Chris Lehmann
Forum Replies Created
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I’ve worked with LED screens similar to this before. There may be other options like rendering in stacked strips instead of one extremely wide video. Another option would be to work in a lower resolution and upscale it after rendering, but this will lose quality.
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/Library/Application Support/ProApps/Final Cut Pro System ID
I believe if you delete this file a prompt to enter the serial number will pop up next time you open any of the FCPS apps. Worked for me moving a personal license to a work license.
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I can’t see the video anymore but I have to say that DVmatte Pro is actually a very good keyer and is exceptional at handling less than ideal codecs and lighting. Are you dropping your background into the plugin or just as a layer underneath it in the timeline. You will get much better results doing it in the plugin.
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I know you said you are on windows, but for anyone else who might be interested in this kind of project I thought I’d share that Apple Keynote is vastly superior to PowerPoint for this kind of thing. The animations and effects are just classier and easier to make look good. The interface is much friendlier and more similar to Adobe. Also, it will export a nice clean QuickTime file that you can later re-time to your voiceover in editing.
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It’s very hard to have a “one price fits all” model for video. Each project is going to have its own challenges and often what seems like a small detail could have a dramatic effect on how much time it takes to finish.
Determine your hourly rate, you can start low to get some experience at first. Your rate will increase as you get more experience and have more equipment. Sit down with the client and discuss what they want to do. Try not to give them a price on the spot, but go home and then estimate how long it will take you. Send them a quote with itemized task times like “On location shooting – 1.5 hours”, “Editing 3 hours” and so on, then multiply the total time by your rate. This helps the client understand what they are paying for, and make sure that you don’t end up getting underpaid for your time. Also, that way if they come back and ask you to add things (and they will), you can simply add hours to the project instead of working extra for free.
As a side note, your audio on the demo is really rough. The dialog is only on the left channel and please, please get a microphone that’s not on the camera. People will ignore a lot of visual imperfections, but bad audio is something that everyone notices, and this immediately puts your videos into a less professional category.
But anyway, good luck with your venture!
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I’m using FCP7 so I’m not sure if this applies When I have that exact same problem I go to the little gear icon in the Log & Transfer window and toggle “Remove Advanced Pulldown and Duplicate Frames” under Preferences which always fixes it. Don’t know why, but it works.
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What you are talking about is Chroma Keying and, yes, you can do that right in FCP7 by selecting the clip and going to Effects>Video Filters>Key>Chroma Keyer. Then select the color you want to key out and tweak the settings until it looks good. However, I wouldn’t do it like this if you can avoid it. First off the default keyer in FCP is…well a little rough. It can be hard to get really good results from it without a lot of tweaking.
I’d have him export an image sequence in a format that supports transparency or an alpha channel. PSD or TGA would work, PNG should work as well. Open the first numbered image in QuickTime Pro or Motion and select the image sequence option, then export it into a ProRes 4444 file with colors set to “Millions+” and bring that into FCP. That way you get perfect transparency and little to no hassle.
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I had a similar problem with an HVX-200A/Macbook Pro and ustream, and I’ve had nothing but trouble using the web interface. Why not use the Producer software? It’s actually pretty nicely put together, especially the Pro version. You could also go directly from the camera into FMLE and send that stream to ustream and see if that works better.
Are you actually checking that the stream has no audio on another computer? I was fooled once because ustream tends to want to turn audio monitoring off on the local system to avoid feedback.
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If you use Panasonic’s P2Formatter software it will display a bar when you format labeled something like “Card Life” or similar.
For all practical purposes the P2 technology will probably be obsolete before the card’s life is affected. Even the E-Series is rated for approximately 2000 complete fill-ups before it will start to wear out and unless you are in ENG or recording very long events in HD you will likely never see that much use. I’ve got about 250 cycles on one card and the life bar on it is still at 100%.
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Oh, I forgot to mention these plugins are for FCP7 and Motion 4. If you are using Motion 5 you are out of luck with this one.