Dave Haynie
Forum Replies Created
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Sure. All DVDs are “data” DVDs (there’s essentially only one format, unlike CDs), but yeah. The best proof against loss is redundancy. Use high quality DVDs. Make two copies, store each in a different place.
There are cheap DVDs that may have problems in a year or two, and high quality DVDs that may be good in 100 years, if stored in the dark. Flash memory is probably good for about 10 years, if it doesn’t get too hot. Nothing much out there that lasts forever.
Hard drives are pretty good, too. The main issues with HDDs are not the data storage per se. Will the mechanicals still be good in 10 or 20 years? Probably… if you’re storing them and not running them constantly. But there have been issues, like “stiction” — the lubricants have, at least in the past, hardened when not used. And of course, “format rot”… will you still be able to read these in the future. USB is a good bet for longevity — there’s no much reason for it to be replaced large-scale.
-Dave
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I have lots of ideas on quiet audio.
For on-camera applications, I usually use shotgun mics. I have a Rode NTG1 as my standard, sometimes with an MXL 301, occasionally on-camera, but often on a mic stand or on a boom pole, recording to a Zoom H4n. Neither is noisy, though with any super directional mic, it’s possible to pick up sound you didn’t hear on your own.
It’s also important to keep your mic isolated from what noise you can. Use a good shock mount. Most come with a foam sleeve which is ok for in-door “wind”, but for outdoors, you need a dead cat or a blimp, pretty much just count on that.
Using the Zoom and a proper level adjustment, it’s pretty easy to ensure you have adequate headroom but a strong signal. One mistake lots of people make is recoding too low, so you have to boost system noise into an audible range, where it might be missing entirely. On the other hand, for anything that’s going to get really loud, keep at least one mic on a 20-30dB pad. My NTG1 will take a 139dB,spl input, but the pre-amps on my HMC40 won’t get anywhere near there (and many camera level controls are not actually adjusting a pad on the input, but the bias on some intermediate amplification stage — so you can still get analog saturation even when you’re not digitally clipping).
For voice-overs, I get the speaker in front of one of my large diaphram condenser mics. You don’t have to pay a fortune. I have a Blue “Bluebird” which is pretty decent for about $300, but I also have an Audio-Technical AT2020 and a couple of MXLs that are excellent choices. A condenser will pick up anything nearby, and can couple to noisy electrical sources, so watch it.
And if you don’t have one of these, a good vocal-quality dynamic stage mic is fine. I can recommend the Rode M1, my current favorite stage mic, or the Electro-Voice D767A.
For on-camera, I use the MXL shotgun most of the time, really good sound from a boom. I have a lapel mic I’m not happy with, it’s an older Shure for a wireless system that was cabled up to work from a battery pack and direct connection to a recorder or camera. I really should get a decent wired lapel mic. Though you have to watch placement of these, too… I’ve seen them hooked on so that a shirt collar blocks the mic depending on where the subject turns, pretty much defeating the purpose of the lapel mic.
Anyway… time for sleep.
-Dave
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You can make a very large image that Vegas will allow you pan/zoom through. But Vegas itself isn’t going to make that image for you. Some kind of transition is going to be evident where two different photos meet along the timelime.
I have “stitched” panoramas from over 50 photos together using Photoshop, and sometimes animated those using pan/zoon. However, eventually, you come to the end of that photo and need some kind of transition to the next one. Naturally, this doesn’t have to be a crossfade, you can do anything you find attractive. I like to align features from one photo’s end point to the next’s starting point, to make the transition smooth and interesting, but you can’t necessarily hide the transition entirely.
As for sync to music, you pretty much want to write the slideshow to the music, not try to force-fit the music onto the slideshow. You can set up markers as guides to interesting places for transitions in the music. You can always slow or speed up a pan to get the sync points where you want them.
