[Angelo Lorenzo]

I would suggest picking up something like an M-Audio Fast Track. While designed for recording, I’ve found it to be a very low noise and low latency audio solution for monitoring stereo mixes. Plug some studio headphones into it and you’re looking good. Works off of USB power.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you could find something cheaper that is just output.

The issue with audio latency is that you probably aren’t working with the best on-board sound hardware when using a laptop. You might be looking at a latency of 30-50ms which will make things feel a little “not right” in terms of sync. Something more professional like the M-Audio brings latency down to 2-6ms.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
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A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Is this for video playback only or for desktop extension?

Blackmagic has some USB based units that will do HDMI out, and will emulate the viewport of Premiere.

I would strongly suggest against using any consumer television for things like color correction, so watch yourself when it comes to that.

——————–
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
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Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Gabriel is right. I’d also suggest doing date_client since you can list your archive in chronological order. I’ve found it more industry standard and more useful for file management.

——————–
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 have After Effects, this may do the trick to a certain extent https://forums.adobe.com/message/4022751

——————–
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]

Reference level is ambiguous, probably the amplitude of the reference tone. Ask the station for clarification. Audition has a simple tone generator if I recall.

Peak at -12 is for most audio, usually dialog. I would set a soft compression at -15 and let it roll off at a 3:1 compression. Anything that isn’t compressed by that probably needs a little volume mixing.

True peak at -6 allows some peaks to go through the -12 threshold… maybe sfx like bullets and so on. I would set a hard limiter for -6.1db. You really don’t want any peaks above the true peak, as it’s an engineering requirement, not an artistic decision.

Also, don’t rely too heavily on “match volume”. I find it doesn’t work too well on clips that are too quiet, they usually need a boost to read at the proper LEQ(A) level. LEQ(A) and LUFS are very similar measurements, if I recall, if not different names for the same thing.

——————–
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]

You probably want to look at a command line tool like FFMPEG or FFMBC. On Windows it should be easy, on Mac I think there is a bit of a set up.

Regardless, these free tools will allow you to take the video stream from one file and the audio stream from another. Quality is kept as there is no transcoding… just a merging of the info into one file.

Alternately, if you have Quicktime Pro and you’re working with a MOV file, you should be able to use the program for this function 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]

I don’t know anyone personally, but I would be aware of two things:

1. Firewire supplies 12v while USB supplies 5v. This probably won’t be an issue with cameras as they’ll use battery power but I wouldn’t try plugging in any port-powered firewire 400 hard drives.

2. It would come down to a driver issue. If your cable doesn’t come with software, I would doubt that it works. Firewire is the cable used for the IEEE 1394 interface which has instructions that multimedia equipment like video cameras use to communicate with your computer.

I’ve seen a few “conversion” cables on Amazon and the like but they all rate very poorly so YMMV.

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/343433-Capturing-DV-camcorder-to-laptop-w-o-firewire-port is worth looking at.

——————–
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]

HDMI is a digital signal. Splitting the signal will not affect the bit depth so a powered splitter should be fine. It also appears that the Blackmagic Decklink studio is 10-bit HDMI, as some other Blackmagic products are only 8-bit.

——————–
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]

As to what DVDarchitect does I haven’t the foggiest, but I would rely more on a proper editing program to conform frame rate before I would a DVD burning program (I’m sure most of them take the liberty to process the footage as little as possible to conform to the DVD standard)

With Premiere, it’s basic modus operandi (phrase of the day) is to keep duration/sound sync consistent while dropping or blending frames.

With that in mind you can do two things:

1. Take your 24fps timeline and nest it into a 23.976 timeline. Review it and if you see any artifacting, right click your nested timeline and select “blend frames” and review it again. Export if it meets your standards. Do the same for the 25fps version. You’ll find the result acceptable in most cases – animation and high movement action sequences may suffer a little. Duration and sound remain the same.

2. This is a little more traditional. Export a high quality intermediate of your footage at 24fps. and bring it into Premiere, duplicate it in your library. Right click and go to interpret footage, set one to 23.976 and the other to 25fps and create corresponding timelines for each. You’ll notice that the sound is sped up/slowed down slightly on each to keep sync but this is very common practice with theatrical telecine. The overall duration, of course is affected. The beauty of this method is that only sound is resampled, while the video is untouched.

——————–
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]

It depends on if you value software as a product or a service. If you need to keep updated constantly then Creative Cloud is cheaper in the long run but it’s like renting. You’ve built no equity and you don’t walk away with a product when you’re done.

If you’re a working professional, there may be some tax benefits. Creative Cloud is a professional subscription and it doesn’t depreciate like the flat purchase of a tool (the software).

——————–
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