[Bill Celnick]

I would double check if the audio was good on the source tape by using your source deck as a vcr and outputting to a monitor. If it was good then I might try to just record the audio via analog out to a digital recorder and import from that.

Good luck.

[Bill Celnick]

The h.264 file plays from the thumb drive on both Windows Media Player and QT Player (at least on my own computers- Asus laptop 2012, running Windows 7, and Mac Pro 2010 running 10.6.8

When I first began doing this I tried several different presets to balance quality vs file size considering jump drives have relatively limited capacity. My first effort was a 30 minute video (mov file) – originally in the hdv format 1920 X 1080i at 6GB, encoded to h.264 HD TV 720P – resulting file size was 1.3GB and it looks wonderful, both as a computer video or plugged in to the “smart tv”

[Bill Celnick]

It plays just fine in QuickTime Player on my Mac as well as Windows Media Player on my PC (Windows 7).

I’m sure you can do the same thing with Compressor, but if you have Adobe Media Encoder, the pre-set works great – experiment – all you need is the thumb drive.

[Bill Celnick]

Does the client want video on a thumb drive so that it can be plugged in to the usb port of a HD TV and watched as a movie, or is he simply looking for file copies to readily distribute?

If its the former, I’ve created h.264 versions of my productions using Adobe Media Encoder’s HDTV 720P preset, copied to a thumb drive, and plugged into my the usb port on my “smart tv” – playing perfectly. Before the smart tv, I used devices like WMD TV, without issue.

[Bill Celnick]

I’ve have 6 drives go bad on me prematurely over the years. Five have been WD, the other a Seagate Barracuda. The Seagate lasted just over 13 months – really surprised me since I’ve had very good experience with them on at least 10 other drives.

[Bill Celnick]

As was mentioned, I would play with the sharpness on a different track etc – your hope there is not to make it good, but less bad. Is it possible to cover this up a bit by distressing it – make it look intentionally off.

If this was an interview with a random person with good information, could you pixelate the person’s face completely, as if they did not give permission for use of their image, or if they were a protected witness?

Probably not the reply you’re looking for, but food for thought.

[Bill Celnick]

Hi.

If you’re simply trying to play a clip in reverse, go into the “Speed / Duration” setting, and check “reverse speed”.

[Bill Celnick]

Hopefully your situation is not the same, but the last time I experienced a heat build up and very active fan – on a 14 month old Seagate Barracuda, the drive failed very soon after.

Be extra diligent with your back-ups while trying to figure this out.

Good luck.

[Bill Celnick]

Thanks Dave – I just tried it again, not as an excerpt from my final combined timeline, but as an export from the original sequence. This time it seems to be correct – don’t know why the difference, but I’ll take it.

[Bill Celnick]

Before I went with Plural Eyes I used to look at the waveform in the audio track, and if I was lucky, I’d be able to place markers at common points, lets say where the vocals began, then line them up that way, either with multiclip or manually.