Here’s an example of one of my “slide-shows” (which is very unlike a slideshow, of course). This wasn’t made from super-large pans, but all from DSLR or scanned film stills.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQGf7xjWc4E
-Dave
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First thing, characterize the hiss. Using an audio editor (rather than Vegas), you can get a spectral histogram of your audio, which can very precisely locate the frequency of your hiss… assuming it’s fairly fixed, which it often is. Once you know what to filter, you can set up a very sharp band-stop filter for just that frequency range.
I still have Sony’s noise reduction package around here, which comes with some of the various incarnations of Vegas or Forge. It’s not as good as the very latest stuff, but it’s often good enough, particularly if you have a “clear” sample of the noise (eg, nothing else in the soundfield).
There’s a pretty big difference between a $25 mic and one that costs thousands. What you’ll find, in fact, is that the quality vs. price is kind of a log scale. So for small increases in price, the quality can jump up pretty amazingly. Going from really good to excellent, on the other hand, can cost a bundle (and I’m kind of a mic guy.. I have over 20 worth using: shotguns, studio, stage, and one lav mic that really needs an upgrade).
Check you recording path, too, to make sure it’s just the mic. Of course, if you’re using an electeret or dynamic on a 2-4m cable to an 1/8″ with a cheap mic, yeah, expect noise. And low quality audio. I just did a video shoot last week for some “work” folks — the marketing group (I’m usually an engineer). They had done some videos in the past with a little Edrol field recorder and a tiny stereo mic… they were kind of blown away with the sound I got from a 16″ shotgun on a proper boom. A good lav mic could probably has done similarly.
-Dave
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Here’s the first level of thing to worry about: your audio driver. Windows has been around for a long time, and there are a bunch of ways to get audio in and out of the PC.
Fire up Vegas, get the Options/Preferences panel, go to Audio Device. If you see “Microsoft Sound Mapper” anywhere, you have found the worst possible way to get sound in and out of Vegas. That’s also the default. That actually routes whatever’s coming from or going to your sound card through an extra software mixer provided by Windows. This isn’t for audio work.
Click on the selector for “Audio device type:” and see if your card shows up by name. That’s a sign there’s a better driver… pick it. Try it. If that doesn’t make things much better, you may want to check the web site for the device and see if they have ASIO drivers available. An ASIO driver can get your latency down as low as 5ms, maybe even a bit less.
There’s also a brute force approach. Play to the drum track, record it… don’t worry much about sync. Once recorded, you can pretty easily sync the tracks up by ear. No good for easy punch-ins, but it works just dandy for multiple tracks. I have a couple of multitrack recorders (one PC-based, one external), but I’ve done things this way from time to time, just because my pocket recorder could follow me out to the woods or on vacation at the lake or whatever. I have one that does multitrack low latency recording now (Zoom H4n), that makes it easier, but it’s always possible to sync back, as long as you play in sync when you record.
-Dave
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[Stephen Crye] “When you say “merge”, do you mean use XCOPY or something else to concatenate the files? With Win7 x64 NTFS, will I be able to concatenate (for example) 10 raw 2GB files into a single 20GB file? More details, please!”
More or less.. I used to fire up a Cygwin shell, cd down to the …/…/STREAM directory (the AVCHD hierarchy), then run something like:
cat 00000.mts 00001.mts 00002.mts > /cygdrive/d/video/project/proj.mts
That kind of thing. I think you can do the same thing with XCOPY. These days, I have a Windows shell tool that makes this slightly quicker, “File Concatenate/Split Context Menu” by JD Design.
But basically, yeah, it’s just a simple catenation. The Panny files, at least in the HMC40/TM700, run exactly 4GB when split — they’re spilt at a byte boundary, not on some logical boundary. So you really do want to catenate them. I’d kind of hope the AG-AC160 would be all nice about exFAT on SDXC cards, no more 4GB boundaries. But while the large cards are all supported these days, the 4GB boundaries seem to still be popular.
-Dave
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[Angelo Mike] “Oh yeah, in cinema mode, the Canon Vixia HF S21 significantly cuts down on low light noise, though it will automatically adjust the shutter to 1/24 when it gets dark if you’re shooting at 24 fps, doing away with any film look.
