[Bob Cole]

I’ve been looking on eBay and finding plenty of candidates, but without software. Do you need any special backup software for these drives?

[Bob Cole]

My sympathies. Could you try to get your Apple Store to take back your recent purchase? I bought a couple of Dell LCD monitors a couple weeks before a major price drop, and they refunded the difference.

I think with computer hardware and software you have to adopt a “rental” attitude: here is what I am paying for X months of use of this product.

The bigger mistake than buying something about-to-be-superseded is always waiting for the next big thing. If you do that, you’ll never buy and never get the use of the present big thing.

But it still stinks.

— Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[Tom Wolsky] “No pro apps will run on the Intel machines until their running universal in March.”

But then, will the new portable, bolstered by external FW drives, be a good choice for FCP editing DV? With a PCMCIA card, can you get FW800 with the new laptop?

I have a bunch of questions that are probably unanwerable. But anyway:

Compare the two Pro’s for FCP editing SD/DV. With 2 GB of RAM and the 120 GB hard drive, the 1.67 Pro will be $2700, and the 1.83 will be $2900.

Is the upgrade charge $49 for FCP Studio or $49 for each title inside Studio (DVDSP, FCP, Soundtrack, Motion2)?

How is Apple historically with delivering in-demand machines, which the Pro will undoubtedly be, on any kind of schedule?

Glad I waited,
— Bob C.

[Bob Cole]

I appreciate your help Joe. It looks as if I have to either wait for Encore 2.0 or use another app. Any rec’s? I believe that on the Mac side that DVD SP will handle CC.

— Bob C

[Bob Cole]

You might want to try TMPGEnc to edit your mpeg files.

I don’t understand your reference to using Encore to trim heads and tails of mpeg files. afaik Encore will only trim the tails.

— Bob C

[Bob Cole]

It’s useful to play with the Arcsoft product, bec. (1) it automates the job of matching color areas with stills that contain the appropriate color, and (2) after you’ve played with it awhile you can get a sense of which “master” images work well as a photomosaic, and which are a waste of time.

Even if you want to roll-your-own, I’d recommend using PhotoMontage (?) first, to see whether the master image “reads” as a photomosaic.

[Bob Cole]

Totally ignorant opinion, as I haven’t used Road Rags, but it looks a bit flimsy and overpriced. — & would it do the job of knocking down the Kino on a white shirt, any better than some extra diffusion on the front of the Kino, and a grid to make the undiffused light more directional?

For the backgrounds, I meant to say, Source 4 “Jr.” zoom — a bit more manageable size-wise and does the job. At least for me, it’s much more adaptable, and faster to set up, than the slash/fresnel trick. One stand, one light, and an appropriate setting of the internal blades — plus an internal pattern holder that gives you an infinite variety of shadows, and a nice gel frame for color. I do wish it were a little smaller.

[Bob Cole]

[Chris Baldwin] “I do need to get myself a third light for
backgrounds and so on…”

The Source 4 along with a bunch of slide-in patterns would be very
helpful for that. I don’t think the Kinos will be very useful for
background lighting, even with the Matthews kit, bec. the Kinos’
light doesn’t project that far (or so I hear).

— Bob

[Bob Cole]

I use an inexpensive program designed to make still photomosaics. I forget the name but I think it is PhotoMontage. You can run it through several times with different collections to give the impression of motion.

Doing this with images that are actually moving video is a lot trickier. If you plan to zoom into or out from a portion of the photomosaic to reveal motion images, you might want to concentrate your efforts on that part only and use the automatically-generated photomosaic for the rest of the image.

Good luck. It’s fun… once.

— BC

[Bob Cole]

[Leo Ticheli] “the subject looking to the left”

To screen left, I assume.

I associate anything aimed toward the left as looking toward the WEST and therefore being adventurous, forward-looking. That’s an American History slant I guess.

— BC