[Angelo Lorenzo]

It’s all a compromise. I think we’re still a few years (2-3) off from widespread adoption of the newer Motion Jpeg2000 (it’s being considered the archival format for digital cinema and institutes like the Smithsonian). Most of the codecs below, with the exception of some uncompressed variants, are 8 bit. This doesn’t make a huge difference since your originating footage isn’t off high end motion picture cameras like the RED or Arri Alexa.

Some of the info below mentions Avid’s DNxHD codec; Avid makes the codec available for free for Quicktime, so you can use it cross-platform without Avid software. It is limited to 1920×1080 though.

From the adobe forum: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/530559

Quicktime – Animation: Completely lossless. Highly efficient in terms of file sizes for graphics, not so much for “footage”. Cross-patform, industry standard.

Quicktime – PNG: Completely lossless. Very efficient for most content types. Extremely taxing to decode, it may not play back easily in anything but the most powerful computers (still useful as a master file). Cross-patform, industry standard.

Quicktime – JPEG2000: Similar pros and cons to Quicktime – PNG. (about 15-20% smaller than PNG)

Quickime PhotoJPEG: Nearly lossless, but not completely, when set at 100 per cent. Very efficient with all content types. Easy to decode. Cross-patform, industry standard.

Quicktime – “None”: Bad idea. Same quality as the the first two, much higher data rates. Cross-platform.

AVI “No compression”: Bad idea. Same quality as the the first two, much higher data rates. Cross-platform.

AVI Lagarith (and other similar, free, add-on lossless codecs): Completely lossless. Highly efficient in file size/data rate. As a non-standard codec, it is only available in computers which have it installed and nobody knows if it will be available five years from now, leaving you with an unusable file. Windows-only.

Another post to note:
Well, Avid DNxHD is “visually lossless”, ie it’s not really, mathematically lossless.

The quality is similar to Quicktime PhotoJPEG at 100 per cent, but file sizes are really smaller (But, truth be told, when you set PhotoJPEG to 90 something per cent, it uses 4:2:2 sampling instead of 4:4:4 and data rate goes down accordingly).

Again, Quicktime PhotoJPEG doesn’t require to download a third party codec at all.

So, choices are compromises.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

It’s an interesting effect. Here is how I would break it down:

1. It’s relatively obvious that they are painted blue. This was early 90’s (I’m thinking ’94 when the song was re-released) so this is really basic.

2. The liquid is keyed on its own. This would mean there was no inverted mask pulled simply off the performers. How can I tell? The water has ripple shadows.

I think they painted the band and props blue, then filmed them in a pool of water mixed with powered milk and green coloring. Why that you ask? It will make the water opaque and it’s cheaper than 300 gallons of actual milk. You pull the key off the green, add the static plate and you’re done.

Another tell-tale sign is the greenish contamination of the blue.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

You have latency issues because USB has a buffer latency of 20+ milliseconds and you also have to deal with processing and conversion latencies on the computer and receiver, respectively.

If you have an HDMI port on your laptop, I would suggest a wireless HDMI to HDMI solution… a little more expensive but lag is cut down quite a bit. $250-$400 is reasonable.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

When there is no budget for it, things get a little more tricky.

If you aren’t getting paid to actually film and edit it, I would only make a deal where I 1) control ownership of the EPK footage and 2) Receive a perpetual license that permits me to use the footage I film (it’s weird because they own the rights to the film, so you need a license to film it and use still frames from production and so on).

My first question would be this: is there a marketing/distribution budget separate from the production budget that hasn’t been discussed? If the answer is yes, then offer that usage of any of your footage be paid out of that budget including web use and dvd/bluray.

If the answer is no then ask for differed payment. A flat fee that is paid once the film is making a profit to cover your labor. Many low budgets use differed payments and if you’re confident on the film’s performance, it may be a good strategy.

