[David Roth weiss]

BINGO!!! Thanks Kristian, I was going completely bonkers trying to get this to work… For some unknown reason I could not find it in the manual though I searched long and hard.

THNX,
DRW

[David Roth weiss]

Dear Mr. Meat,

So, your thought is that it doesn’t actually work as its supposed to? Or, do you think we’re both missing something?

DRW

[David Roth weiss]

Atkiva,

I recently completed a post-production industry marketing survey with about fifty questions regarding the major NLE software companies. When asked which companies were truly innovative, there was only one that I could honestly call innovative, and it was Apple. Three days later I bought my first MAC G5 and FCP Studio. Now, just one month later, I’m quite comfortable with FCP, Sound Track Pro, and LiveType, and getting to know Motion. And I’m already very comfortable operating in front of clients. Needless to say, I’m very pleased with my purchase, and I feel confident that I have an excellent suite of integrated tools that will take me well into the future.

Yes, it does seem daunting, but there are many of us making this move every day. The good news is, unlike those other “A” guys, the Apple world is filled with tutorials, training guides, and friendly people willing to share their knowledge. In fact, the community spirit among Apple users is perhaps the best reason for making the big switch. The Apple world is a pretty happy world, and there’s a lot to be said for that…

DRW

[David Roth weiss]

Or, it could be that you’ve chosen a frame with too much motion bewteen fields. FCP toggles between fields on still frames and this only shows on an NTSC monitor, not VGA monitors. Try choosing a slightly different frame that is “quiet” when you park your cursor on it in the timeline.

DRW

[David Roth weiss]

Hi Howie,

Huh!!! Not a typical dropout… Seems to last longer than normal. That can make things a bit more difficult, but I won’t know until see it.

Let me tell you briefly how dropouts are typically dealt with, and you will know from looking at the footage if there’s a good chance the normal technique will work…

The proceedure is essentially to take either the next, or the preceeding good field or frame, and layer the two in a composite. Then, using “reveal,” paint through the bad pixels on the top layer, revealing the good pixels below from a very similar portion the nearby frame. So, as long as the dropout is not messing up the face of your interviewee in a really bad way, and if the information obscured by the dropout is similar to nearby frames, there is a good chance the problem can be fixed. In a sitdown interview where movement is limited, things tend to be a bit easier…

Let me know if you’d like to discuss it further…

DRW

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

[David Roth weiss]

Howie,

Combustion is the desktop tool of choice for this job. Of course if you have unlimited funds, taking it to a facility with Flame would be the way to go.

How many dropouts are there, and over how much running time? I have Combustion and its quite possible that I can save the day for you, but I’d would need to see a sample typical of the problem. If you would like, send me a short QT file with a few seconds of video conatining a couple of dropouts, and I will be happy to send you a sample of what’s possible. You can email me at “drw” at “drwfilms.com” for further info.

Hope this helps,
DRW

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

[David Roth weiss]

[Graeme Nattress] “Use the conform option in Cinema Tools to conform the 24.00fps footage to 23.98fps”

Graeme,

Please, if you would, could you possibly explain what’s going on behind the scenes in FCP when “conform” is doing its thing. I just can’t quite wrap my brain around it without understanding what’s actually happening.

Oh, and is it exactly the same thing that takes place on board a card such as Blackmagic?

THNX,
DRW

[David Roth weiss]

Matt,

I am not a huge fan of any of the current crop of LCD monitors when it comes to displaying full motion video, because they all have slow refresh rates, however let me explain something about contrast ratios. I think you may be confusing brightness with contrast/contrast ratio. Contrast ratio has to do with the range of colors (shades of gray in this case) between absolute white and absolute black. It is these shades of gray which give the video image its definition, and the greater the contrast ratio, the greater the perceived definition.

For example, imagine an extremely high contrast image with only two shades of gray, i.e. black and white. This image would be said to have a contrast ratio of 2:1, and as you can imagine the image would not have an awful lot of definition. Many fine CRT monitors have 5000:1 or 6000:1 contrast ratios, however in the world of LCDs 500:1 and 700:1 is common, as it costs more to create higher contrast models. Dell is claiming 1000:1, but I doubt you would notice the difference.

Hope this helps…

DRW

[David Roth weiss]

J,

I agree with you, the way cross dissolves blend multiple layers is not particlarly attractive. I had a similar issue earlier today and determined that the only good solution was to nest the layers and apply a single fade to the nested layers. I ultimately ended up using a wipe, which turned out to work better in my situation.

DRW

[David Roth weiss]

[Tom Wolsky] “It is available from https://www.classondemand.net, or through the LAFCPUG store ” target=”_blank”>https://www.lafcpug.org/”

Tom, the link to class on demand doesn’t seem to work…