Benjamin Reichman
Forum Replies Created
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Good to know! Farewell to nested sequences with the Timecode Reader applied…
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Thanks all! Even though there’s no single answer to my question, it’s more helpful than you might realize to get a variety of “ballpark” answers from the COW.
Craig, I’d love to hear some of those “fun” stories.
Ed, I don’t think I’ll have script notes, transcriptions, or much of anything in the way of guidance. So I’ll make sure I have time to mark up the interviews in FCP (I don’t think it’ll be practical for me to pay a transcription service.)
Rich, your advice is very helpful. As I work, I’ll keep all of that in mind and see how my pace compares.
Mark, I understand what you mean about the work filling the available space. There’s always more that can be done to improve a piece!
At the moment, I’m still waiting to hear even the basic details of the project (beyond what I posted above), but if and when I do, I’ll follow up here as needed.
And now back to editing (a different, very small project)…
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Just tried it, and came across two issues:
1) MacOSaiX doesn’t start the mosaic (as far as I can tell) with the initial photo in the center like the OS X screensaver does; and
2) The maximum sequence size in Final Cut 6.0.6 appears to be 4000 x 4000 pixels, and it would work better with a higher resolution.
Otherwise, it did work. Gerret, let me know what you find out. This is an interesting question, and I’d love to be able to do this in a high-quality way.
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There’s a free mosaic app for OS X: https://homepage.mac.com/knarf/MacOSaiX/
I just downloaded it, and haven’t really put it to the test, so I can’t personally recommend it. But if you’re happy with the mosaic it generates, you could save it as a TIFF at the highest resolution the app allows (which seems to be very high).
Then you could create a sequence in Final Cut with the same resolution as the TIFF, place the TIFF into it, then nest it in a regular sequence (at whatever your video resolution/framerate/etc. are). Then you could use the Basic Motion tab to animate the nested sequence–starting zoomed in on a single tile, then zooming out to show the mosaic, etc.
I haven’t tried this out yet, and I’d love to hear from someone with actual experience, but I think this approach might work.
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It’s not stupid; it happens to everyone as they get familiar with Final Cut.
Open your project and then double-click the sequence icon in the Browser (for the sequence you were working on–you might have several such icons), and all will be back to normal.
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That’s odd–well, glad it worked!
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I don’t know why this would happen in the XDCam Transfer app, but have you tried using Log and Transfer in FCP as a temporary workaround? There’s a required plug-in if you don’t have it already.
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Tom, I’m a film student who’s been using an EX-1 for about a year, which is extremely similar to the EX-3. I’m (obviously) not an expert, but I can tell you a few things that I’ve tried and that teachers have recommended:
1) As for resolution and frame rate, I don’t think you can get more film-like on the EX-3 than 1080/24p. That’s the maximum resolution of the camera, and 24fps is the standard framerate for film.
2) CineGamma presets in the Picture Profile menu can really help. On the EX-1, there are a set of Standard Gammas and a set of CineGammas, and we’ve found that CineGamma 3 often gives us a rich, film-like look. It all depends on your taste, what you’re filming, how it’s lit, etc. So you’ll just have to try out the various gamma settings to find what works for you on a particular project.
3) You may want to set gain to a negative level (-3db) to ensure the cleanest image.
4) Speaking of clean images, you may want to make the image less clean by adding fake film grain to your footage. I personally have never tried that, but I’ve heard you can get good results that way. There are various plug-ins that do this. Last week, I saw a demonstration of the FurnaceCore plug-ins from The Foundry (a package that works with Final Cut), and one of the plug-ins can be set to mimic the grain of specific film stocks!
5) We used the Letus adapter with the EX-1 on two of our final projects this year. I think this is probably the BEST single decision you can make to mimic film (after framerate), because an adapter with 35mm lenses is the only way to get the shallow depth of field that film has.
I can’t comment on whether the Letus is better or worse than other similar adapters, but what they all have in common is a certain amount of light loss, and a kind of “grain” caused by the spinning ground glass.
Also be aware that renting an adapter, lenses, follow-focus, and rails isn’t cheap. You’ll also need a dedicated focus-puller, so if you’re used to having only a camera operator, now you’ll need an operator and a second person to pull focus.
And of course, this will slow you down! Focus pulling is hard. Don’t expect to shoot nearly as much in a day as you would normally–at least until you and your crew are very proficient at it. We had good results thanks to some fellow students with experience. But it was still tricky.
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Yes, it does have four drive bays, thankfully. It’s a 2008 Mac Pro (identifier “Mac Pro 3,1”). Would the best arrangement be two drives in the RAID array, one drive to host Mac OS X itself, and a fourth as a back-up?
At the moment, I’m wrapping up three projects, but in a couple of weeks, I’ll have a breather and could set this up.
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David,
Good to know–thanks. I understand the real answer is buying a SATA RAID, but would I get a significant boost in throughput from simply moving all the footage to an internal drive in the Mac Pro?
I’m just thinking of stop-gap measures until I’m in a position to purchase the real fix!