You should also probably ask your employer (the post house, I assume) if you can work directly with the client. There could be a conflict of interest if you use work time or work property to produce this footage.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

*Edit* I answered this assuming I was still browsing the Premiere forum… you might just want to skip to the link at the bottom.

Premiere does automatic conforming. Try this first, and see if the results are suitable for the look of your footage before jumping into some more exotic techniques:

1. I assume your timeline is 60i to match your footage, and you’ll probably carry that all the way to output?

2. Import your CG footage. If it’s a video, it should come in marked as 30fps (and talk to your CG artist and make sure it’s 30 straight and not actually 29.97), if it’s an image sequence, then interpret it as 30fps.

3. (optional) Right click the CG footage in your timeline and uncheck frame blending. You can play with this setting on/off to see how you like the final result.

4. Drag the CG footage into your timeline and render out to a file with “Maximum Quality” checked.

Premiere will do it’s magic, so whenever 1 min of footage is thrown into a mismatched timeline, it plays as 1 min long. It’s when you manually screw around with reinterpreting the footage do you actually retime it.

If you don’t like the results then this article explains the process step-by-step https://magazine.creativecow.net/article/interlacing-progressive-footage but it still recommends trying the method I outline above first.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Where are your videos final destination? Web? Broadcast? DVD?

Bare in mind the fact that every consumer monitor will look differently: between wide manufacturing tolerances, people adjust their screens to their taste, not necessarily what is right. You will never have consistency in the wild. So what do you do? You use a monitor that doesn’t adulterate the image, just like audio recording studios use speakers that have even frequency responses and not Dr. Dre Beats headphones.

There are a few ways of approaching this.

The first, and the cheapest is to use your computer monitor if your videos are just going straight to YouTube/Vimeo/Mobile Devices. What you need to purchase, though, is a calibration system like a Spyder Pro, X-Rite, or Huey ($100-250). Since you’re on a laptop, you’ll also need to make sure your screen brightness is calibrated and your system doesn’t dynamically adjust it.

Calibrate with gamma 2.2 for web, or recalibrate for gamma 2.4 and you can get passable quality for dvd/bluray/broadcast.

A better, more expensive, solution is to get a broadcast quality LCD monitor from someone like Panasonic, TV Logic, or Flanders Scientific ($2,000-5,000). These come with on-screen video scopes, blue-only mode, and professional connections.

While Todd is correct in mentioning that CRT is the gold standard, it’s only in black (contrast) response. LCD, in a properly lit room, is more than suitable. Some people like using plasma displays for their improved contrast but they have issues with inconsistent brightness (put a small white square on the plasma and it will measure brighter than the same spot if the whole screen was illuminated white; it’s called “floating white point”). Chances are, if your shadows are insanely critical, then your work is to the level where you can afford to colorgrade in a theatre or get a more expensive monitor from a company like Dolby (we’re talking prices like $15,000).

Food for thought.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I use an overclocked GTX560 with 2gigs of DDR5 from EVGA. Not officially supported but it works through the text file hack and it’s stable performance-wise.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

If you’re in an urban area, why not print to file progressively and have a duplication house do the conversion and print to tape?

Alternately, you could rent a tape deck and print to it via HD-SDI. I’d look into something cheap and basic from AJA or Matrox for SDI Out. I have a Blackmagic card myself but it doesn’t seem to do a 1080p to 1080i conversion in-card.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

As high as is reasonable for your Vimeo space quota (unless you have Vimeo Pro of course). Vimeo, like Youtube, will recompress your video once it is uploaded to their system but you can eek out some extra quality, especially if multipass encoding is selected. I’d say, if upload speed isn’t an issue, anywhere from 16,000kbps to 20,000kbps is a good start depending on the amount of motion and the quality of the original footage.

This is all assuming 1080p with 30fps or slower.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I could be totally wrong, but I believe you need to remove it from all sequences before you can change the speaker assignment, or change it to “mono as stereo”.