[David Gurney]

Just found this post after someone asked me for some old footage, and I found I had compressed it with Sheer. Not sure how I’m going to recover it yet, aside from installing an old OS version on an old Mac. I think I’ve tried to use Sheer on a modern OS and it didn’t work. Anybody have a different experience?

I find it odd that people were so suspicious. Sheer was an excellent codec, and the only viable lossless one that I know of (there was one other short-lived one that I can’t remember the name of).

ProRes did not “beat” Sheer to anything; Sheer pre-dated ProRes by years, and ProRes is still lossy. Apple has never understood the need for lossless compression, for intermediate results and archiving. Then again, Apple didn’t understand the seriousness of their ridiculously defective gamma-handling either.

Now that Apple has largely abandoned the media-creation space, I guess we never will see a widely accepted lossless codec.

[David Gurney]

Unfortunately that does not appear to be an option. Media Encoder (at least in CS6) does not default to the sequence settings for export, and there isn’t even a “match sequence settings” option as there is within Premiere.

The one in Premiere doesn’t appear to work correctly; it uses the preview resolution for the export instead of the real sequence (and source-clip) resolution.

[David Gurney]

Thanks. As it turns out, there is indeed frame-rate metadata in a wave file. We can fix it with a free app called Wave Agent (from Sound Devices), but unfortunately the vendor’s Web site is broken currently (it isn’t sending the download link after you request one).

[David Gurney]

I’m having this problem in FCP 7 (our editor refuses to update), and I’m wondering where FCP is getting the info that the audio is 23.98 (the video is true 24). Is this metadata in the wav file? It seems to me that changing it to true 24 FPS should resolve the problem.

[David Gurney]

If you’re talking about the Rokinon 35mm lens, I have an opinion to offer.

I bought his lens recently after reading good reviews, and used it on a shoot this past weekend on my BMPC 4K. The results were poor. Looking at the footage after the first day’s shooting, I was shocked at the haloes and lack of sharpness that characterized this lens’s images. The Canon still lenses I used for other shots absolutely blew the Rokinon away.

I was shooting with the Rokinon at 5.6 and wider, which was required for the depth of field we wanted. Here’s a grab of the results with the lens wide open (or nearly so):

While I greatly preferred using a proper cinema lens (with gears on the focusing ring and hard focusing stops and manual aperture), the poor quality compromised the entire production. Even at less-than-wide-open apertures, the sharpness was obviously inferior to the Canon still lenses.