Andrew Rendell
Forum Replies Created
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Last time I upgraded I used the Migration Assistant and it worked a treat. HOWEVER, I was going from a computer that I’d upgraded to Snow Leopard to one that came with Snow Leopard. I don’t know what would happen going between different levels of OS though (I haven’t tried Lion yet, on the basis of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, so I have no opinion to offer on it).
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Brief anecdote.
A few years ago I cut an interview with a well known abstract artist. The interviewer asked him to tell her how he constructed a painting, and he spoke for some minutes about how this curve represented this thing and that colour value represented whatever it was, and so on. When he paused she asked him whether he was actually thinking about all these things while he was laying the paint on the canvas and he replied; hell no, at that point I’m just trying to make the damn thing look the way I want it to.
I think that’s how lots of us work – buy me a beer and I’ll give you chapter and verse, but when I’m actually cutting I’m just trying to get the damn thing to work.
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I don’t know (not having any involvement in recruiting that kind ofthing) but I work with broadcast journalists so I might be able to offer the odd observation (which might get the ball rolling).
Most of the reporters I know started as researchers, so a job or internship as a researcher might be a good start.
Have you had anything published?
What have you done to show that you can find out what others can’t find out? By the time you have a degree you should be aware that the internet is great for fact-checking, but research is mainly about getting the story from people.
[Where are you? In the UK there is a small number of highly regarded independent production companies making current affairs programmes for Channel 4 and doing anything at one of them, even just making the coffee, can open doors. Look for a similar situation wherever you’re located.]
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[Jon Fidler] ” To me the former idea is ridiculous and semi paranoid, am I right in thinking this?”
I’d agree with you. But I never studied film. When I was training there seemed to be a widespread opinion that those of us who came into tv from a non-media background progressed more quickly than those who had studied some form of media at degree level as we had less to “unlearn”!
Personally, I reckon that John Berger’s “Ways Of Seeing” and Mamet’s “On Directing Film” had a direct influence on my work, everything else basically sits in the back of my mind and although it “informs” me/my attitude, it is always subservient to the story in hand.
So I think about such questions as “why should the audience care about this?”, “what is the function of this scene in the narrative structure?”, “to what extent is this character a metaphor for a bigger idea and how can I reveal that?”, etc, in what I think is a practical way – I want to show the emotional truth of whatever I’m cutting and I don’t really care about the socio-political intentions beyond that. (Which is probably why I’m an editor, not a director).
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The IN points take priority over the OUT points when making an edit, so if your video and audio durations are different, they won’t be in sync properly if you need them to match on the OUT frame. What you need to do is delete the IN point on whichever of those tracks has the longer duration and then the edit will match on the OUT point (the computer will calculate the appropriate IN point for you).
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The dub lead was the best way to make a u-matic copy of another u-matic (as it avoided a coding/decoding stage) and would be a good way of connecting to a tbc if the tbc is designed to take it, but it doesn’t have any other use, so copying to another format has to be via composite video.
By todays standards u-matics are quite unstable so a modern computer input device (such as you mention) which is designed to work with more recent technology may have trouble if you don’t have a tbc or frame synchroniser in the path. I’d be wary of taking it in “bad” and expecting to fix it in the computer, tbcs work by syncing the frame/line pulses and the color burst and it’s much harder for software to do the same job once it’s digitised.
Nothing inherently wrong with buying old equipment, as long as you’re aware that much of it wasn’t entirely reliable at the time and won’t have got better over the years, so pay accordingly and be prepared for the occasional breakdown.
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As well as deinterlacing, it’ll be better to cut with if it’s 24fps to match the rest of your material, so I’d do both the deinterlace and the frame rate change with MPEG Streamclip to see what the quality’s like (there are other ways to go about it, but your quality is already compromised by coming from a DVD).
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Make a new project and transfer any saved sequences/earlier cuts into that, so that your main project contains only one sequence (the one you’re working on) and your rushes, nothing else.
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Welcome to the Cow.
It’s been a long time since I used that kind of gear, but I vaguely recall the Sony BVT-810 as being the one to use with U-matic. Possibly the Sony BVT-2000 might work as an alternative. You’d need a proper external ref signal to get them wired up and working properly.
If I remember correctly, we used to call that bending over at the top of the screen “hooking” and it was something that a TBC was expected to fix (along with the horizontal instability that we called “jitter”), so if you’re seeing it post-tbc then either the tbc isn’t wired up properly or it’s not a suitable one for the job.
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As far as I know USB doesn’t allow for multiple devices through one wire, so a pass through seems unlikely.
USB3 has 8 pins as opposed to USB2’s 4 pins, so it’s more accurate to say that it uses more pins rather than different ones (it claims backwards compatibility so I guess that it’ll work over a 4 pin cable but you’ll only get USB2 speed if you do).
The speed of a drive is much more complicated than the speed of the link (the USB connection). This may sound odd if you don’t know some of the more arcane technical details, but drives connected by USB 2 at 480Mbps are usually not fast enough for reliable use as video media storage whereas drives using Firewire at 400Mbps usually are.
As a hard drive holds data in a buffer (memory) while it spins a physical mechanism and an SSD writes directly into memory, plus the discussions over brand X’s class 6 SDHC being faster than brand Y’s Class 10 one, I’m not particularly surprised about your experience with the memory stick being quicker than a USB hard drive for this particular kind of file.
I don’t know anything about your Dazzle device, sorry. I’d say it’s either faulty or it doesn’t fulfil the claimed function and ask for a refund if it were mine.