Cole Prine
Forum Replies Created
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Just thought I’d chime in. I just skimmed through the other posts because there were so many, so forgive me if I talk about something already covered. I work at, Newcomer Young Productions in Monroe, Louisiana, and we have the Microdolly Jib and track. I do like this gear. It does everything we need it to. The track is amazingly compact and can be set up in a matter of minutes. It rolls very smooth. The only problem we’ve had with it is that it squeaks on carpet. It still rolls smooth but its a little noisy. But, you can always block it up if you’re shooting on carpet.
The Jib works great too. I can set it up by myself in about 15 minutes. And everything is very light weight so you don’t have to be in great shape to do it. Our system will go out six feet and we have the power head. We shoot with the panasonic hvx 200 and the panasonic varicam. When shooting with the 200 you’ll never have any problems. You have to be a little more careful with the Varicam. The jib supports it just fine, but it tends to be a little bouncier with the heavier camera, especially on starts and stops. And we shoot the Varicam with a big anton bauer battery on it, and audio and video cables running off of it, so there is a good bit of extra weight there. Microdolly’s power head works pretty well but it’s definitely no motor head. Just in case you don’t know, the power head works off of a cable system and you have to actually turn the handles on the jib to make the camera turn. Which it works well, and smooth, it just can be much more difficult to get big sweeping shots. For the small subtle moves it’s perfect. And be VERY CAREFUL with the cables. We have a fraid spot on ours where someone didn’t set it up properly and it hasn’t been the same since. Now microdolly told us at NAB one year that they were making a motor head and the put our names on the list to get one. That was about 2 years ago and we’ve heard nothing else about it. So, we’re actually in the market right now for a motor head that will fit on our Microdolly jib.
But if you travel a lot it’s great. The thing breaks down into three bags that are about 12″x36″ and it is extremely light. We’ve really liked ours and we’ve put it to the test. We’ve shot with it everywhere from warehouses, to hillsides, on boats and even in the back of a truck. It’s built well and pretty stable. if you’re on a hillside or a boat, then I wouldn’t leave it unattended but we’ve never had any trouble with it tipping over. Another thing that will help is to make sure you have it balanced perfectly. Watch the video that comes with it and learn to really balance the camera on the head. That makes a big difference in how well it performs.
So, all in all it has a few flaws, but i definitely fell we’ve gotten out money’s worth out of it.
If you have anymore questions about it, just let me know.
Cole
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Hey everyone thanks for your help. I found two of the greatest tools to have when dealing with subtitles and they are free! Subtitle Xtractor and Subtitle TC-Converter. Both can be downloaded here: https://www.truevision-video.de/ With the Xtractor you can take subtitles from DVD STUDIO PRO, and convert them to a .stl. In DVD SP you just select the track that contains the subtitles, go to FILE>EXPORT>ITEM DESCRIPTION – this will give you a ,dspTrack file. You can then open this file using Xtractor and save it as a .stl, It also does some other stuff too.
The TC-Converter will actually take subtitles that are timecoded at 30fps, and convert them to 24fps, and vice versa. It actually will convert from/to many different time bases. These are some great tools.
Cole
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Yeah it was just progressive on/off. It was just buried in the menu options.
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I don’t know much about blue ray players, but we were having the same problem once…turned out our dvd player’s progressive mode was turned off…
Cole
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It sounds like a file permission problem. Right click/get info on the files that won’t copy and make sure you have permission to read and write the file. If not, change it and try again….that’s all I’ve got…
Cole