[Darren Edwards]

I didn’t mean any disrespect to Mike, of course – if he’s experienced positive results by applying Auto Levels to film captured via HDV camera, then go for it. However, my one and only time using it was applying it to music promo performance shot on a beach in Barcelona; the light remained the same throughout and its director wanted a crunched/saturated look, and Auto Levels seemingly did the trick, quickly. It was applied to all the live stuff, we awaited render and found it a waste of time. Whenever tentatively applied at a later date on other types of footage, the result was the same: flickery, unuseable garbage.

D.

[Darren Edwards]

Never use Auto Levels for anything! It’s a horrible, horribly
unintelligent filter which hasn’t a clue what it’s doing
and will result in flickery footage. Very serious about this.

Darren.

youtube.com/darrenpce

[Darren Edwards]

Ah, okay. That’s not an uncommon practice. There’s
currently a big furor about the ‘WWII in HD’ doco series
because they up-rez’d a lot of library film by pointing
a Red One at a wall…
https://provideocoalition.com/index.php/shullfish/story/controversial_history_channel_wwii_in_hd_debate_the_truth/

Colour grading in Prem can be equally as sophisticated
as anything else out there.

If the footage is a bit murky, the first thing I’ll adjust
is pedestal. This raises the overall brightness/gamma
levels in a sympathetic manner whilst (hopefully) revealing
hidden details in the black areas. And vice versa if lowered.

Curves will crunch your levels whilst also increasing contrast.
Almost every tutorial here — or at places like
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/ — will have something
to say about curves adjustment, and how to do it. Go easy.

There’s a fantastic old-school method of sharpening imagery
in Photoshop, which up until CS3, was impossible to do with
video footage, but now that CS3+ versions of Photoshop support
video import, one can use the Photoshop filters on it.

*It derives from the days when Quark users wanted a way of
shrinking images whilst maintaining sharpness…

Import the video, duplicate the video layer, apply Filter/Other/High Pass
and select a Radius setting of around 0.5 (the higher the figure the
sharper the effect). After which layer blend the effected top
layer with Hard Light. Works great on still images, of course,
but for video footage in Photoshop you will need to do this
frame by frame. Prem’s sharpening filters are a bit clunky,
a bit low bit-rate, for me — but, any port in a storm.

To really go to work on your Super8 stuff, grab a copy of
Magic Bullet’s latest Looks suite plugin for Premiere. The user
interface is a joy to use.
https://www.redgiantsoftware.com/products/all/magic-bullet-looks/

Alternatively, you can have my Super8 projector.

Hope that helps.
Cheers,
Darren.

youtube.com/darrenpce

[Darren Edwards]

How did you telecine the Super8 stock with Nero in the first instance?

D.

[Darren Edwards]

With older versions of PPro — i.e. ver 1.5 which most of still use
for SD work — I’ve found that any project which uses a lot of
differing audio khz on the timeline will eventually do a crash
on export, even when the audio has been mixed down to one 48khz file.

D.

youtube.com/darrenpce

[Darren Edwards]

Super8 is the latest codec to be supported? 😉

Seriously speaking, what’s so bad about the original rushes?

Darren.

youtube.com/darrenpce

[Darren Edwards]

Jon’s right, software is terribly slow doing pull up/pull down of
frame rates/formats, but it can do it, at least. There’s even a
couple of hintful Cow tutorials scattered around here on pull up/down
in software like AE.

Darren.

youtube.com/darrenpce

[Darren Edwards]

I’ve onlined and submitted a few videos to MTV UK.
I’ve always mastered TV audio to the traditional
-1.5db (and film at -6) and they’ve never complained,
although Sky usually dislike audio too loud.

HD to digibeta is as mentioned before — sending a HD
digital file (or tape) to an NLE and downconverting/
burning to digibeta in one go.

For a music promo I’ve never paid more than £50 for
the [insert format here] to digibeta process, the
time, plus the cost of the 5′ digibeta tape itself.
Then again, I’m based in the north of England and
not London.

D.

youtube.com/darrenpce

[Darren Edwards]

Hi Chris,

The popular choice of solid state SD/HDV for UK HE at the moment is
Sony’s new range of medium-priced ‘Z’ cams.

https://www.sony.co.uk/biz/view/ShowProductCategory.action?site=biz_en_GB&category=HDVCamcorders

The solid state unit records to either AVI or RAW DV. Record
to it in either DV, DVCAM or HDV mode. When attached to a PC
it behaves as a harddrive and you simply drag the AVIs over.

You can record to tape (as a back up) whilst recording to
to solid state simultaneously.

S270E/Z7 range also accepts cheap non-Sony memory cards.

We’ve been using the shoulder mounted S270E and Z7E for a while —
sports, broadcast, educational etc. — and…they’ve never let
us down — and they are the perfect option for you really —
but given our choice again, I would have saved our (low-end)
budget for a little while longer.

I won’t bother listing my quibbles, but several options are:

Panasonic AG range: supported by Prem CS, P2 cards expensive.
https://www.panasonic.com/business/provideo/p2-hd/index.asp

HD XDCAM: records to reasonably-priced harddiscs, supported by
Prem CS, but probably overkill for everyday student use. The
new F800 is lovely, though, for the price.
https://www.sony.co.uk/biz/view/ShowProduct.action?product=PDW-F800&site=biz_en_GB&pageType=Overview&imageType=Main&category=XDCAMCamcorders

JVC GY range: medium priced cameras — we used these (and
the Z7s) for an entire season of super league rugby. Older
models only recorded a SD or 720p HDV image to small miniDV/HDV
tapes, newer models support a harddrive which fits on the
back. They’re funny to look at when fully kitted up — they
look like bazookas — but saying that, they use CCD chips as
opposed to the Z7s’ CMOS, and frankly, I still prefer CCD
regardless of Sony’s dabbling with CMOS technology. The
harddrive records to XDCAM format supported by Prem CS.
https://pro.jvc.com/prof/attributes/features.jsp?model_id=MDL101824

Suggest using the HDV forum for specifics.

Cheers,
Darren.

Super League, S270E and JVC GY

youtube.com/darrenpce