[Barry O’brien]

Thank you very much. I have a bunch of videos that have to be posted by tomorrow night, so I opted to have my computer guy do a clean install of Compressor. I printed out and gave him Apple’s suggested install process. I am going to print out your comments and leave them at his shop in the morning.

Thank you for your sage advice!

Regards,

Barry

[Barry O’brien]

Michael,

You with “the fastest answer of the year” award. Thank you. I’ll try it out this afternoon.

regards,

Barry

[Barry O’brien]

Thanks Craig. I’m not familiar with “a nano flash to capture the 4:2:2 if you can.”

How would that work?

Barry

[Barry O’brien]

Thank you, Clint. The advice from all you guys is confirming that I have been going in the right direction. I am going to shoot a test in the coming weeks to make sure I don’t reflection issues (off the green seamless and onto the talent) shooting in this space. I’ll let you know what happens.

[Barry O’brien]

Craig,

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer my questions. We ma land up lighting these projects with Kineflows to keep it cooler in the room. Also, since I entered this question, we have decided that the talent will need teleprompter so we have stopped looking at the light ring option.

I have one question for you, Craig: you said: If you have the budget getting Uncompressed or ProRes from HD-SDI out would be better. NanoFlash shooting with an I Frame 4:2:2 setting would be good.

Does this mean you come out of the SDI jack and directly into a laptop with FCP? What’s the workflow to do this?

[Barry O’brien]

Sadly, in corporate communications, the day of budgets large enough to accommodate assistants is long gone! Fortunately, in this next shoot, I have two assistants – but the Sony XDCAM work flow process is still awkward.

If you roll and the actor makes a mistake in the first few seconds, or there is a noise or the client say something, you land up stopping and starting a lot. You land up with all these busted clips, and it is very easy to lose track of what clip number you are on. Corporate videos often have scores of short clips, particularly if you are shooting B-Roll. If you could just look in the viewfinder an see the clip number, it would be so much faster.

Currently, with my EX-1, I have to stop shooting, flick over to playback, select the clip, note the clip number and then go back to shooting. It would just be a good feature for Sony Cameras to have.

[Barry O’brien]

The alternating current in Europe changes at 50 cycles per second. By setting your camera shutter speed to 1/50th of a second, the idea is that you will bring the camera and light source into sync.

Fluorescent lights, which work by discharging bursts of light, will create the most noticeable flicker. Tungsten filaments, on the other hand, also flicker,but the warming and cooling of the filament dampens the flicker somewhat.

Here are a number of actions that can help.
1.) Change your shutter speed to 1/5oth of a second. Also try 1/100, or 1/200. As the other poster suggested, sometimes this helps.
2.) If you need the fluorescent light as part of your lighting, try covering them with diffusion to moderate the flicker.
3.) If you can do without the Flos, turn them off.

Regardless, you are in a 50 cycle world, and you should set your shutter accordingly. Otherwise, the slowly changing relationship between your shutter opening and closing at 1/60th of a second and the lights brightening and dimming at 1/50th of a second will create this weird slow dimming and brightening within a scene.

[Barry O’brien]

Thanks Noah.

I am trying to avoid switching back and forth to playback. When working ith actors, it’s a distraction.

I have always had it display time code. Is there a way to make it display the current or last clip number in the viewfinder? That would be a great feature.

Regards,

Barry O’Brien

[Barry O’brien]

Both of these projects were started after I upgrades my XDCam Transfer, but you bring up a good point. I may have older cashe files from old projects in the database with cashe files from newer projects. Maybe XDCam Transfer is seeing some old cashe file data, and flipping out.

How would you pick through and clean out a cashe database file?

Anyway, the project is done, and the work-around is to dump the old preference file, and go back to the default XDCam settings. It puts the cashe in a generic cashe location, instead of where I wanted to put it, but at least I could finish the project.

Thanks for your help!

Regards,

Barry

[Barry O’brien]

I am back up and working again. This is what I did. I quit out of FCP. I trashed the Sony XDCAM Transfer Preferences (com.sony.bprl.xdcamtransfer). I fired up XDCam Transfer, and the pop-up preferences window appeared.

I clicked on default preferences, and the application opened. I closed the application and repoened FCP. I selected import>XDCAM and all was ggod again. The probelm has something to do with changing cache settings in XDCAM Transfer.

I generally set up a separate cashe file for each project withing my project file, but this time, it got confused. I don’t have time to figure it out right now, but this will fix the Database problem if you run into it.

Barry