[Gabriel Bergeron]

There are plenty of major major pictures shot with 2/3 sensor cameras. Some including:

Star Wars Episode II, III
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Sin City
Once upon a time in Mexico
Zodiac
Speed Racer
Miami Vice
Sky Captain and the world …
Crank

The Wrestler and Black Swan were shot on 16mm. Not for budgetary reason, for an aesthetic and practical reasons.

[Gabriel Bergeron]

Hi everyone, I’d really like to have some clarifications with this.

Hope to hear from you.
Thanks!

[Gabriel Bergeron]

Thanks guy for all your great feedback.
You shared a lot of crucial information that was escaping me before. I appreciate it a lot.

An Intensity card connected to a calibrated plasma seems like the cheapest working solution. With the plasma I’m losing the 10bit feature of a reference monitor like the Dreamcolor but that’s about it? Is this right?

I know an iMac is not an ideal computer to run Resolve on but I’m currently transitioning to new computers right now. I’m getting ready to build a hackintosh pretty soon.

I had a few more questions related to the Intensity/Plasma solution.
One of the things that I can’t still shake my head around is all the different color spaces and the limits we might have depending on our hardware.

My understanding is that a true cinema color space is DCI-P3.
REC709 comes close and is often used for low budget / indie films.

If P3 is better, why wouldn’t we choose to grade in that workflow? Is it a hardware limitation?
What about REC709, can I work with this with an Intensity?
On BMagic’s website it says that its HDMI color space is YUV 422. Does that mean I’m locked in that color space and would need to calibrate everything from there?

Any input regarding color space solutions and workflow would be most welcomed.

[Gabriel Bergeron]

Hey guys,

I had posted an answer but for some reason it didn’t get through or was removed… oh well.
Essentially I was thanking you for your input and felt grateful to know you’d be happy to discuss/help. 🙂

I actually have two easy or general questions:

1) A gig I have right now asks for known Hollywood sounds like the T-rex growl in JPark, web-shooters sound in Spider-Man, etc. Are these available somewhere to buy?

I would guess they are since they’ve been used elsewhere but I couldn’t find anything.

2) I want to buy some sound libraries and was hoping to get your suggestions. Any favorites?

FYI I’m starting to build my sound collection so it’s not extensive right now. So I guess perhaps some good general “start up” libraries would be welcomed but also more specialized ones.

Anything that you love really : )

Oh yes, I’m also looking for great atmospheres (indoors/outdoors) so if any library comes to mind for that…

Thanks!
Gabriel

[Gabriel Bergeron]

[Terry Mikkelsen] “The interesting part about applying this to web is the “glue”. If you cut/copy/paste in QuickTime, how do you then save the final version?”

Yes doing the “save as” option wouldn’t re-encode anything. Theoretically, it would export the video as is. But being a delivery format, h264 didn’t support that very well.

Back in the days when I made DVDs, I used MPEG streamclip to “glue” mpeg2 clips together. Maybe I’ll dig it up and try it with h264.

[Gabriel Bergeron]

I am bumped and surprised that such a feature (manual bitrate settings for portions of video) is not available. It would make things so much easier sometimes.

On a side note, isn’t it at least a feature pro compressionists have on hand for DVD and Blu-Ray authoring?

All right:

1) I did lots of tests with Episode and Squeeze. It’s not working. I tested with A LOT of different settings. The grainy footage always breaks down. I’d need to increase the overall bitrate too high.

2) I see one solution left: compress the video in separate sections using different bitrates and put them back together afterwards. I had tried this before with QT pro (copy pasted files and “saved as”) but I ended up with out of sync audio.

–> Would you know of any workable way to compress different H264 files and glue them back together resulting in a playable video?

3) While I was testing with MainConcept h264, I noticed the grainy footage never looked as good as with Apple H264, even at high bitrates. I did a test and, surprise, Apple handles the grainy footage better at the same 4.5 mbps) see files: https://www.mediafire.com/?ncw38t8d5e5f4pc
also original for comparison (prores): https://www.mediafire.com/?rmdtjsxhzay5dn6

• Maybe there’s a way to make it work BUT I’m already late for this project so I think I’ll need to use the segments solution outlined in #2. *** But I’d need a way to glue the files together that works!!!!!

[Gabriel Bergeron]

Hi Craig, thanks for your answer.

Yes I was using Apple’s H.264 in Compressor.
I hate Compressor really, I have so much trouble with it (ex: stability). So you’ve easily convinced me to get something else.

Not being a compression pro, would my goal of telling the encoder to use Xmbps here and Xmbps there be considered a normal feature and something normal to do? Something easily done in the other apps?

And does that manual intervention have a name?

Unconstrained encoding may be an answer, but it’s still automatic, isn’t it…

I’m checking telestream Episode but no mention of what I’m looking…