[Chad Treanor]

Hey max,

first of all, its just the nice thing to do to fill out your COW info so we know more about what your working with, what kind of work you do and all that fun stuff. Sort of saves time as well.

Exposure has a lot to do with what your planning on doing with your footage. Some videographers who know they are going to go black and white will some times expose their video a few stops up to give the video a specific look. If magic bullet says that you shouldnt have any blown out areas, then it seems like the software will work best with video that falls in the proper 7.5 to 100 IRE range on your vectorscope.

Zebra lines can be a great handy tool… I usually have mine set to 100 IRE. It works for me. The idea is that you will be able to see what your camera thinks is hot. Some people think that you would turn on the zebra lines to see where the image is ‘over exposed,’ but is really there to show you where the hottest parts of the image are located. Those people’s footage came out really dark because obviously they stopped down their exposure to make all the lines go away. Not good. You want to have a good balance between the zebra lines and darkest spots in your picture. Overall a good black and white viewfinder can be the best thing for focus and exposure. Normally I’ll use my viewfinder first and set my exposure and then check the LCD just to see if it looks good. Sometimes people will turn the exposure on an auto function to just see what the camera thinks is right and then back to manual to set it themselves. Overall it depends on what you think looks right and what you will be doing with the footage in post.

hope this helps
Chadwik

[Chad Treanor]

THANKS!

Im starting production on an all Texas trails video that specifically focuses on bmx. I’ve been riding bmx and digging trails for about 12 years and I want to produce something for all the efforts that diggers put in for everyone to have fun on. This feature is really going to come in handy. Thanks again for putting up with rudimentary ?’s.

thanks
chadwik

[Chad Treanor]

I thought that if you edit uncompressed DV footage that the quality of the image looks better than that of composite firewire video? Is this not true? Ive watched certain productions that were edited uncompressed on (component DV) media 100 machines that look better than productions that were created on like a FCP w/a camera firewire-ing in the footage.

I suppose my desire for more professional equipment blinded me from looking into the engineering aspect of this upgrade.

Thanks again.
Chad Treanor

[Chad Treanor]

DON’T WORRY, this isnt that big of a problem….When AVID editors run into this kind of problem they OFFLINE the media. Meaning that the program disconnects the link from the project to that specific media file. Then once the file is disconnected, you can delete the media file therefore taking away the file from the computer BUT NOT FROM THE SEQUENCE AND BIN THAT YOU ARE EDITING. Once the media is gone but the file is still technically in your bin, go back to your bin and go to re-digitize the media. It should ask you to put in the right tape number and it will remember where the media started and ended. Its sort of like having a permenant log of footage files in your bin. Tell me if this works or not.

Hope this helps out.
Chadwik

[Chad Treanor]

You may want to also keep in mind where the final project is going to end up. If you’re also creating the DVD for this project, then you may want to also pay attention to the different final codecs that are used in DVD studio PRO and in Adobe Encore…You might want to get the entire production’s method down so you can plan on what systems to look ahead to.

EDL’s actually are a very very important and reliable way to keep an edit forever even if its just the EDL file on your computer. Its not all that hard, but it can be intimidating if your trying to reconstruct the edit from the edl and re-linking media. This is quite simple in an AVID, but a little tricky in P-Pro.

hope this helps.
Chadwik

[Chad Treanor]

Ive been using premiere for about 3 years and Ive found that even effects like the color corrector can leave digital artifacts, create noise and even ruin a video clip. I’ve come to the point where I use after effects to really adjust the clips visual data so it wont go way overboard with pushing its color capabilities to the limits. After adjusting in AE i’d export it as a new clip. That way you have more controls and more ways of adjusting, cropping and masking different layers of effects together and making a greater pretty picture.

If you don’t have AE you may want to consider adjusting your video image a little less. I had to edit an instructional video where a guy was under an 18 wheeler in almost complete darkness and make it visible. So when I brought up the levels and adjusted every possible aspect in PPro, I had to tell the client that this is really un-useable footage. My video clip was awful and grainy once I added the adjustment effects. Its sometimes better to edit with the best take and to try to shoot in the best light.

I hope this helps.
Chadwik