[Chet Wesley]

Yes, you could put video along the wall… it would just have to be aligned the same way as the wall… you could start out when you make the wall in the first place, by making that wall the parent of the video “screens” so that when you angle the wall and put it in place, the video screens will go with it.

As for reserving a space for the videos and putting them in in premiere, I don’t use premiere, so I don’t know exactly the method to do this in there, but I think you could just bring your rendered AE video in, put it on the timeline, and then when the camera turns to look at a screen on the wall in your AE video, and it is all squared up, you could just have another layer of video over it in premiere which you would fade in over whatever was playing on the “wall.”

It is hard to give precise directions, as it seems you don’t know exactly what you want to do, but that gives a starting point.

[Chet Wesley]

I don’t know if you are wanting to use real coins or to generate them in a computer. What I would do is create a small set with a flat (as in not glossy) black background (ie: some black felt or fabric). With this “set” well lit, I would then drop many real coins onto the background, one at a time (ie: drop one coin, let it sit, pick up the coin, repeat).

Then in after effects, I would bring in the footage, and apply a luma key to key out the darker (the black bg), so that I could cut out any grain if there was any in the video footage, making it pure black. I would composite all of those coins on top of eachother, positioning them so that they would fall where I wanted them (looking at the end of each piece of footage to see where they will end up) in order to get it to spell out the word “silver.”

You could probably film the coin just 10 times or so, and that would be enough variation that no one would notice if you repeat the same drop a few of times.

This is the way I would do it. I am sure some people could come up with a faster way to CG it, but I personally prefer the look of real things vs. computer generated things wherever possible. If it is something like a logo, it is going to be used a lot, so you want to make it worth your while.

[Chet Wesley]

I think they took at least 4 weeks to return my camera when I sent it to be repaired. It came back UNREPAIRED, and past the factory warranty date. Luckily I bought an extended warranty.

[Chet Wesley]

I remember spending an hour one day navigating phone menus just trying to talk to a real person. I gave up that day and had to try another day. I can’t even remember now the steps I took through the phone labyrinth to actually finally talk to someone real.

[Chet Wesley]

I like to use 1/30 or 1/60 shutter speed because of the look (not a fan of strobing), so for a lot of my purposes, I can’t even pump the shutter speed. In a lot of shots, the pixel doesn’t show up if it is well lit, and it is down in the corner. I use the camera mostly for personal projects and a lot of things I shoot are intended for the web.

I actually picked up this camera because it was the best looking picture I could get for the price point when they were blowing out the GR-HD1. Also, I thought the extra resolution of HDV would be useful as I use a lot of green screen in my personal artistic ventures, so I like to be able to manipulate the size in post without any noticeable pixelization when it is screened in SD.

[Chet Wesley]

Do you know if it is possible to take advantage of the 4 channel spec in miniDV using final cut?

I have been told by my employer that they regularly have had projects in the past where the music and voice come as split tracks. They don’t know the technical details of it (I’m the video nerd here)… so I am trying to figure out if they have been getting projects on tape that just have a mono audio track and a mono V.O. track, or if there is some wizardry at hand that I am not aware of.

I’ve been told they do this with miniDV and DV cam tapes, but I am skeptical.

[Chet Wesley]

I have a pixel that is always green on my hd1. I have an extended warranty, so I plan to “fix” it that way when I can take some time away from needing to use it, but it appeared within the first three months of owning the camera. I sent it to JVC while it was still under the three month factory warranty, and they didn’t fix it, just sent it back a month later with the same problem.

I won’t be buying any JVC products in the future.