[Daniel Horitz]

Belated thanks guys! This was a great success in the end. Cable ties, tape and a climbing chuck kept it in check.

Audio was a bit of an issue, we couldn’t get a good feed of the sound from the cameras point of view, so used a separate mic to pick up the speech we neeeded.

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IPSOFACTORY
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Canon XM2
Final Cut Studio 7

[Daniel Horitz]

actually tell a lie.

Looking back at this new export from the ProRes sequence and there are some problems. I have a few shots which play in slow motion, at half and quarter speed. In the new sequence they judder.

The frame rate is 25 in both sequences. I have noticed that FCP has only applied the Shift Fields filter to some of my video so I am now going through manually adding it. Is there some way of automating this?

With or without the Nattress Smart De-Interlace filter the SloMo bits are juddery. Perhaps it would help if I could work out what settings to use in the Smart De-interlace filter!?

Any ideas on getting around this?

Thanks
Dan

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IPSOFACTORY
– – – – – – – – –
Canon XM2
Final Cut Studio 7

[Daniel Horitz]

ahh! this thread is like a holy grail in the works. I also shoot on a Canon XM2 in DV PAL Anamorphic and have a nightmare of a time trying to get decent looking titles.

I am aiming for Youtube / Vimeo usage and whilst there are countless guides to compressing for web they always suggest Export>Full Quality then use compressor. When you shot in DV to start with this is a terrible idea and until now I have had crisper titles Exporting an h264 straight out of Final Cut.

I have also been tempted, like Dave, to upscale my frame size. Afterall why should high definition graphics and titles be the sole preserve of the HD cam owners club. But I’ve also been warned off this for problems further down the line.

Dave, did you ever get this sorted? After I copied my video from its original PAL sequence to a new ProRes one as suggested I did notice a slight increase in quality and my titles do look pretty crisp.

What did you create yours in? I always find Final Cut’s built-in titles are pretty crap. Try using the free Manifesto plugin which comes with FXFactory for sharper text.

Another note: All the guides suggest using square pixels for web video, BUT then we loose our aspect unless we use an non-standard frame size? I would recommend sticking with your ‘PAL – CCIR 601 (720 x 576) Anamorphic 16:9’ aspect ratio as from my testing Youtube seems to have no problem with it, and importantly; recognises and displays it as 16:9.

Thanks for all your advice, the cow’s milk is sweet.
Dan

[Daniel Horitz]

All working great except the application I’m using AV Mixer Lite, does not recognise the firewire as an audio input so I’m getting no sound from the feed.

Does anyone know of any free (or otherwise) applications which could monitor the sound from the feed in the background?

Thanks again!
D

[Daniel Horitz]

Gotcha. I’m looking to get a dry diving suit with cables coming out of it so should be able to bongo the camera cables to those ones too.

Thanks for all your help peoples.

Dan

[Daniel Horitz]

Cheers Chuck.

Do you mean bungee cords like this?

How do you use this in this context?

Apologies if I’m being stupid now!

Dan

[Daniel Horitz]

Thanks everyone.

I am going to stick with the firewire as we need the image to be initially black before seemingly ‘spluttering to life’ with some noise and distortion, for which I am going to use Modul8 VJ software to add fx to the live feed. Hence why the feed needs to run through the laptop and not directly to the projector.

I was thinking of creating some strain relief by doubling the cable back and taping it to the camera then tying it to my diving suit somehow.

Rehearsals should be interesting.

[Daniel Horitz]

Thanks Tom. Unfortunately this is a relatively small scale production and we have nearly used up the budget already.

I may look in to hiring a transmitter like this, but if we can get by with cables we will.

I have now found that the laptop we will use does have Firewire 800 input so I can buy a cable which will directly connect camera to laptop:

https://www.lindy.co.uk/20m-premium-firewire-800-cable-4-pin-male-to-9-pin-bilingual-male/30792.html

Has anyone else worked in this way with such long cables?

[Daniel Horitz]

Thanks Rob. Perfect