[Bob Cole]

Not really. My little historical anecdote was just to tell how I learned about this — I think it may have distracted you from my point.

Today, I captured a file to my RAID, put it in the trash, reopened FCP, and there it was, just as if it were still on the drive (which it is, of course). My point is that you can think it’s safe to “Empty the Trash” (because you just trashed a lot of media, and your project is still working), and actually FCP has been using the Trash to access the media, without telling you.

MacPro 2 x 3GHz dualcore; 2 GB 667MHz
Kona LHe
Sony HDV Z1
Sony HDV M25U
Betacam UVW1800
DVCPro AJ-D650

[Bob Cole]

Congrats on the offer. More factors to consider, all in the category of “What are you giving up?”

Do you own equipment now? Can you sell it? If you return to freelancing in two years, will it still be worth anything?

Do you have other clients whom you will lose by taking this job? It takes time to regain clients. You can’t just switch a freelance career on and off and on.

Do you like being a freelancer? Freedom to choose projects is pretty nice. (otoh, I can’t recall turning anything down lately.)

What’s your main concern? Leaving money on the table? You may not have the proper servile attitude to be an employee.

MacPro 2 x 3GHz dualcore; 2 GB 667MHz
Kona LHe
Sony HDV Z1
Sony HDV M25U
Betacam UVW1800
DVCPro AJ-D650

[Bob Cole]

[Jeff Carpenter] “The computer can deal with that, but Final Cut Pro has stricter guidelines. It wants ALL the RAM to match.”

Match how? Are you saying all sticks must be identical in size?

MacPro 2 x 3GHz dualcore; 2 GB 667MHz
Kona LHe
Sony HDV Z1
Sony HDV M25U
Betacam UVW1800
DVCPro AJ-D650

[Bob Cole]

[Flowmotion] “out of the $7k I made this month, $4k came from Craigslist connections.”

Interesting. I’d like to know more.

How many Craigslist connections yielded this $4k? How many months has this happened? Did you just get lucky with one or two, or do you regularly get a number of good leads?

If this is truly a trend, then I wonder why your experience is so different from those of so many others. Do you do a high volume, or are you in some remote market area, where you have a competitive advantage by being the only game in town?

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[walter biscardi] “Panasonic Pro Plasma monitors are excellent for large scale viewing and can be tweaked to almost perfectly replicate the Sonys.”

Walter, does tweaking the Pan. plasmas entail buying monitor calibration software/hardware? The 37″ and 42″ are listed as native resolution 720p. Does that make them significantly less useful for 1080i monitoring?

I know this is covered ad infinitum in the forum, but HD monitoring is is an important and constantly changing topic.

I have a small editing room, perhaps too small for the 37″ and up Pan. plasmas. I’m looking for an HD monitor which fits on the desk.

Choices as I understand them now:

(a) one of Pan’s “pro” HD LCD monitors (BT-LH2600W 26″ or the 17″) (but $2600-3500! and still LCD)
(b) Dell 2405 or equivalent. Can the image on the Dell be tweaked to come close to a “real” HD monitor as easily as those Pan. plasmas?
(c) other?

Thanks!

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

Thanks for the very helpful replies.

PJ, your post was great, and I’d like to follow up. Are “mattifiers” the powders simply listed as “matte?” I will look again, but I don’t recall finding anything labeled “Pancake.” Is that the same as the slightly wet, semi-solid stuff? And, our local “beauty” shops have very skimpy supplies, so the high-quality brush, & the damp sea sponge… I haven’t seen. Do you know of a good online source that understands the video business?

Finally — how do you deal with the man with the five o’clock shadow — at 9 am? Is that where the pancake makeup comes in again?

Thanks again for the great reply. With all the attention we spend lighting people to look their best, and buying high definition cameras, improving the looks at the source makes a lot of sense, eh?

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

Thanks — I’ll copy the MXF files as well, but I am curious as to why it is advisable. The QT files are what I actually use in FCP. Keeping the MXF files doubles the backup space required.

I assume that I need to keep all of the associated data files that live in each respective MXF folder as well.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

Thanks Walter! I’ll try that as soon as today’s shoot is over.

How in the world do you ever know stuff like that?

bob

[Bob Cole]

I have been trying to find the answer to that question too. Not only do I have poor deck control response, but I also have spurious timecode breaks which shouldn’t really be there at all, and which sometimes occur right in the middle of a shot that I need to capture.

If you have a capture card which accepts HD/SD-SDI, one possibility is adding the Convergent Design HD-Connect MI. It ports the video from the M25 via HDMI to SDI on your capture card. It also runs a firewire cable from the M25 to the HD-Connect MI, to your computer’s 9-pin controller (again, probably via your capture card). Whether the deck control is actually better this way, I don’t know.

If someone has actually solved this I’d love to see the answer.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

I’m sort of taking a left turn from my own thread here, but given what I have (Sony M25, AJA LHe), which would be the better way to go from HDV to HD-SDI: Convergent Design HD-Connect MI or AJA HD10AVA?

HD-Connect MI seems like a very nice choice, if I understand it correctly: it is all-digital, converting the M25’s HDMI, which carries everything (video, audio, timecode?) in its original digital form, to another digital signal.

Am I missing something here?

Would that path also eliminate the broken timecode problem that I’m experiencing while capturing HDV originals?

Thanks to all for their excellent ideas.

Bob