[B.j. Ahlen]

I thought I had seen a really good article about how to handle non-financial ID theft.

I just found it, in last month’s issue of Kiplinger Magazine (which is an outstanding magazine btw).

This article is available online: https://www.kiplinger.com/personalfinance/magazine/archives/2005/10/idtheft2.html.

Specific advice is offered, with resources that even very few in law enforcement know anything about.

This is important information, any one of us could need it next…

[B.j. Ahlen]

There is no way Avid renders better than Vegas. They are about equal, but some effects look better in Vegas because of better code.

Any flavor of Avid Express is ho-hum, and far less robust than Vegas.

Now, the expensive Avid systems like Nitris DS etc., those are truly wonderful. $90K+ or so…

[B.j. Ahlen]

You don’t need QT to make H.264, and as you noted QT7 for PC hasn’t been released yet.

I haven’t used it myself, but have heard from usually reliable sources that Nero’s H.264 codec blows Apple’s out of the water, ie. much better quality. It’s standard in the latest version of Nero 6 Ultra, try it for free at https://www.download.com/3000-2646-10028984.html.

Good PCs today are better at playing this kind of advanced (CPU-heavy) codec than Macs, there are only a few very very top Macs that can play 1080 HD without choking.

[B.j. Ahlen]

Here’s a good comparison between the old and the new models, hope this can help a little too:

https://www.barefeats.com/g527.html

[B.j. Ahlen]

What video format is on your timeline?

If it’s DV, wouldn’t there be a fair amount of work for each frame?

I’ll test with uncompressed 4:2:2 as soon as I get a chance.

[B.j. Ahlen]

Maybe next year.

https://www.hdforindies.com said from NAB this week:

Apple’s saying dual link 4:4:4 HD is a preview, doesn’t want to put their official stamp on it yet – got a BS answer from one lady about “we don’t know what all the issues might be”, got to a demo artist who said it’s because there is NO 10 bit RGB processing in FCP – if you render anything, even a cross dissolve, it gets bounced into 10 bit YUV, then rendered from YUV back to [8-bit] RGB. Yuck.

The suggested fix was to do EVERYTHING other than cuts only editing with Shake.

Who wants to do a cross dissolve in Shake? Then you can’t change your edit whilst effects run. You could do your FX & CC work in Shake, swap shots out, carefully managed if you had to. Once editorial was locked, THEN run the whole thing out to Shake. Do cross dissolves hand over to Shake? Do any FCP effects hand over? I doubt it. This workflow sounds barely viable at first but gets less and less so in a real production environment. Yuck. … So maybe next year.

At least the next version of FCP (FCP5) will work in the right color space for HD (ITU 709).

The current version of FCP HD only works in the Standard Definition color space (ITU 601).

[B.j. Ahlen]

See https://www.snellwilcox.com/products/data/standards/alcpdata.pdf.