[Daniel Wilson]

Yep. One of the reasons I moved from a JVC HD-200 to a 5DmkII a while ago was because I don’t shoot events. If I did, the 5D wouldn’t have even been a consideration as a primary cam. If you can borrow/rent some 7Ds or 5Ds and mock up a long shoot with similar light levels and similar subject to cam distances, the problems might present themselves to the other people in the office.

I totally agree with all the problems you describe with the JVCs too. Horrible in low light and lots of time code breaks, but the form factor and build quality make them very nice to use, and in the right conditions they can produce excellent images. I was quite sad to let mine go.

Good luck convincing everyone. I’m sure some people with chip in with some ideas for more suitable cameras, but I haven’t got enough experience with anything else to make any recommendations.

Dan

[Daniel Wilson]

Thanks for that advice Matt, it’s pretty much what I was hoping to hear.

Cheers,
Dan

[Daniel Wilson]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply but I don’t think I explained the question very well. My system drive is already separate and I definitely don’t put any media on that, but I’m talking about having two separate media drives. The first would be the scratch drive, which fcp writes to as it renders during editing. The second would be where I store all of my existing ingested media, ProRes etc, which fcp is only reading. I probably misused the word ‘capture’.

Thanks,
Dan

[Daniel Wilson]

One of the Barefeats pages which Craig pointed out talks about successfully running three monitors off the 5770 and 5870, on Mac Pro’s from 2006 to 2010, so I think you’ll be alright with two monitors. It also talks about which adaptors you’ll need.

It’s this page, about three quarters of the way down:

https://www.barefeats.com/wst10g6.html

Cheers,
Dan

[Daniel Wilson]

Hi Aaron,

Your question reminded me of an article in the December 2010 (5th Anniversary) Cow magazine. It doesn’t answer your question, but it has a few points which touch upon similar issues. Its an article by Nick Griffin called ’12 things I know about business at 55, That I Wish I’d Known at 25′.

https://magazine.creativecow.net/pdf_download/23/unzipped.pdf

From section 3: “…if the chemistry doesn’t feel right, and you can afford to, walk away before too much unproductive time is wasted”.

Sections 10 and 12 might be relevant too, but the whole article is pretty good.

Regardless of whether or not your terms are reasonable, this part would worry me: “He sees it as a personal attack and sign of mistrust”. There’s something weird and unstable about that attitude. I can understand being skeptical of a contract, but taking it as a personal attack? My instinct would be to assume that this person simply does not want to be obliged to pay on time. As Walter mentioned, maybe he just likes to push his cash flow toward his advantage (which in my opinion is still a dodgy way to do business if it’s designed to breach the contractor’s terms), but maybe he’s simply not liquid enough to be able to honour the contract that quickly. As Mike said, ‘warning flag’.

Cheers,
Dan

[Daniel Wilson]

Hi Jared,

I print about 500 – 800 DVDs at the end of every year. Each job is only about 30-50 discs so I’m in a similar situation where I need to print them quickly and the run is far too small to outsource. I used an Epson R800 and an R210 or 310 (I think) for a few years which I was very happy with.

A few years ago I switched to a Canon MP600R because it printed the discs faster, but there was a nasty surprise which I hadn’t thought of. While each disc is quicker to print, you only have about a 3 second window to change the disc over before the printer goes off on some sort of self cleaning/resetting procedure which takes anywhere from 20 – 40 seconds. Sometimes I can just manage the changeover in the 3 seconds, but usually I miss it so most of my DVDs now take more than twice as long as the Epsons did. It might have just been that model but it’s definitely something to check before you buy a disc printer.

I found all of these printers had pretty good print quality for discs, however I’ve found that they become less reliable with their disc printing after a while. Eventually they start spitting discs back out unprinted or worse still, printing the disc, spitting it out, then sucking it back in and printing on it again. I guess they just aren’t built to handle thousands of discs. I tend to buy a new one every two to three years, although newer models which you’d probably be looking at may be more reliable.

I’m buying a robotic autoprinter at the end of this year which you might want to look into, although it might be overkill for your needs depending on what sort of volumes you’re needing.

Hope some of this might be helpful.

Cheers,
Dan

[Daniel Wilson]

Thanks for the reply Zane. You are right, it’s an unnecessary bit of extra work, and I just remembered why I’ve been doing it. I’d forgotten about that whole ‘QT X has a minimum frame size’ thing, which means it’s been blowing up my 400×225 clips, making them look soft. I just exported one straight from the HD timeline and opened it in QT 7 at actual size and it’s all fine. Since re-setting up my machine a few months ago I’d forgotten to set QT7 as the default and had been previewing my web exports in QT X.

Thanks again,
Dan

[Daniel Wilson]

Thanks very much for explaining that method Martin, I’ve actually had this same problem before in trying to change other various parameters of multiple files and that pretty much seems to be the answer to all of them.

And the 4:3 still from a 720px cam makes a lot more sense too.

Cheers,

Dan

[Daniel Wilson]

Ah, I see. That makes me wonder something else though. These photos are just casual snaps taken by Japanese students while they’re studying in Australia for a year. Does that mean one of them is walking around with a DVCPro HD cam and using it for stills? Or are there consumer handycams which shoot this format?

[Daniel Wilson]

In beginning to answer your question I’ve figured out the problem, and you’re right. I didn’t need to change the PA, I had to select the photos and click ‘Remove Attributes’ – Distortion.

I’m just dropping photos submitted by a client into a sequence. Usually FCP shrinks jpegs to fit within the sequence frame but keeps them in proportion, with some black space on the sides. This time it was actually squashing them vertically to fit precisely in the frame, therefore distorting them.

The size of the jpegs was 960×720, and the Pixel Aspect was “HD (960×720)” which I’ve not dealt with before. I’m guessing they were shot with some sort of handycam still function.

By the way I’d still be interested to know if the PA info is in some sort of metadata if anyone knows, just incase I do ever have a reason to try to change it on a large number of files.

Thanks very much for the responses.

Dan