[Bob Cole]

Sounds as if you’re making progress!

[Andy Bernstein] “We’re going to get a couple of Lowel Totas instead”

For keys or background? For key lighting, I’d advise against those, unless you’re putting them in Chimeras. For background lighting, you could do better with some Mole Nooklites (often available on eBay) or other cheap old open faces WITH BARNDOORS to keep their light from hitting your subject.

“already tossed the 1000 watt worklights (too hot). “

For cooler key lighting, check out some fluorescents from Kino Flo or Lowel. You don’t need the Diva, with its self-contained ballast, because you’re in a studio. You could get one of Kino Flo’s four-foot-long, separate ballast lights, which would allow you to wash your subject in light which drops off quickly so it minimally affects your background.

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[Bob Cole]

[Andy Bernstein] “I need to create several hours”

I hope you have lots of prep and test time because you’ll need it. None of your elements — lights, background, and room — sounds adequate to the task.

Are you producing several hours of green screen? That’s lots of compositing time. You might look at hardware which keys the live image.

You might want to google this topic or search this forum for basic advice about shooting a green screen. I’m not familiar with your lights, but it sounds as though the key light is going to be hard to keep off the green screen, especially given the room size and a full figure shot. The actor would practically be standing next to the greenscreen. Also, a fabric doesn’t “cyc” well, or sweep to become a floor.

I’d shoot a test right away, because I don’t think you have what you need for a bulletproof key, and with several hours of material, you’ll need a bulletproof key.

Bob C

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[Bob Cole]

Thank you Bill. I’m going to get another cheap ink-jet printer, knowing in advance its limitations. When a great dedicated CD printer at a reasonable price comes out, I’ll be ready.

I appreciate the specific recommendations — and the validation of my deciding to buy another Epson (R380 this time) despite not liking the printer that much.

Bob

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[Bob Cole]

[Ron Lindeboom] “We have always had the ability to do forum specific searches, Bob”

Right, but for current-forum-only results, I used to have to specify the forum. Now, the default for a search inside the forum is that forum only. A lot faster.

Is Boolean search part of the future? plus/minus/literal?

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[Bob Cole]

[George W.] “I assume the “Please Press Play…” changes position periodically also…”

Right — that is just a title, not a button, although it prompts the user to hit an invisible button.

I’ll try it, and post later whether it works.

Thanks!

Bob

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[Bob Cole]

So all that stuff about “military spec” audio patchbays, at 4x the cost of plain old patchbays — you’re not believing there is a difference?

I guess the test would be to introduce the patchbay into the middle of the cable route and see whether it makes an audible difference?

Bob C

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[Bob Cole]

thanks Jay, sorry it took me so long to thank you. I got some good answers, and wound up just doing a block dissolve which was just fine. The key to selling the effect, oddly enough, was getting the sound effect right.

BC

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[Bob Cole]

[Ron Lindeboom] “I saw this demo”

Very funny. But so far, nobody remembers the alleged voice-actuated editing system run by the person behind the curtain, right?

Darn. I was hoping that this one was real. I think about it every time the Wizard of Oz runs on tv, which is about monthly.

It would be refreshing for someone to get up there and say, “Here’s the technology, it is absolutely the latest stuff, and very buggy, but you didn’t fly all the way here to see last year’s stuff, so enjoy the show and hold your breath because sometime in the next ten minutes we’re gonna crash.”

To be the devil’s advocate about big trade shows, when you’re in the mood for them, they are actually kind of fun. But the big slick shows are boring. I like the funky little booths with the dreamers. My favorite in 2006 was the little helicopter with the even smaller DV camera in it for your low-budget aerials.

Bob C

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[Bob Cole]

[Ty Ford] “There used to be a PC-based program I would see at NAB every year that did voice to text conversion.”

Ty, if the program you’re thinking about is Naturally Speaking, I’ve used it. You do have to train it for your voice, and I’m not sure how much time it actually saved me.

Thomster, you might want to hire this out to a captioning company. They usually do this for videos, but if they have the ability to create transcripts and sync them to a time-code video they should be able to do the same for audio.

Bob C

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[Bob Cole]

Wow. Welcome, Graham.

I used to look forward to NAB as a source of information. It seemed like an oasis in the desert: the few days in the year when you could feast on the latest in tv technology. With this website, Google, and the Internet in general, you can have all you want, every day.

[Raymond Motion Pictures] “if you think I’m trying to trick you – fine.”

Not you personally, of course. But NAB trickery is well-documented, as in a demo I attended for an NLE system which had a big booth at NAB and enjoyed a brief vogue. The presenter must have had his script vetted by the legal department. He would very quickly do some basic edits in a pre-produced, dazzling video full of special effects, and say, “The XYZ now has REAL-TIME dissolves, chroma-keying, split-screens, particle wipes…” trying to convey the idea that the whole video we were watching had been created in real-time. I was a bit more naive at the time, until a friend took me aside and said, “The only real-time effect was the dissolve — and most of the rest was probably After Effects.”

I’m a happy FCP user, but at the last NAB I attended (2006) the Apple reps kept saying, even one-on-one, “it’s all real-time,” even after I said, “You mean, it has a LOT of real-time features, right? Not all.” I guess it’s not lying, if they believed it.

Just curious Raymond: What do you mean by “we take that attitude into consideration?”

Bob C

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