[Gary Hazen]

“Sounds like there’s some bad blood…” – M.M.

Or a giant chip on the shoulder.

Take Grinner with a grain of salt, all of his rants about Avid have very little to do with current techology. His grumblings are all about Adrenaline. And to be fair to Grinner, Adrenaline was one of the biggest mistakes Avid ever made. It’s unfortunate that Grin was stuck making payments on an ugly beast. Now he carries such a great deal of resentment over his purchase of a bad product that he can’t appreciate the advancements that Avid has made in the past few years. In Grinner’s mind FCP is good Avid is bad – it’s that simple. No matter what sort of advancements Avid makes they will still the bad guys in his narrow view. I’ve worked with Meridien, Adrenaline and the new DX line. I’ll admit that Adrenaline wasn’t very good. That said, the latest software/hardware(3.5 and up) works better than Meridien.

Also, I think we’re going on 3 years now with Grinner saying that he’s going to go to FCP and never look back. I’m ready to pass around the hat and buy him FCP just so he’ll stop the incessant whining about Avid. Or he can move his whining over to the FCP forum.

[Gary Hazen]

https://www.aja.com/products/fs1/fs1-connections.php

“upconvert it to HD or even a pseudo HD (as long as it improves it)” – C.S.

Upconverters will scale SD signals up to HD, but they will not ‘improve’ the original signal. What do you mean by pseudo HD? If you mean SD widescreen the model of your cameras would determine if you can output a widescreen signal.

[Gary Hazen]

Is necessary to cross post in 6 different forums?

“my editors break out in hives telling me it’s really difficult and it’s critical how it’s lit, etc. ” – T.H.

Are you willing to hire a gaffer ?

That’s your starting point. Pulling a clean key from DV footage can be difficult. If the footage is poorly lit the job of pulling a clean key can be extremely difficult.

“I see really good examples of it: on youtube” -T.H.

You’re using Youtube to judge the quality of the keys?

[Gary Hazen]

I believe Nat is talking about the shape vector path not the motion path.

[Gary Hazen]

What a mess. Shoot on a white background when you want a white background. If you want to remove the background you should shoot on either a green or blue background. Preferably an evenly lit green or blue background.

Crew list:
-budget camera guy
-budget lighting guy
-budget post production artist

I see a pattern here and the possible cause of the problem. In an effort to save money the producer has pulled the purse strings so tight that there’s not a single person on the crew that understands the keying process. Hindsight being 20/20 if the producer had been willing to pay the full rate for a DP with experience then you wouldn’t be in this mess right now. At the end of the day you get what you paid for.

“I would leave the background in but the budget lighting guy did a pretty bad job with the lights and the whole thing in uneven.” – Eddy Rose

Adding a soft feathered white solid (vignette) might help smooth out poor lighting on the edges of the frame. But if the gaffer did a poor job in general there’s not a lot you can do to “fix it in post” as the low budget producers like to say.

[Gary Hazen]

I’m anxiously awaiting the first episode of Real World in 3D. Or perhaps it will be Road Rules, a giant RV rolling at the viewer in 3D would have more impact.

[Gary Hazen]

“First off…considering the recent history of the banking industry, am I the only one it bothers that a bank is raising $700 million in cash to jump into an industry it knows nothing about? ” – Chris

No kidding! How quickly we forget.
Maybe the government will give us TARP 2* to help pay for upgrading to 3D.
*Tax Abatement for Repressed Production companies.

[Gary Hazen]

We chose XDCAM for this reason as well. They are developing a 100 GB disk – nearly 200 minutes of HD footage on a single disk. Given the amount of data that can be stored on a single disk shelf space isn’t a problem.

[Gary Hazen]

I work in broadcast and by far the most difficult person to find is a good engineer. We are fortunate to have access to a top notch engineer that keeps our facility finely tuned. His work load is such that he constantly needs to hire and train young people to keep up with demand. The problem is that it’s difficult to find young people interested in the engineering aspect of the industry.

All the kids have easy access to cheap cameras, NLE’s and graphics applications. Many of them had some fun cranking out a few skate videos. So they’ve declared themselves “Director’s” and they are ready to take on the world. On the other side of the coin you’ll find the rare individual that enjoys the challenges of solving technical problems. I suppose hunting down an unterminated source is boring work when compared to making shiny glowy things. But when the room is filled with a dozen ‘artists’ that have no clue on how to fix the problem you can bet your last dollar that the highest paid person in the room is the guy with the boring job of solving the problem.

Granted there are far fewer job listings for entry level engineers versus editors/motion designers. But when there’s an opening for an engineer the competition for the job is a handful of people compared to a thousand wanna be “Directors” competing for a creative position.

As others have said here the most important thing is doing the one thing that you enjoy doing.

[Gary Hazen]

To put it bluntly, from reading your post it’s obvious that you’re in way over your head. Hire a post house to help you with final delivery. In addition to having the necessary hardware (decks and scopes) the have the knowledge to deliver a spot which meets the required specs.