[Don Greening]

[Kirk Johnson] “I’m sure it will come up in the future and am wondering if I’m doing something wrong or if this is just one of the limitations of the camera. “

You’re not doing anything wrong. The auto-focus on the EX is slow to react but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Once your EX locks in on your subject it should hold focus. Some of early cameras had an issue where the auto-focus was constantly hunting and would never really lock in.

Think of it this way: if you’re in full auto-focus mode and the subject in focus moves away from the centre of the frame the EX will not instantly try focusing on something else and you’ll have a few seconds of leeway while you re-frame the shot. It’s a lot better for the lens to be set up this way than having the auto-focus too sensitive.

To take full advantage of the EX auto-focus controls slide the focus switch to manual but don’t pull the focus ring back into full manual mode. Now you can twist the focus ring (clockwise- closer) until you have focus. Doing this will be a lot faster than waiting for the camera to do it in full auto mode. Afterwards, you can always hit the “push auto” button down below and it will still work for you with this setup.

To keep full auto-focus lag time to a minimum always make sure the subject you want to focus on is in the centre of the viewfinder.

Hope this helps.

– Don

[Don Greening]

A 2-4 camera EX shoot with continuous recording:

Set up a central station with a Macbook Pro. In this case two laptops would be even better because during a continuous shoot the cards from all those cameras are going to fill up at the same time. Hire a card wrangler. Buy some 16 Gbyte SxS Pro memory cards and some FW800 drives and leave the IO HD’s on the shelf. USB drives are okay but FW800 drives have a substantially higher sustained transfer rate.

As the cards fill up insert them into the laptop’s Express 34 slot and drag the BPAV folders from the cards into separate folders on the external FW800 drive(s). Use a bullet proof naming convention so you know which card came from which camera and the number of transferring cycles each card is currently doing. It helps to get all the folders on your external drives ready beforehand, then it’s just a matter of dropping the various BPAV folders into the correct hard drive folder.

I’m using a 200Gbyte G RAID Mini and transferring a full 16 Gbyte card takes about 5 1/2 minutes. Have your card person review the footage using Sony’s Clip Browser Software. After the review the card can me emptied by simply dragging the card’s BPAV folder to the Laptop’s trash. The card can then be put right back into the camera for use without any further preparation. After the shoot hook your FW drives to the Mac Pro and the Sony Transfer Tool will transcode the native EX MP4 files into MOV files for use in FCP 6.

Hope this helps you with your purchasing decisions.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Hi Peter,

I use Compressor (and Media Manager within FCP 6) all the time to do SD downconverts with EX footage and I’m pretty happy with the results. I’m shooting with the full raster 1920X1080 frame whereas you’re not, so that might make a difference. We’re both shooting progressive. Make sure your FCP timeline is set to progressive with rendering set to best quality.

The workflow for me is to drag the raw EX footage into a DV NTSC timeline (to match up with my SD cameras) edit everything and export a DV NTSC self-contained QT movie after rendering everything out just before the export. If I need to do multiclip editing I’ll “media manage” the EX stuff right in the SD timeline. Then I use BitVice to encode to MPEG 2 for SD DVD.

One of this forum’s leaders, Craig Seeman, may be able to advise you on Episode Pro workflows.

I think the trick here is to get into your delivery codec as soon as possible. Adding any intermediary compression schemes when you don’t have to just contributes to quality loss.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Thanks, Tim and Michael for the warm welcome. Let’s hope I can live up to my peers’ expectations.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Steve Wargo] “Your extensive knowledge is very well appreciated.”

I couldn’t agree more. Craig has always impressed me with his expertise on various topics and the way he presents his answers to posters’ questions.

Welcome, Craig.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Steve Price] “on further investigation of course I found it would have helped if I had digitised my widescreen footage as an anamorphic clip in the first place, which I had neglected to do”

Steve,

Any footage that’s mistakenly captured in 4:3 instead of 4:3 Anamorphic doesn’t have to be captured again. Go to the Browser, find your master clip and put a checkmark in the Anamorphic column. That clip will now be displayed as 16:9.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[dorit grunberger] “Don, I don’t know what you mean by PAR 720 x 480. Could you please explain?”

PAR is an abbreviation for Pixel Aspect Ratio, which refers to the the size or shape of a single pixel.

This is a pretty simple task, Dorit. Simply export your movie using current settings but with the compressor set to H.264. The resulting movie will look a little squashed on a computer monitor but will look fine on your projector screen. This is how it’s supposed to work.

If it was me I’d just export a self-contained DV NTSC movie using current settings and use QT Player to play back the movie on the projector. As a test you can hook up a TV to your laptop using the DVI connector and play your movie back using the TV as a second monitor. If that works and looks good the projector image will look just the same.

As with anything to do with FCP there’s always 3 or 4 ways to do the same thing.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Are you viewing the final product on your computer monitor or a television? Computer screens use square pixels and televisions/projectors use more rectangular pixels, so if you’re watching a QT export on a computer that’s actually destined for a TV it will indeed not look quite right. I believe that the pixel aspect ratio for DV NTSC is .9:1, which means that the picture is slightly taller than it is wide. For comparison, square pixels have a ratio of 1:1.

Export with a PAR of 720×480. It will look somewhat distorted on a computer screen but will display properly on a projector or television.

– Don

[Don Greening]

I’ve got EX3 envy, Scott. Steve Wargo probably has some on order for his rental biz as well, so you’ll both have to come up with some rates fairly quickly.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Adam Rose Esq.] “would an EX1/3 do a good enough job? “

I would say that it’s more than good enough. EX1 footage intercuts seamlessly with Sony F900 studio camera footage. I’ve seen that for myself, so I’d have to say that you’d be quite happy intercutting EX footage will digibeta.

– Don