Yup… Any decent camcorder with 24p mode will let you shoot at 1/24th second, which is of course a 2.5 stop advantage over the 1/60th second minimum you have for true 1080/60i video (some 60i camcorders have offered slow-shutter modes that basically drop them to 30p recorded as 60i, others don’t have this facility).
The HF S21 is the 2010 model. I suppose today’s equivalent is the HF S30. This model uses a 1/2.6” 8.59Mpixel sensor, with pixel bucketing to simulate a 2Mpixel 3-chip system. Curiously, though, their consumer high-end model is now the HF G, which switches gears and supports a single-chip 1/3″ 2Mpixel sensor. Yeah, it’s the new technology used in the HF300 (3-chip) and HF100 (single chip), but as a veteran of the Sony HVR-A1, I’m very skeptical about single chip HD sensors — you can’t avoid Bayer color bleeding, no matter how great the sensor is.
I use a small higher end consumer camcorder, the Panasonic TM700 (also two models old now) as my “B” camera (well, give or take, depending on whether HDSLRs get involved), which is pretty handy since the 3-chip sensor and lens is very similar to my HMC40’s. But I want my main camera to be something at least a little substantial. The HMC40 is light and fairly compact, but it still works with real mics, it’s heavy enough to work on a Glidecam 2000, it’s got a proper handle on top, actual shoe for mounting a second mic or a light panel, etc.
With that said, some projects are just HDSLR projects.. not sure I’d use a second camcorder if I had to do it over again. I have a shoot tomorrow (video for a Kickstarter project), and we’re using two HDSLRs (my Canon 60D and our “web/art” guy’s T2i), and, particularly given my range of lenses, this would be nearly impossible with a conventional camcorder (part of this is filmed drawing on a whiteboard table… the 10mm lens on the Canon is wide enough, but just so). For something like this, I don’t even worry about on-camera audio, other than for sync; we have one lav mic with a dedicated flash recorder, and my H4n with an MXL shotgun mic on boom. You wind up needed a Beachtek or similar to use real mics with a compact camcorder or HDSLR. Maybe not a big issue for sports (though if you looked at my soccer videos, consider those are all shot with a Rode NTG-1 mic with a dead cat on it… if I had used the built-in, the wind at some of those games would literally howl… you’d pretty much want to cut the audio entirely).
-Dave
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Yup… agree with what everyone says here… calibration of any screen is critical. But it’s worse with LCDs, basically, since they’re worse to begin with.
A modern LCD television does a bit of magic to mimic the quality of a phosphor (CRT or Plasma) or DLP display. The typical CRT can deliver a contrast ratio of 15K-20K:1. A very good LCD does about 1K:1, and many do less. The magic in recent displays is dynamic backlighting. LCDs don’t create light, of course, they gate it. So there’s also a backlight. Dynamic systems use an array of LEDs (thus, marketing people call them “LED” monitors/televisions) as backlights, and the video processor varies the brightness of each LED based on the local brightness needs of a small area of pixels…. kind of the same idea as MPEG-2 macroblocks vs. color, only in reverse.
But this isn’t usually done on PC displays (if yours supports it, it’s probably switched off), simply because it only really works well with natural images, not pixel-precise computer graphics. Add to that your typical laptop uses a TN (Twisted Nematic) LCD, which will often only deliver 6-bits per color, not the minimum 8-bits per color we expect. And they have this whole viewing angle issue.. but hey, at least that’s a good way to prove you have a TN display and not something higher end. The main reason they’re used in laptops: they’re cheap, and they’re low power. They’re also pretty inaccurate, color-wise, varying by temperature. Calibration helps, but the typical laptop will never look as good as your CRT.
