the in and out marks and you’ll just change the keyframe you’ve selected.
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The first thing I would check are the menu settings on the camera – the Z1 has a couple of settings in the menu that affect the ilink connection, e.g., downconverting HDV to DV, and if they don’t match what the computer is expecting the connection won’t work properly. (N.B. The ilink cable has to be disconnected for any changes to the menu to take effect).
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I do it slightly differently. A folder on the external media drive called [whatever your project is called]. In that are folders for capture scratch, renders, stills, music, etc, with all the media in appropriate folders. Where I differ from Daniel is that I usually have my .fcp project on the local drive and copy it over onto the media drive at the end of each day, so I’m keeping a copy of the project each day. It’s a personal habit, but it does mean that if you have a breakdown you can only lose one days work.
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Once you’ve scanned a picture and saved it at a particular resolution, you’ve limited what information there is in the file, so although you can expand it, you’re limited by how the software in question creates it’s extra pixels. IMO photoshop does a better job of expanding a photograph than FCP, you can choose different interpolation methods to see which one gives you the best looking image, plus add a little unsharp mask to improve the subjective sharpness.
Dpi is irrelevant as there is no such thing as an inch in a tv picture, so dots per inch is meaningless. The only thing that video sees is the total number of pixels. If you have a 6×4 print and scan it at 300dpi, you’d have 1800 pixels along the 6 inch side by 1200 pixels along the 4 inch side, which isn’t far off an HDTV frame size, so so you could expand it to fill the tv frame without too much of a problem. Making a 10 x 8 print and scanning that would give you more pixels in the file for the same dpi scanner, but if you’re in a position to go to some extra trouble/expense than putting a regular print into a desktop scanner you’d get a better result by having the negative scanned at high res rather than having a bigger print made.
Expanding a 640 x 480 image to fill an HDTV screen is going to look pretty bad in FCP – if that’s what you have to work with I’d recommend sending it to Motion and doing your zoom there, it’s much better than FCP for that kind of thing.
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There shouldn’t be any difference in speed, but some people are easier to follow when sped up than others. I think it’s to do with things like the speed at which they talk (which varies quite widely between individuals), the clarity of the words (some people run their words into the next one more than others do) and the pitch of the person’s voice.
I can follow sped up speech quite well if I’m in a quiet room on my own but any kind of distraction makes it hard for me to keep going, so a really good set of headphones can help as well, just to blot out background noise. And take a break when you start to feel tired, just a couple of minutes to walk over to the water cooler can save you from developing headaches, stiff neck, etc.
Some of the work I do can have a lot of interviews to work through, so it’s more efficient to export mp3s and have them transcribed, then I’ll just listen to the sections where I’m most likely to find what I need.
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yes, duplicating the tracks in that way is the same as centre pan and add 6dB of gain to a single track.
On an organisational note, I stick to one track per person, e.g., Bob on track 5, Fred on track 6, Sue on track 7, etc, and don’t put anything else on a track that’s been designated to one of the contributors. When you have lots of audio sources on a timeline it really helps to keep things as logical as possible, so use as many tracks as you need but don’t add them unnecessarily.
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I find that you can usually get in at the start of a word within a sentence without too much difficulty, as long as the word is spoken reasonably clearly. Very often you need to do a fast fade up, FCP’s audio rubberbanding is frequently adequate, but sometimes you need an audio editor that goes to sample accuracy to cut finely enough. The end of a clip is usually a far bigger problem as you need the last word to be spoken as if it’s the end of a sentence. The only way that I have to do that reliably is to cut to the last word, or sometimes just the last syllable, from somewhere else in the conversation where it is spoken with the right inflection. Having an accurate transcript of the conversation is invaluable for that task as you can search for suitable substitutes without having to listen very carefully to every second of a recording. Again, having fine enough control of the edit point makes doing that in an audio editing program better than a video editing one, but whatever kit you’re using this takes quite a lot of practice to “get your ear in”.
Once you’ve got the audio sounding right, you then have to either cut the vision slightly off the audio cut or go to a cutaway. Occasionally putting a speed ramp on the vision over the edited sound can work, but you may have to juggle how the interpolation is done to get it to work (it takes a lot of practice to be able to judge when that trick’s likely to work for you).
With a group of speakers, I go for a single track for each speaker. There’s no advantage to be had from using stereo pairs unless the audio was mixed to stereo on location (which is very unusual in my experience).
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Yes of course you should always use contracts. If anyone doesn’t like it, think about why that is, because in my experience that probably isn’t someone who you want to be working with anyway.
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If I remember correctly, what you have to do is flip up the control panel so that you can get at the boards behind it, then there’s some buttons on one of the boards marked something like System Setup – that will bring up the menu. In theory you can navigate through it by reading the numbers on the timecode display, but it’s much easier if you’ve got the Video Output 3 plugged into a monitor and read it on the screen. You can scroll through the menu using the jogwheel, I think it’s the shuttle/jog button that switches between choosing an item in the menu and choosing a value for that item (if it’s not, try the other buttons on the panel, I haven’t done this for a while and I might be confusing it with a different model) then when you’ve changed whatever you’re going to change you save it with the set button under the panel.