[Erik Pontius]

.MOV files are just a container, same as .AVI. It’s what you choose to put in that container that makes the difference. In this case the Red One sample Mov is compressed, they’ve used a Motion Jpeg codec to compress the video to something manageable.
The AVI file you created may have been created using no compression (aka uncompressed) which results in a LOT of data and video is at a specific frame rate to be fluid…far more than your system can handle unassisted. You’re trying to drink from a fire hose rather than a garden hose…if you can keep up it’s going to spill out.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

HDV camera like Sony’s are showing up in more crew’s bags these days from customer demand. We’ve booked crews through Crews Control in the past with Sony’s HDV camera.
That being said, you’re money might be better spent on hiring crews with HDcam or DVCproHD cameras since these are greenscreen shoots. HDV has inherent problems with chromakeying because of the mpeg2 compression and chroma subsampling. You’ll spend a lot of time in post trying to clean it up.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Not sure if there is a short cut straight out of the project window. However, you can select the layers in the project bin in the order you want drag them to the comp, then select all the layers and choose “Animation > Keyframe Assistant> Sequence Layers” and then choose your options for overlap if desired. This will put the layers end to end.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Our setup is kind of complicated. We have and HD/SD-SDI router routing signals between various devices to 3 edit bays and a fiber loop for broadcast, we have AJA analog SD/SD-SDI boxes converting beta decks and other analog sources to/from the router. I can route the HD-SDI output from the HVR-1500 to any HD LCD or the live switcher we have fine, shows up as 1080 60i. The router also routes machine control from sources to/from the Avids (adrenaline, studio, xpress). We’ve bypassed the router and attached the HD-SDI output directly to the adrenaline using a HD project and still can get it. The “V” video button doesn’t even light up in the capture tool. HDV capture over firewire worked fine, but Media Composer really gets moody with switching between DNA/1394…so it’d be nice to fine a way of capturing HD-SDI.
Our HDW-D1800 should be in next week, we’ll see how that goes…might be able to route the HDV through that or at least dub it up to HDcam and go from there.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

We’ve just now started to get the HVR-1500 hooked up to the Adrenaline. Haven’t had a chance to do any batch captures and the like so don’t know if the r2422 control is more reliable with the HVR1500. We found out today from the installer that the Adrenaline/Media Composer will not recognize HD-SDI from the HVR-1500. The installer said it was due to it being HDV, etc… They’re supposedly in contact with Avid as to a workaround. The deck is pretty new, so no machine template yet which maybe part of the problem perhaps. We had to capture HDV the old fashion way – firewire through a second firewire card, disable the adrenaline…a workflow I was trying to avoid with HD-SDI out on this deck.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Also, depends on how you are encoding the video to MPEG2. If you are feeding Encore mpeg2 elementary streams, you need to tell your encoder (Sorenson, Procoder, etc..) that your footage is 16×9. Encore then picks this up and will show the asset as being 16×9. If Encore is doing the encoding, you’ll need to do likewise.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

AFAIK…alpha channel is only available in flash 8 and is an option that needs to chosen, not done automatically just because your comp has an alpha channel. I use the Flix 8 exporter from On2 Technologies, when exporting the dialog box has an option to preserve the transparency. I did a green screen of an actor for an educational flash piece. I supplied FLV files that preserved the transpareny, the flash guys were able to then drop these clips into their flash project so that the actor appear to be sitting on a object that was part of the background.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

I’ve done something similar with Windows Media Encoder. As previously noted, you can setup Media Encoder to capture directly from firewire to disc. It is actually designed to keep chugging through screensavers and monitor shut off, though I would probably disable all power management. Media Encoder can also record multi-bitrate streams. So you could conceivably create a 640×480 2k stream for projection and a 320×240 300k stream for web. Then use the Windows Media Stream Editor to split out the streams.
Windows media encoder during encoding will display an estimate “disk time left” calculated from your remaining disk space and your encoding settings…for today’s hard drives this is often in days.

I’d strongly suggest doing a dry run over well in advance of what you are really wanting to record.

One thing to double check is with the camera…often cameras when not recording to tape will power down after several minutes of inactivity (not pressing a button). In most cases there are menu settings to disable this feature.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Depends on what site. Sites such as YouTube will take whatever you give it and convert it to flash…something which you don’t have much quality control over. There have been previous threads on some best practices to get tolerable results in Youtube.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

I watched that film a couple of weeks ago. My girlfriend and I are both in the film/video industry so we always stick around to watch the end credits all the way through. I looked at those blood spatters and thought to myself that it wouldn’t really be that difficult to do in AE. I think Andrew Kramer has probably made it even easier with his new Riot Gear collection paint splatters. Using a combination of opacity, scale and the stroke reveal original effect I’m sure that this can be done.

Erik