[Angelo Lorenzo]

Most music videos with any budget were filmed with 16mm film. You’re seeing these videos through too much degradation: a telecine version to (probably) Beta tape, broadcast, taped to VHS, encoded to the computer, and uploaded and re-encoded to YouTube. The Wham video may be one of the exceptions – since it’s an official video, it may have been transferred to digital from an original beta tape.

I wouldn’t, however, concentrate on fidelity effects unless you take it to the extreme and emulate analog VHS style tracking damage.

Most of these videos magic is in the aesthetic. Promist lens filters, still maturing editing techniques, the use of a videomixer to do a lumakey in the Wham video.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Chances are the last time you asked it was in the AE forum and I weighted the answer for AE performance. Trust me, I won’t remember specific people most of the time so I answered this with Premiere performance in mind. Slightly different answers, same reasoning behind them.

You’ll notice that in both cases I made a special note of After Effect’s global cache as being the primary reasoning behind the SSD recommendation.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I’ve edited smaller things on my 2006 MBP intel core duo in native h.264 originating from Canon cameras. I probably wouldn’t consider editing larger projects, mostly due to screen real estate on a laptop, or begin to touch a project in heavier formats like RED raw or ARRIRAW.

Consider keeping all your footage in ProRes like FCP6. Just because Premiere can edit native formats, it doesn’t mean you should. Underpowered machines (anything less than a quadcore machine with 8 gigs of ram) really benefit from the use of intermediate codecs like ProRes or Avid DNxHD.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

dbFS is just a decibel scale where 0 is considered maximum and infinity considered minimum (Premiere has a fidelity up to -120db).

dbFS is common for digital audio. Older analog recording equipment uses VU or dBu which is almost always a direct voltage measurement of the signal which can go far and well into positive values.

Loudness is perceived as the average level. Your mix shouldn’t peak to far above or valley to far below the spec -16 to -20 range… it’s the “meat” of the signal. RMS, rather than peak, measurement is what you need to look at (broadcast specs get strict with average levels being measured over time with certain frequencies weighted more than others). Premiere VU meter doesn’t give this to you at least not directly. Adobe Audition or any DAW is a better choice for audio mixing. There are plenty of free audio effects that are just volume meters.

The human voice is very dynamic. Depending on the microphones used it does have a tendency to sharply peak. You may want to compress your dialog (this gently squishes the peaks) and raise the overall level. This also makes plosive syllable sounds easier on the listener’s ears.

If you regularly mix audio to specs, consider using Adobe Audition along with Waves broadcast volume monitoring plugin. It’s a setup I’m currently using and I found it totally worth the money.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I suggest getting Colorista Free as it’s immeasurably better than most of the color correction tools in Premiere.

With that said, I balanced the image with true blue in the shadows, mids with cyan blue, and highlights with cyan blue. I also reduced saturation. I then used the “Change to color” effect as, basically, a hue/sat/luma qualifying control that you’d see in the full version of Colorista set with low tolerances to match the hue of the wood.

It looks like on the wide camera there is some fidelity issues with the skintone, it would be difficult to dig it out and correct it. I suggest taking the good camera and correcting it down to match. You could also take down the saturation of the good camera down 10-15% to hide any of the subtle color differences.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

If you/editor is using the PC, they may find using the software xSplit to turn your screen into a emulated webcam is more stable in terms of FPS than direct screen sharing. FFSplit is free and may work as well.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Skype, so far as I know, is usually limited artificially in terms of broadcasted/received framerate. There are articles on how to alter this for both PC and Mac which, bandwidth allowing, should give you a better experience.

Adobe Story is a completely different product. It’s for pre-production and script collaboration. You may be thinking of Adobe Anywhere which isn’t released, but is more for collaboration with others who know how to use media software than for live client review.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I see no interviews, only Michael Jackson.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Premiere Pro would rarely benefit from a quick startup or scratch disk in my experience. You may see some benefit in preview rendering or rendering final products with preview renders selected; even then, other hard drives would be the bottleneck.

Your first setup is probably the best overall. You’ll probably get more pleasure from the general OS performance increase from the SSD.

If you also use After Effects, I think you’ll find increased performance from the second setup. Even though AE CS5.5 doesn’t have the global cache that CS6 does, it can still benefit from having fast scratch access.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Clear your cache of conformed audio on machine #3 (usually a good time to trash Premiere’s preferences as a preventative measure as well). Sounds like there was an issue in that process.

Edit: If it was happening in RedCine at some point then it may also be a compound issue requiring you to update the RED importer for Premiere, as this will use more up to date code from RED’s SDK https://labs.adobe.com/technologies/redepic_importer/

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks