[Dave Gage]

[Oliver Peters] “You might want to start on the last page and work your way forward. The oldest page has some of my demo reels, including some of the long-form stuff (features, etc.).”
Will do. The weekend got lost to the kids, but I should have more time this week and weekend.

[Oliver Peters] “Clearly you get every bit of quality out of the image, but in general, most TV spots go for a more punchy and saturated look than a feature or documentary.”
Makes perfect sense.

[Oliver Peters] “If you are very interested in grading, here’s a link to the blog posts I’ve done specifically discussing color correction/grading with various tools:
https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/category/color-grading/“
Thanks, I will take a look this week also. I don’t need much in the way of grading for what I do, but it’s interesting stuff.

Thanks again,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Bret Williams] “The top video, “Know Your Numbers: Employee Testimonials” was an h264 native multicam shoot with zoom audio.”
I saw the first “Kick-Off” video a couple of days from your reply to my post, so it was fun to see this “sequel” video. Were the blue-white right to left moving numbers done in AE? Is the orange/blue/green split screens at the end also done in AE?

I’m glad you pointed out the J and L cuts in the audio. It’s done so simply and smoothly, I don’t think I would have noticed without watching a few times. (I’m much more a viewer than an editor.)

It was cool to see the “Georgia Hall of Fame Music Awards Intro 2010” video. I realize it’s just part of an editor’s job, but the amount of work that must go into an intro like staggers me. Even though you were able to use the basic graphics for a few years in a row, how long did it take you to put them together in AE and LiveType?

Sorry for all the questions, but I guess I’m at the stage where I’m able to do about everything I need video-wise in FCP7 or FCPX, but the more I understand about editing, the more I become a fan of the industry.

I look forward to watching more of the videos tomorrow, but I’ll try to keep the questions to a minimum.

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

Oliver,

Very cool! I only got a chance to watch about 6 or 7, but I’ll watch some more tomorrow. The “Give Kids The World” was too good. I could only watch a couple of minutes of it.

I really like the overall color look, which except for maybe the “Crooked Pine Band” video, there’s a overall slightly saturated look to the videos which I like a lot. Am I reading something in that isn’t there or is that your preferred coloring style? I noticed that some of the grading you did in Color or with Colorista and some was done at New Hat (a few miles from where I live).

Maybe it’s me, but it seems like whenever I watch on Vimeo I need to start the video, pause it for 30 seconds, and then start Play again or it stutter. Are these uploaded at 720p or 1080p?

Again, it’s very nice to put a face and video work behind the forum posts.

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Bret Williams] “Why would the YouTube version stutter?”
I get this all the time with higher quality videos at Youtube and especially at Vimeo. It could be my i7 MPB, but I doubt it. It might just be busy servers and Internet traffic. When there is something I really want to watch without stuttering or something I may want to replay portions of (like The MacBreak Studio stuff), I download it and it ends up being a much more pleasant experience.

[Bret Williams] “Good tune.”
Thanks, I appreciate that.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Bret Williams] “I think uploading a 1.5 gig file just to have YouTube compress it to a 69MB file is a bit overkill.”
I agree completely. I just ran the test as requested, I didn’t come to any conclusions. Later that night, I exported a x264 file from Compressor which ended up being about 200mb (5000k data rate based on Youtube specs) and it was fine. Full screen via QT7, it doesn’t look quite as nice as the original FCPX export when viewing the “smoke” effect from the visualizer (more pixelating), but it’s fine for Youtube.

Typically for uploading to my websites, I use the x264 encoder sized 640×360 at a total data rate of about 600k. They do fine at full screen for the intended purpose.
—

The ad looks great! I take it you did it in FCP X? I have read here and elsewhere that Youtube sometimes has problems with 1080p. Certainly no issues with your clip. I typically shoot 1080p, but work in a 720p timeline to take advantage of pan and zoom, and thus export at 720p. As an aside, I really enjoy peaking at the work that you guys do. It’s always interesting and sometimes gives me ideas. (At some point, I’ll start a new thread to ask if the pros that post here can add some links to their work.)

[Bret Williams] “You can simply grab it from the YouTube html5 stream (or the flash if you’re viewing the stream in flash – I don’t recommend) with mpeg stream clip.”
I used to use Safari for video capture, but I recently started using a FireFox add-on called FlashGot. It works great.

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

I just did an upload test and like Tony, Youtube had no problem accepting it. Here’s the specs:

Test upload of FCPX direct export as ProRes 422. Original file: Size- 1.5GB, Data Rate- 68.4mbps, 720p, 29.97, 3:05 minutes. Upload time with 6 minutes processing: 84 minutes total (Broadband connection: 26mb down, 3 mb up- I just checked at Speedtest.net).

The biggest problem I see with the ProRes 422 and large file size, as pointed out by Claude, is that you need a fast broadband connection to get it to play without stuttering. When the video started to play, I hit “Pause” and let it pre-load a bit. Then, I could even watch at 720p HD full screen and it was reasonably smooth. This is on my Early 2011 MBP i7 running 10.6.8 with 8GB RAM.

Here’s the video if you want to see:

https://youtu.be/5zRfI2IBlHk

By the way, the video is a ScreenFlow capture of the iTunes Visualizer that I took into FCP X and added the intro and outro titles. I didn’t bother to use a proxy file (will next time though), so I did need to render a few times to get it to play reasonably smoothly while editing.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Steve Connor] “I don’t usually use compressor separately, I’ve created a compressor preset for YouTube, as opposed to the one that’s in there, and I normally export straight from the FCPX timeline with “export using compressor settings””

I’m still on version 4 for Compressor, so it doesn’t work directly from FCPX. But, as I said, I’m just being a bit lazy and wondering if there would be a quality benefit. It’s quick to open Compressor and use one of my presets.

If I don’t hear from someone that’s tried this, I’ll do a test upload, see if they accept it, and then post back here.

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Bill Davis] “I work exclusively with Firewire 800 drives – and they’re both plenty fast enough and cheap to boot.”

Bill,
(going off topic here)

Are you using single drives or RAID 0, 1, or 5? Also, are you always making proxies on import or using the native files? I ask because I’ve been waiting on OWC to see what they come out with in terms of Thunderbolt enclosures.

Since I was still waiting on OWC, so I decided to replace my eSata expresscard because the old one was flaky. Frankly, I don’t really notice a ton of performance difference when using FW800 vs. the eSata (with a single drive OWC Voyager–I had a 2-drive RAID 1 enclosure, but it recently died). I’ve gotten a few kernel panics recently and the only significant change in software or hardware has been the use of the eSata expresscard.

Being an old school Mac kinda guy, I plug in the external drive via eSata, re-boot, turn off Wi-fi, and then begin editing in FCPX. It’s never immediate, but it seems within a day or two I get a kernel panic and need to re-boot.

I will try after the next FCPX session to eject the drive, unplug the card, and then re-boot and see if that solves the fatal crashing problem. (Hopefully, this is related to the expresscard and not some new hardware or software issue. The expresscard workaround is very easy.)

Thanks,
Dave
17″ MBP i7 2.2 (early 2011)

[Dave Gage]

Richard,

I appreciate the thought, but I already use this:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashgot/
and this…
https://perian.en.softonic.com/mac
and this…
https://download.cnet.com/Switch-Audio-Converter/3000-2140_4-10703967.html

…but what was your P?

Dave

[Dave Gage]

RH,

Sorry man, I meant to go back and review the XCRs (club rules) before posting, but in my haste, I neglected to do so. I now realize one them “P”s is for Private.

DG