Ben Holmes
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Depends on your budget. A proper grading monitor for broadcast etc. will run you $15,000+. Something like a JVC 24″ monitor (equivalent to grade 2 for normal editing) around $4,000. A lot of post houses use Pioneer Pro Plasmas.
What is the final use, what is the format?
You will certainly need a Matrox, AJA or Blackmagic video card. Other than that, a great deal is down to a proper enviroment for grading, and properly calibrated monitoring.
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I did post the above comment about 6 hours ago – sorry for apparent repitition. It appears either I or the Cow have a few virus issues….
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Given they need it tomorrow? Take a quicktime to someone who can make you a disk.
If you have a blu-ray burner (most external ones work fine with OS X, I have Pioneer internal BD in one of my towers) the simplest option is to use Toast Titanium – drag and drop an HD quicktime into Toast and let it do the rest – quick, reliable and far better quality than DVD.
You can also burn a Blu-Ray disk within FCP using the ‘share’ option – this can be to Blu-Ray or an AVCHD disk, which can be a standard DVD-R with HD data on it. These are less compatible than actual BDs, but a good option for many.
If you wish to take this further, you can use Adobe Encore (which tends to be a nightmare on more complicated BDs on a Mac) or I’m sure certain people here can advise you on more specialist setups. I’d guess, however, that you just want a simple ‘enter and play’ disk.
I think you’ll be suprised how well OS X supports Blu-Ray, despite Mr. Jobs assertions. I have two external and one internal BD burner, and all work seemlessly in OSX.
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Total speculation as it is, given Apple’s penchant for fullscreen ‘apps’, such as the extensive fullscreen mode in Aperture, I think this is a very likely UI change for FCP in the forthcoming release. It will be interesting to see what they try, as this mode could be very different from the normal view.
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I would be suprised (having done similar motion text work) if that was done in anything other than After Effects – although I suppose if someone had Shake/Nuke/whatever in-house, it could have been done on any of them.
Clearly, however, AE is the cheapest and mostly widely used for this sort of work – as well as being one of the quickest and easiest.
Nice work though – good flow and design, and plenty of skill in the execution.
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David
Many thanks. As far as your advice goes:
1. Not RT settings – I checked them. At any rate, this is not RT behaviour as far as I see it, as the bar is green, and the systems still drop frames. Interested to hear if you have further insight on this.
2. I’ll have to test this on Monday on a system – I was unwilling to take action without advice, as it was the systems integrators who did the update, and I don’t want to make the situation worse (or be blamed for it). However, hard to see how checking disk permissions could do any harm.
I’m puzzled, as it specifically occurs on unrendered text – the’re no media to access, and the system has no issue streaming ProRes to the edits – unless there is unrendered text on the timeline, when it drops frames.
Appreciate the advice, as ever.
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I don’t believe so – instead, the systems all had NEW system drives installed by the reseller, then had Snow Leopard clean installed, the FCP clean installed. I assume that FCP was upgraded to 7.0.3 via an update package, as the edits are not on the internet. That last bit I will check.
Only oddity (if you like) is that the old system drives are still installed (in case there were any issues) – any chance drivers etc. on there are causing issues – clearly this drive is NOT now seen as the system drive by the Mac when it boots…
Appreciate the reply.
Ben
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I’ve regularly captured ProRes 422 and ProRes 422 HQ at 1080i50 to G-Raid drives, and other external FW800 raid enclosures. It’s my standard setup using a MBP and MXO2.
The data rates are around 17MB/s and 26 MB/s – not sure why that should be the issue here. These codecs were designed to give acceptable data rates to accomodate this kind of storage.
You can share ProRes over Ethernet, but you won’t find it’s as easy to do on the cheap as DV was. You might like to look at some of the Drobo products, as I believe they offer something in this area. More usually, this is accomplished with a Gig-E switch, and a 8-bay+ drive array, then something like MetaSAN to manage it. It’s a lot cheaper to do than it used to be however – but don’t expect shared storage to be cheap and easy – that’s the holy grail of video editing, and just doesn’t exist yet.
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That’s a very long lens to use indoors. I find the 50mm too long for anything over a midshot. Obviously – have a look at it for your own uses. You can always move closer, but further away is a problem when you hit a wall…
Also – bears repeating that you only get the exposure you want at very low f-stops, so you have very shallow depth of field. Non-moving subjects will be ok, but even interviews will suffer with sections of the face out-of-focus.
The only other alternative is to get a more sensitive camera.
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Cheap is a relative term – and certainly its not cheap compared to a kit lens, however it’s still slow for low light video – the money would have been better spent on a faster, prime lens.
I don’t know anyone using a DSLR primarily for video using zoom lenses. There’s a reason for that. And as I own a 550D and have tested the suggested settings, I can tell his results look right to me.
Most of this goes to prove two things: 1) People have unrealistic expectations of what modern cameras can do (especially on a budget – a 550d is NOT a 5D) and 2) The human eye is a wonderful thing – the light we can read by is far lower level than we can easily shoot at. I’d probably add a third: lighting is not obsolete.
Ben
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