[Andrew Rendell]

Have you discussed this with a doctor? Maybe it is just the inevitable passage of time, but I started noticing that kind of aches and pains around age 40 and it turned out to be the early stages of arthritis. I now have medication for it and at 48 I’m effectively in better shape now than I was 5 years ago (arthritis isn’t really cureable, but the modern pills are very good at keeping it under control so having it doesn’t affect my lifestyle). I hope that doesn’t sound like scaremongering, I wouldn’t want anyone to jump to any conclusions (or get sucked into the alt-med fraudsters) without speaking to a medical professional.

[Andrew Rendell]

I’ve done something similar to this – ingest the footage one one FCP system; copy the media onto another external hard drive; do some editing with that hard drive attached to my laptop; take the project from the laptop back to the original suite and relink the media to the copies on there in order to finish the edit there.

That’s pretty much what you’re describing and it’s ok – when you copy the project file to the other system it will come up with the media offline, but relinking to the media on the other drive is fine (as long as you haven’t done anything to change the media file along the way). Renders are a bit flakey and it can be quicker to just re-render rather than muck about trying to link them up, and if you use motion for any effects you have to put those project files on your stick and copy them over as well.

A slight variation (assuming that you’re only going to work on one system at any time) is to put the project file on the external hard drive as well as the media and carry that between the systems and use it as a kind of master drive and treat the copies of the media on the tower system’s internal drive as a safety backup (plus, it’s unwise to use the system drive as a media drive for editing).

[Andrew Rendell]

There’s a bunch of things like having inputs and outputs that match other equipment (things like SDI for vision feeds and RS422 for controlling vtrs) and interchange with other systems (like importing and exporting omfis) which become important in a professional environment. So the professional choice isn’t so much whether you like a particular toolset, but whether the system integrates with other aspects of a workflow which will have other technical specialists doing certain parts of the job (graphics, dubbing mixers, and so on). Avid and Apple have that kind of thing pretty well sorted.

From an editor’s point of view the big thing to ask about a system is: will this enable me to do anything that I might be asked to do? It doesn’t matter whether you like the look of the screen layout if you can’t handle some complicated issue, say multicamera (synced)clips where there are breaks in the different feeds or the requirement to mix 20 tracks of audio so that you have a stereo mix coming out of tracks 1&2 and an m/e coming out of 3&4 at the same time.

You may also have to make files, either viewing or project files, available to someone else so you have to be able to provide files that are compatible with whatever others are using (or use the same systems).

If you are freelance, there’s a good deal of work where you go and use someone else’s equipment, so if you’re very comfortable with the most common systems (which are, let’s be honest, Avid and FCP) that’s a damn good source of living. [When I left my job as a staff editor and became freelance I didn’t own any of my own kit at all for the first 5 years, I was very busy using Avids at facility/production companies who had the kit but not the staff].

(I’ll probably think of more reasons to go with the established kit after I post this, but liking the toolset in any given software package won’t be one, unless it’s because it gives me an edge in a technical or business sense).

[Andrew Rendell]

I agree with Paul – export the timeline in current settings and use Compressor to make that version.

[Andrew Rendell]

Slightly more complicated (and I haven’t tried this so I don’t know if it will work) if you had quicktime and apple’s Prores codec for windows on your PC, you could probably use Mpeg Streamclip to create a Prores (video) + aiff (audio) quicktime file that would load into FCP on a mac… maybe…

[Andrew Rendell]

I’ve been using a MBP for the last few months (on and off) and I’m very pleased with it. For me the portability is extremely useful as I frequently take it to one of my client’s offices and that’s the main reason for going for the MBP.

What I have is a NEET Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter which gives me a 2 display system (using a high def tv as a second monitor), an Expresscard34 to esata adapter to connect to a fast external hard drive and a usb audio adapter to play the sound through some proper speakers. At the moment I don’t have a pro level breakout box for vision (I occasionally plug in my AJA IO but it’s the older SD only one so a bit limited and rather defeats the idea of being portable), I use a facility company for ingesting, colour grading and quality checking (usually I get them to capture from tape onto my hard drive overnight and dry hire a suite for the other stuff by the hour when I need it).

There are times when you can tell that it’s not as fast as the desktop system, e.g., doing layered effects, especially in HD, but it’s fine for most stuff. It can be hard to stave off the urge to constantly buy more/better kit but I’ve got a setup that works well and a plan B (hiring) for those rare occasions when I actually need the full works.

[Andrew Rendell]

Are you using the lip mic correctly? The top bar should actually be touching the top lip to bring the mouth and microphone to the correct distance apart for the mic to work properly – the whole point of the design is it’s only sensitive to sound sources very close to one side (it’s designed for use where there is a lot of background noise, e.g., sports crowds, and only respond to the commentator’s voice).

[Andrew Rendell]

I’d encourage you to learn to trust your own ears as no metering is anywhere near as good as the human ear, although you do need decent quality speakers (not necessarily expensive audiophile stuff, but they need to have a reasonably flat response over the full audio frequency range). I generally set the dialogue so that it peaks between 5 and 6 on a PPM then adjusting the effects, ambience and music so that it sounds “right”. If you don’t have access to a PPM (I use PPMulator via Audio Hijack Pro when I do this, although I take it to a Dubbing Mixer in a proper sound suite for most of the broadcast stuff) you can get close by having the speech mainly around -12 on FCPs meter and never going above -6. Ambience is hard to give a suitable level for – it might sound fine at 20dB below speech, but 30dB or 40dB lower than speech might be right depending on the precise nature of the sounds.

[Andrew Rendell]

AFAIK blu-ray can handle 25fps as well as 24, 23.97, 29.97, 30, etc., so the issue isn’t whether the blu-ray disk can handle it, it’s whether the screen display/projection can. I’d try to find out what systems are going to be used for display and then work out whether you’ll need to change the frame rate for that before leaping into that particular world of pain. I think audio sync issues have come up on here before, so have a search around the forums as there is stuff you can do to fix it if that does happen.

[Andrew Rendell]

Strictly speaking, PAL is the way that the colour subcarrier is used in a composite video signal (as is NTSC and SECAM) so it’s not precisely meaningful when your talking about a digital file – it becomes PAL when you have an analogue output to, for example, a tv screen. But that is being excessively pedantic.

25fps is right, as is 720 x 576 (with the appropriate pixel aspect ratio selected).

I’d really recommend proper standards conversion software (e.g., Nattress) but I’d agree that Compressor can look fine when you use the best setting, depending upon what movement there is in the shots (straight interviews wouldn’t have much that would cause a problem) and where it’s ultimately going to end up (it might be questioned if it had a technical check at a major broadcaster).

I’ve delivered material as IMX and it was fine but you must check the field order in Compressor, don’t trust auto. H264 works for HD as well as SD, but remember that it is really only suitable for final delivery and not where any further work, e.g., editing, is likely to happen.

My gut feeling is that converting 30fps to 25fps would probably give a smoother result than going 24fps to 25fps, but is shooting 25fps out of the question?