Darren Edwards
Forum Replies Created
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Thankfully – or not, as the case may be – I’m not the only
one facing streaming difficulties. The site you linked, Jeff,
resulted with the same buffering problems. I can easily
‘Download This Video?’ straight from the server because I’ve
got the latest ver. of RealPlayer installed, but I shouldn’t
have to do this.D.
x-gf.com
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Inside PPro 1.5.1
Select:
– File
– Export
– Movie
– Settings
– Keyframe and Rendering
– You will be offered a choice: export as Lower Field
First, Upper Field First or Progressive. Clicking its
‘Deinterlace Footage?’ box will render out a non-field
progressive-ish version. I say ‘-ish’ because the
footage will not really look the same as footage
shot progressive natively, and you will lose some
vertical resolution (sharpness) when PPro crunches
those interlaced fields together for you.D.
x-gf.com
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That’s what I said, didn’t I?
1080 or 720HD footage won’t ‘scale perfectly to fit the [SD] frame’
though, regardless of what ratio you’re SD footage is. There’ll
always be some slight pan-and-scanning involved. And if you’re
crowbarring progressive HD into an interlaced SD project, then
it’ll worsen your issues. It’s not the end of the world,
though, even if your combining HD/SD, PAL and NTSC footage…
Magic Bullet and After Effects both have pull-down and pull-
up options which will help ameliorate things.D.
x-gf.com
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Jeff – Like yourselves, we get all kinds of calls everyday, and
if they’ve been patched straight through to us – i.e. the
cold caller has told reception that they need to speak to
sales/marketing – we take them, and fortunately for them,
they actually get to speak to D., a digital designer, but
who’s also done his fair share of cold calling marketing
in the past, and D will chit-chat away until the cows come
home. It’s the voicemails which are the problem. Like I
said, they’re now illegal in the UK — and for good reason(s),
I think.Re your .flv movies:
Am now at home, online via a tiny ‘3’ network USB modem.
It rides on the back of any available 3G bandwidth. Currently
it’s telling me that my connection is at ‘3.7mb’. Good
enough.
I tried your movies again, and I’m facing the same problem:
no film will play for longer than a few seconds before
buffering – or lack of it – causes the film the pause.
Using the same modem, I logged into the Hull FC Super League
rugby team’s website mentioned in that news article above.
(For what it’s worth, I filmed/edited/produced the top
two films: ‘Pride…’ and ‘The Season Ahead’.) We’ve
transcoded our original HD content into Adobe Flash, and
everything plays smoothly and without stuttering; HullFC.TV
gets thousands of hits a day, without any snags.
https://www.hullfc.com/hullfctv/Your problem may lie in your website provider’s ability to
stream content. Or, you haven’t optimised your .flvs to
stream correctly. Whatever the case, I’m facing a problem:
the videos won’t play smoothly – and speaking as a theoretical
prospective customer, say – I’m annoyed. Maybe your
films stream okay for you because they’re actually coming
from your browser’s cache?If I can help in anyway to optimise your .flv post-production,
let me know and I’ll get D. and his cohorts to look into what
you’re doing, and to maybe offer suggestions. We’ve recently
upgraded our SD/HD workflows to CS3, and we’re currently
talking to Adobe about partnerships in some way because
we’re eager to get a grip with their Flash On/AIR platform,
so it’ll be relevant advice.Darren.
x-gf.com
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If it’s a techy read:
Blain Brown – ‘Cinematography: Theory and Practice’
Big, thick, upto date, lots of illustrations and marvellously
comprehensive.Paul Wheeler – ’24p and High Definition’ (second ed.)
There’s a barely any difference between the 1st and 2nd
editions – which is a bit of a pisser if you’ve paid for
both…Old school
Goethe – ‘Theory of Colours’
Focused on paint, primarily, obviously, but some interesting
aesthetical philosophy about how our eyes perceive., amongst
other things, luminance.D.
x-gf.com
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Jeff – cold calling and leaving voicemails is a bit of a
no-no, really. It’s actually illegal in the UK, nowadays.I had a look at your site. I tried playing some of the
Flash videos but found the streaming quite stuttery on
every clip I tried playing. My broadband download speed
was 3.6mb at the time, so you might need to look into
that. Hopefully not, by you may have already lost some
business because of it.mandy.com is another media-industry hotspot for finding
work. Because it’s free, it’s also highly competitive.D.
x-gf.com
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We used to capture VHS a much easier way: we found a VHS
player which had a firewire socket. You couldn’t control
the device from PPro, but PPro would quite happily
capture video/sound once Play was pressed.Alternatively, you will need to buy a little DAC (digital/
analogue convector).D.
x-gf.com
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That’s great, isn’t it – ‘[a] slight problem. Turn off your
reference monitor’. It’s not like the reference monitor
is ever doing anything important.D.
x-gf.com
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My new co-director is the king of cold calling. He doesn’t need to do it
personally anymore, but it is fun (and a bit enviable)
to see him show off to his sales team, picking up one
of their phones, and getting some sort of order on the
first call.If there’s any kind of secret to what he does, it’s
things like: slowing down his voice, being interested
as opposed to interesting (old journalist principle),
practice, confidence, and a bit of the old blarney for
good measure.Every mainstream broadcaster has a sales team, busily
cold calling overseas networks every day to buy (or
renew) so-and-so production this or that.Whenever you do you calling, and you hit a receptionist,
ask to put through to their sales and/or marketing
department. These guys are used to making and taking
cold calls, so will have more time for you than, say,
head of finance does. If the receptionist asks why your
calling just says you’re calling sales/marketing with
regards to ‘some filming’ or ‘corporate filming’. And
leave it at that. How you improvise after that is
personal choice.D.
x-gf.com
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Open an SD project, import the HD footage and downscale it.
We do it all the time in After Effects – with footage from
a Riot Act DVD, for example – when there’s simply more
detail in the scaled down HD version than there is in its
SD equivalent.Warning:
You might find yourself with all kinds of PAR (pixel aspect
ratio) and ARC (aspect ratio conversion) issues once you’ve
downscaled the HD footage, but if it’s shot in progressive,
of the same FPS as your SD stuff, you might be in luck,
although you might have to do a little pan-and-scanning.Darren.
x-gf.com