[Craig Seeman]

Black level is something you’d need to adjust in the NLE. Look at a waveform and see what’s happening. It may be a specific scene or it may be overall. You might need to get that detail from them. I’ve actually found cheating black lower than 7.5 works. Take it to near 0 if you have too.

[Craig Seeman]

Patch no longer needed. Just update to Episode 4.4.2.

If you want the preset, let me know but you’ll need 4.4.2 to use it.

[Craig Seeman]

and Studio Pro HD if you want to do 2 pass encoding or encode to HD frame sizes.

Player Pro allows one to use wmv source to edit in Final Cut Pro. All Studio versions include Player Pro.

Studio series also works in QuickTimePro and as a plugin in Compressor too.

I guess that covers the rest of the bases.

[Craig Seeman]

Check MP4 files in VLC. It won’t play audio but it’s a good way to check to see if the files will play.

Ideally you’d like the entire BPAV folders so (on Mac) XDCAM Transfer tool can rewrap them as MOV.

If there’s even the remotest risk someone is going to be touching hard drives who might do such risky things, back up the BPAV folders to DL-DVD. This can be done with the laptop you’re using for import. Import files and immediately burn to DL-DVD.

[Craig Seeman]

I’d prefer compressing to H264 over Photo JPEG. I like having the control over the data rate/file size. It looks like Brian is using the “new” file size of YouTube. At the now permissible 1GB for for up to a 10 minute duration, you can really push the data rate very high.

Is this the Brian Gary article you refer to?
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/youtube_compressor_gary.html

If you’re doing a viral campaign YouTube does generate quite a bit of hits since it ranks high in the Google search engines (since it’s owned by them).

If you want better quality for showing off work, embedding a Flash video link in your site, Vimeo is many times better than YouTube. They allow 720p30 HD and use the On2VP6 codec to compress.

[Craig Seeman]

Your best bet would be doing the crop in your NLE (Final Cut Pro). This way you can reposition the video for best framing in the crop. This wold give you the letterbox look (black on top and bottom). You could do that an then crop off the black in Compressor.

[Craig Seeman]

If you’re going to shoot this kind of stuff regularly you might consider a change of camera. Sony EX1 handles wide dynamic range much better than either of the above and there are better cameras than than at a much higher price of course.

Cine Gammas can help. They can roll of the whites a bit and you can bring up the blacks in camera if needed. Any time you bring up something you do risk making the noise visible.

I’ve been in situations where I’ve needed to shoot speaker and Power Point presentation. If you can’t relight the room (and it seems you can’t) you need to inform the client (and charge them) for two cameras (one exposed for speaker, one exposed for presentation).

As you probably know, once brights get too hot they lose detail and you can’t bring that back in post. If you bring down bright areas in camera, bringing up black, mids in post can bring up noise. This is where cinegamma can help.

It’s much better to get the presentation (architectural diagrams in your case) as separate stills.

So the solutions are:
relight the room (which you say you can’t do in this case)
use two cameras
use camera that can handle wider range
use camera cinegamma to roll off highs and bring up blacks
get graphics as separate stills.
fix in post

Generally all my require additional budget. It’s important to notify the client about this.

[Craig Seeman]

FCP 6.0.2 specifically. That version includes the EX codec.

BTW there’s no obvious EX1 codec to be copied to other systems either.

[Craig Seeman]

If you put an 1920 by 1080 image in a 720 by 480 or 720 by 576 (PAL) timeline you have A LOT of room to zoom in or pan left/right etc without any loss of resolution.

If you’re not sure what “Keyframing” is you’ve got some very very basic things you need to learn about editing and moving objects to learn. Look at some of the COW tutorials or Google for some various tutorials about keyframing. Pick a start point and an endpoint and move an the image.

At this point I would not choose Premiere to edit EX1 video since it doesn’t handle it natively. You’d need to convert to another codec. Right now the best choices are Final Cut Pro, Vegas and I hear Edius might be a good choice too.

An NLE can do a downconversion but the results depend on the ability of the NLE. A program like Compressor can do downconversion too.

There’s doing and doing well and that really depends on the software (and hardware).

My hunch is that the hardware device to record HQ will probably be more expensive than buying a laptop (although probably smaller). With a laptop you’d be able to screen shots with the client and burn DVD backups on location . . . all while the camera continues to record on one card while you dump the other card into a laptop.

I see lots of risks recording directly to hard drive over solid state memory cards. I’ve heard of enough Firestore horror stories to scare me away from such devices.

With 2 16GB cards and a laptop could record all day non stop and the client can look at the previous card while I continue shooting.

[Craig Seeman]

Compressor can get you close. In the Summary area it’ll tell you what it estimates the file size will be based on your settings. While not quite the same as limiting the size, you can keep upping (or lowering as the case may be) your data rate until you get near that size.

I find that Compressor under estimates by 10-15% so if you if the Summary says you’re around 900MB you’re probably much closer.

I do this for Vimeo which has a 500MB per week limit. If you really want good looking videos on a YouTubish like site Vimeo blows the doors off of YouTube. They’ll play 720p HD. While it wont show up in the search engines like YouTube, if you want to send clients links to your work it’s a much better alternative.

https://www.vimeo.com/