Apple and perhaps some other expensive laptops use IPS (In-Plane Switching) type LCDs, which are more expensive and more power hungry (two transistors per subpixel, versus the single transistor in a TN display. IPS displays used to have even worse contrast, but much better color, and recent improvements in LCD and backlighting have these at least competitive with CRTs, for a price. IPS have also moved down-scale a bit, kind of edging out yet another LCD variety, MVA/PVA (multidomain/patterned vertical alignment)… I have a pair of these on my desktop. About five years ago, MVA was the best LCD choice for video work; IPS was too slow and had some weird artifacts. Like IPS, MVA/PVA doesn’t have the viewing angle issue, it has good color (IPS is a little more consistent, but I run my calibration tool every two weeks or so anyway), and has pretty much been pushed out of the monitor business with the improvements and falling price of IPS technology.
-Dave
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[Darren Campbell] “Also.. my motherboard (intel x58) has different coloured sockets for RAM, Black and Red. The Red sockets are occupied by my current 6 GB of RAM (2GB sticks), how different are the Black sockets and would I be able to add the 12 GB of RAM to the Black sockets to coexist with my 6 GB of RAM?”
The sockets are color keyed to identify banks vs. channels. You have an i7 motherboard, so you have three DRAM channels — the CPU grabs from three modules at the same time. Each of those channels has two banks: one red, one black. For best performance (whether or not your memory controller supports other configurations), you want the same kind of memory for each channel of the same bank. So you have 2GB modules, presumably the same kind, on you red bank. You might be able to put 4GB or 1GB modules in the black bank, depending on the MB, that would be fine, as long as all three are the same.
There are problems with mixing slightly different modules. MBs pretty much expect the three modules in a bank to the same across each channel, so they may not actually check (they should). If you had a slower module in the first channel and faster in the next two, it’s probably not a problem. But flip that around, and it might run faster, but flakey. This is also the kind of problem folks run into in overclocking memory. Each module has a ROM that describes what it is, but MBs don’t always check every module.
Since you’re buying new, it’s easy enough to find a set of three. That’s also a better indication they’re intended for i7 motherboards. Going one better, you can usually find your MB listed on major memory supplier sites (Crucial, for example, the retail DRAM brand from Micron, the USA’s last remaining DRAM maker.. they also own Lexar, the flash retailer), and get a pre-tested match.
-Dave
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I don’t think you’re going to find any camera at ~$200 that does acceptable HD video, particularly something you’d want to cut in with your GH2 video. The GH2 is one of the best mirrorless EVIL models for video — you’re probably getting the quality of a fairly high end camcorder… think $5K+ range.
A $200 consumer camcorder or P&S pretty much looks like a $200 consumer camera. You’re probably limited to 30p or 60i, no 24p, though that’s not the end of the world. But the quality is going to be a significant issue. Certainly way better than such did five years ago, but I would go a different way.
Why not pick up a lower-end M43 body? Assuming you have a few lenses to play around with, you can get a new Panasonic GF3 body for $350, or a used GF1 or GF3 for just over $200. I’d recommend the Olympus bodies too, but since you’re already on Panasonic, the way seems clear. I don’t think any of these cheaper models do 24p either (which seems just a firmware issue, but Panny’s like many companies and artifically limits the cheaper models).
The sensor size itself doesn’t matter… you’re asking about HD video, which is 2Mpixel once recorded, no matter whether you’re starting with a 2Mpixel sensor or a 20Mpixel sensor. Anything over 8Mpixel is theoretically large enough for pixel bucketing, to eliminate the color issues you can have with a single Bayer sensor.
Particularly for an interview, you’re not likely to notice 30p or 60i either resampled or drop-framed to 24p. I’d far prefer doing that, with very high quality video, than ping-ponging between pristine video and something fuzzy and intended only for YouTube.
The one exception on my scathing trashing of low cost cameras are the GoPros, which do have a decent video quality. Part of that’s because they’re spending nearly all the money on the sensor (there’s not even a viewfinder) and the fixed wide angle lens (the new one has a lossless digital zoom; the sensor is actually 11Mpixel, so they offer three different crops for 1080p video. No 24p here either, though the new model does 480/120p). This is fine for the typical sports/throw-away use of these little beasts, but not something I would think of for your application.
-Dave