[Bob Cole]

[Dave LaRonde] “What does a vectorscope say about the saturation?”

outta sight (or beyond the 100% ring) on the red.

When I change the logo’s color to yellow it looks perfectly clean. But with red (even if I cheat the color somewhat), the solid regions tend to moiré.

The background is an animation in various shades of very deep red; the logo is static at the point that you notice the moiré.

The best solution I’ve come up with is to reduce saturation, darken, and use visual psychology to make the logo seem brighter by darkening the background.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

I see both sides of the issue. Just want to point out, though, that disconnecting will not save you from disaster, if you forget the one most important principal of earning your living with computers:

“It might break at the worst possible moment, so make sure you have a worst-case scenario in place.”

The Internet is probably not the greatest source of potential disaster, and it is incredibly helpful to productivity. Even though I have other computers which I could use to access the Internet, I find it useful to have online access on the Mac to music libraries, Google (those lower-third name spell checks), software updates, etc. On both PCs and Macs, using firewalls, “safe Interneting,” and common sense, I’ve had no debilitating Internet viruses in many years. On the other hand, I’ve had hard drives fail, and a virus has indeed brought a PC NLE to a halt (when I used a floppy disk from another editor, which had a virus).

If I had a life-or-death, mission-critical business, I’d probably disconnect. But I’d do a lot of other things first, like daily full backups, etc. And DON’T UPDATE your software until the guinea pigs have checked it out.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[Terren LIn] “It takes about 4 hours to back up per tape though. hope this was somewhat helpful.”

Thanks. I didn’t know the history – the current Quantum network drive has a 400/800 gb capacity and is compatible with gigabit Ethernet. I wonder whether it is the speed of the drive, or the speed of the network, which leads to such lengthy backup times.

The Ethernet solution is terrific, though it helps to have a “gigabit ethernet” network, and most of the older ones are at most 1/10th that speed.

[Bob Cole]

Just tried the trial version of MovieLogger. I don’t think it applies.

okay – may have found the answer: https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/log_capture_workflow.html

The section on “digital work print,” para. 3 has some links for spreadsheet templates.

Thanks for helping jog my brain, folks. I’ll report.

BC

[Bob Cole]

[Bret Williams] “I would think you would simply log the numbers in, then reconnect to existing media.”

Clearly I’m missing something here. I thought logging could only be done during capture.

[Bob Cole]

Great advice all through this thread. I appreciate the newbies asking the questions I’m sometimes a little reluctant to ask myself — and the veterans who take their time to answer.

On balance, I think the best course is to frame out all but one window, and tent-light that one carefully.

fwiw: The cooking show my wife likes SEEMS to be set in a home kitchen, but if you look closely you’ll see that the shadows and light in the window never changes.

Authentic window light could change at any time, possibly causing continuity problems. You’ll have so much to keep track of during production that you should try to reduce the variables as much as possible. With cooking, you can’t really do all the wide shots with the window first, then all the cu’s.

Look at, and record for careful scrutiny, every cooking show you can. Then imitate the ones you admire.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

Thanks for asking. I have a solution which I’m about to implement starting next week — appreciate any comments on it.

I couldn’t bring myself to pay $7000 for the ultimate solution: that Quantum Ethernet-connected box which would probably be the best for backing up the whole network, especially with something like Retrospect as the master control.

So I’m going with a kludged-together approach: lots of hard drives, one for each day of the week, one set of five for each computer, to back up the system drives; and LTO-3 tape for the video data that sits on the RAID.

Instead of the LTO-3a $7k box, I just bought an HP external LTO-3 drive (under $2k) which connects via SCSI. I’ll hook it up to the HP 8200, which has a SCSI interface. The plan is to put a 1 gb drive into the HP, and over the local gigabit network, copy (rather quickly) from Mac to PC the files that need backing up. Then the HP can work away at its leisure, backing up the HP’s 1 gb drive to tape. That way I can keep using the MacPro for video editing.

HP makes no guarantee about connecting it to a Mac, but I’ll be experimenting with that too. I may or may not even want to do that, as I think the hard-drive to hard-drive copy is much quicker than hard-drive to tape. I got the idea for this from an HP rep, who told me about their hybrid box which integrates a hard drive for the quick back-up and tape for archiving.

It’s not elegant, but in this economy, saving over $5000 is a reasonable move. I already own the hard drives, and even though I’ve seen one fail, I’m not too worried because I’ll be exercising them regularly, and I’ll have lots of copies no more than a couple days old. And the tape should be absolutely bulletproof (knock on wood) for long-term storage of video assets.

Bob

[Bob Cole]

When I faced an arcane situation (ultra-widescreen), I created a graphic which showed the intended boundaries of the frame with arrows and bounding boxes.

You could create a “resolution graphic” with text or lines which, the label states, should be legible. This may have to be on a separate DVD, if the client wants to pop the final product in and have it play without menus.

At least that way the AV team could have both a reference and perhaps more motivation to make the DVD look right. It’s all too easy to blame someone besides yourself. An official-looking test pattern/graphic might persuade them to try just a little harder next time.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[Bob Zelin] “David writes –
BTW, I loved your performance in Jaws…
REPLY – but Roy, you were really great in All That Jazz !
Bob Zelin”

You were amazing in Seaquest DSV!

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[Steve Wargo] “Hope to meet you and Augie this year.”

You should try to do that, Steve. He’s even cuter in person. Augie, that is.

Bob C