[Ben Holmes]

True – I use mine with a friend’s RED camera on-set, and the 720p 1:1 pixel display option is very useful. I also make a lot of use of the safe area markers for broadcast work, and the embedded audio and timecode display.

Please – try before you buy. Others here will tell you they dislike the look of the JVC’s and prefer the Panny’s or (even) Sony. I believe Sony now has a 1080p 24″ monitor around the same price point, so have a look at that as well.

If you want 1080p monitoring, LCD is your only option, but my guess is you’ll be suprised by the quality…

Ben

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Alan

Yes – I have the HD-SDI version of the JVC, and generally I’m very happy with it. It’s very neutral colour-wise, and I think the ‘look’ of a monitor is a personal taste thing, so I don’t want to say it’s the best available (although for the money…)

I colour grade on mine all the time – for broadcast and corporate. Take care to set both it and your computer monitor up properly and it’s great. Feed it a 1080p source and it’s amazing.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

[Rick Dolishny] “I didn’t know about a Sapphire plugin that does that. Thanks for the tip.”

It’s part of the Sapphire package at http://www.genarts.com – but it ain’t cheap.

Honestly – stick with the oval. It’s free and it’ll serve you well – although as with all vignettes if you apply them in 8 bit they can lead to banding…

Ben

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[Alan Lacey] “When monitoring SD signals is it possibel to judge interlace errors on these monitors? “

Yes.

Kind regards,

Ben

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Ignacio

I run FCS (not as a main machine) on a 24″ imac 2.8Ghz. It all runs fine – although nowhere near as well as on my Mac Pro towers. Color will need the higher resolution of the 24″ to run I think, but since the imac has an external graphics card, you shouldn’t have any problems. I would however suggest you invest a modest amount of money on a proper disk array, and you’ll be limited to FW800 on the iMac – honestly that’s the biggest drawback, and the inability to add video capture etc.

If you plan on making money out of the system, the lowest priced Pro tower and a 23″ monitor will serve you far better I’m afraid.

Ben

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Brad

You’ve got two good choices, the Blackmagic decklink range (starts around $300 I think) or the more expensive Kona range. You can find these (and prices) at http://www.ajavideo.com, and http://www.decklink.com.

I have used both, and had few troubles with either (actually slightly more Kona card failures, but their service is amazingly good). For digibeta, I think the decklink is the cheaper option, and a great card. Make sure whatever you choose will meet all future requirements for output and partucularly audio. If you just want to import video from a digibeta deck with embedded audio, and send it back the same way, it’s inexpensive and easy to do. Integrating into a larger post environment usually costs more.

Also, you will need a fast disk array to cope with uncompressed SD, although you can now work in ProRes in SD with a firewire 800 drive no problems (and some may even play uncompressed SD fine). ProRes is a great format for quality/space.

If you search on the forum here, you’ll find plenty of recommendations. Currently I use decklink and G-Tech drives.

Hope that helps.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

I rarely bother with filters etc (although I have Sapphire vignette which is fine). I prefer usually just to make an oval in the fcp shapes menu, and lay it under the video I’m using, and apply the ol’ ‘travel matte luma’ property to the video I want vignetting. This allows a massive amount of control shot-to-shot (as vignettes tend to play differently on the different shots depending on the luma levels in the shot) and allows a lot of softness in the effect. It’s also a quick render!

In my opinion, ‘strong’ vignettes are naff – keep it subtle and they’re nice sometimes. Isn’t it funny how much time we spend in post adding elements (like lens flare) cameramen have spent their life avoiding?

Ben

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[walter biscardi] “Ben, we have only produced 1080i/29.97 BluRays so I can’t help you with any 24p stuff right now. I can tell you that we never allow Encore to transcode or re-encode any of our material, we do all the MPEG-2 compression in Compressor.

Even if we want to do a regular DVD (which Encore is not doing well anymore either) we create two MPEG-2 files in Compressor. One for the regular DVD and one for the BluRay.

Sorry can’t help you any further with that.
“

Walter – I should have realised that. I also should have had the sense to go the compressor route from the start. In truth, I held off because I thought Encore might do a better job of ensuring the footage was Blu-Ray legal, and the correct frame rate.

As a future note, allowing Encore to convert 24p footage for a 23.98p disk actually just meant the encodes had frames missing every now and again. I don’t know if that’s my fault, or a limitation in the software – I suspect it’s my fault. Encore just says it will accept 24p, 23.98 and 30 fps video – it wasn’t clear to me what it would do to it. When it converted 24p footage for the 29.97 disk I made in error, it was awful.

Compressor allowed me to set the frame controls as ’24p as 23.98p’ and produced nice results on the (soon to be final as soon as I find my surround sound) disk.

Let me say that picture quality-wise (omitting motion/frame rate issues) the Blu-Rays look superb. I think that’s what I find most depressing about this. I have a PS3 connected via an HDMI>DVI lead to my 24″ 1080p monitor, and the quality is amazing. If I play it back on a 1080i TV, the PS3 will convert it to 1080i60, the same as if you’d made a 23.98p DVD and played it back on a non-progressive scan DVD player. That’s why I asked the cameraman to shoot 24p, and I’m glad to say it worked. I’ll definitely be working with Blu-Ray again, some time…

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

By the way – here’s my two additional problems today: Encore deciding the 23.98p disk I painstakingly recreated yesterday was actually 29.97 in the project settings – and there’s no way to change it back. Fortunately this has only led to jerky menu motion, as I have imported 23.98p files from Compressor this time.

Second one: Encore has substituted a stereo 192kbps version of my 448kbps 5.1 surround mix from my project, and refuses to rebuid the disk with the surround one even though I have deleted it. I am now going to try a rebuild after deleting all the session renders in the project folder, as I suspect it’s just ‘hanging on’ to a previous version where I had the stereo audio on track 2 of the main edit.

Oh yeah – and most of the time Encore crashes when I open a project, unless I delete the project ‘pref2’ file in the project folder…. Oh – and Encore often decides my projects are DVD, not Blu-Ray in the preferences…

Ah well.

Ben

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Eric

I’m sorry – it’s been a trying week – and in part you’re right, you should always nail down a workflow before you offer it to clients. In truth, MY client had already offered HIS client the Blu-Ray, so I made the best choices I could in order to satisfy the brief. Not ideal, but things rarely are, are they? I was clear with him that it could lead to problems, but he still wants a Blu-Ray, so I’d rather try to deliver than risk him going elsewhere.

In turn, I hope both my comments (and Walter’s, who has had a MUCH worse time of it than me – I’m only starting to feel the pain) will act as a caution to anyone in my situation considering Encore as an authoring solution on a new Mac – many of whom have probably grown tired of waiting for Apple to deliver.

Until someone from Adobe can refute the problems everyone is having, I would say to people to think again, or just get Toast for simple burns. It’s a shame – I think Encore is a solid product in other areas, and I would be happy to use it in the future if it was at an acceptable standard.

Ben

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