Andrew Rendell
Forum Replies Created
-
I reckon you should get hold of itunes’ distribution and content contract and go through it carefully. If you’re trying to improve your reach in terms of selling complete programmes to the public it’s probably a good way of going about it, but I don’t know what kind of revenue you’d be able to raise that way.
With hundreds of hours of media, it might be worthwhile selling some of it as stock footage to professional users, in which case you’d need a website/app where people can search and preview clips, then a system where they get a link to download the full quality file either on a payment or by being logged into an account. Without knowing what kind of thing you’ve got or what the technical quality is, it’s hard to say whether the up front investment in time and effort would be worth doing. Perhaps you should have a look at some stock footage distributors to see how they go about it (and maybe consider putting your stuff with one of them rather than do it yourself to bypass having to market it from scratch).
-
Depends where you are. In the UK Broadcast is THE industry magazine – https://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/ but it’s general rather than technical (although it does have some good technical reports).
I quite like this – https://www.definitionmagazine.com/ -
Usually it’s a matter of exporting the files from Avid in a format that works with mac as only a few codecs are readable by both systems.
(Sorry, it looks like Avid’s PE set of codecs is only available for registered users, I didn’t notice that first time).
There’s a few workflow variations that you can have a go at, but I can’t guarantee success. More codecs are available through FFmpeg, so you might get lucky there, and it might be worth trying to transcode on a pc rather than on the mac (if you have access to a windows pc). It’s possible, though, that the only way will be to load the file into another Avid and export it again.
-
Have you tried using the corner pinning (under Distort in the Motion tab)?
-
I don’t know the FX1E, but I guess that it’s similar to the Z1 in that there are a couple of menu items that have to be right for the capture (right as in both matching the tape and matching the FCP capture settings), so it’s likely that you just need to go through the menus (in the camera and the capture settings) very carefully and you’ll find one that isn’t on the right value (e.g., DV versus HDV).
480 lines is right for NTSC, it’s a smaller frame size to PAL.
-
I guess that if you install the Avid Codec PE package you’ll be able to transcode it with something like MPEG Streamclip. The codec package should be on Avid’s website in the support section, otherwise google for it.
-
The main reason for going blue or green for the background is that human skin shows a lot of red (even though it doesn’t look red to the eye). Technically the Y signal is more green than blue or red, so in theory green would have a slightly better signal-noise than blue when you derive it from a YUV component video stream, but in my experience it’s not really noticeable (but red would be very poor, and that is noticeable on the occasions I’ve tried it). If you did your chroma key (or colour separation overlay in BBC-speak) in RGB colour space it wouldn’t matter what colour you keyed from, but most of us are dealing with YUV most of the time (e.g., 4:2:2, 4:1:1 or 4:2:0).
-
It doesn’t make much sense to me – crop implies that you have to lose the sides of the picture, then the vertical squeeze implies changing the geometry of the pictures… however, what I think they might mean is putting the 16:9 image in a 4:3 frame in “letter box” style, i.e., with black bars top and bottom. I used to do that occasionally when it was SD 16:9 and the client wanted to view stuff on a PC with an older media player that didn’t recognise stretched pixel aspect ratios, but 1080i is square pixels (so the issue of displaying non-square pixels doesn’t arise) so it’s only a guess.
-
I was using the one in Boris (plugin) acouple of years ago. Ended up using it on everything and got bored with it, so I haven’t done it for a while now. There’s a lens flare generator in Motion, so you could build the same thing there – Boris makes it easy, for a price. There’s a similar thing in Genarts Sapphire, and probably others.
-
There are a couple of audio issues with the Cannon DSLRs – they don’t have professional XLR connectors, so you need an adapter box (e.g., Beachtek) or a separate sound mixer/recorder, and they have an AGC circuit which you’ll need to turn off/defeat (which might be via a software hack or hardware).