[Gerard Tay]

Premiere Pro can’t consolidate/trim. Make a feature request to add to the strength in numbers.

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

At the moment, your best workaround is to use project manager to “collect files and copy to a new location”. Then run that bunch of copied clips through AME to transcode to ProRes. Then re-link. If you want to trim, you can then trim them now that your footage is in an all I-Frame format.

[Gerard Tay]

Hi Chaz,

Guess I’m probably a little late on this… If you’re working in FCP,

Get this to flip the clips:

https://www.spherico.com/filmtools/rotateClips/index.html

As for when to do the PAL/NTSC transfer, it depends whether you are going to use NTSC footage in the edit. If you are mixing a lot of footage, it’s best to convert everything to NTSC before the edit. If everything is PAL, then you edit in a PAL timeline.

>And if I use FCP, should I work in ProRes422 or HDV?

I’ll go with ProRes.

cheers,
G

[Gerard Tay]

> It looks very interesting. And for that price, how don’t
> give a try?

It’s actually fully operational for the first 15 days.

I actually beta tested the software. What was cool about it for me, was SampleLab. Very neat. And the best thing about the quality was that it actually looked marginally better than Compressor at identical settings. Overall it’s very functionable, with intelligent frame control settings that tells you when you accidentally select the wrong frame size. No need to consult proportions. Yep, overall, it’s a surprisingly elegant software and i was actually surprised Josh put it up for 30 bucks, compared with the hundreds of bucks for the other encoding softwares in the market.

[Gerard Tay]

Great instructions so far… I pretty much understand the uncompressed workflow, which preserves quality across render- but do you also include adding the shift fields filter (i’m in pal, and SD pal is upper field dominant). Or does compressor interpret this part automatically? (i somehow don’t really trust final cut with fields).

The shift fields is something i need to really comprehend, as recently i had a project that had largely dv material, with some mixed media thrown in (dvcprohd, animation and sd footage), and thinking i could nest the project on mastering (it was a digital beta master) and work off a dv timeline, since most of the clips were dv. but what happened was that I got field tearing, when i changed my sequence to uncompressed, with or without the shift fields filter. (which is really strange, as i’ve used this workflow quite a few times, but without the mixed media).

Next, as most of my current projects are fairly short, I’m encoding dvds/mpg2s with this setting:
Gop Pattern: IP
Length: 6, open
vbr 6.6 to 7.5 mbs/dualpass encoding

Most of the projects were initially shot on DV25, but i seem to be seeing artifacing as well as noise quite a lot. Okay, The shorter GOP length seems to be able to prevent blockiness around dark moving areas, and it seems to hold quite alright across dissolves… but areas where there are white text with a black shadow (program subtitles) seem to pixelate at the edge of the text (reminds me a little of an offline edit off the Avid). Any tips on improving the workflow?

[Gerard Tay]

Interesting tricks! Hmm.. On montages, sometimes i’ll slow/speed up the footage slightly to better sync up the action with the music. Audio wise, I’m absolutely sick of throwing cheap stock sound effects into the mix- so if i actually need a whoosh/swish sound, i’ll tweak a stock sound with eqs, reverbs, pitch/speed adjustments to make it sound somewhat different.

[Gerard Tay]

great advice, mark! It’s strange, i’ve been trying to find material/discussion on aesthetics but the lion’s share of it seems dedicated to technical skills in a software. If only there was more material- Kuleshov was a thinker regarding film aesthetics, and so was Murch, and quite a few notable others…

On watching films without the audio turned on- i recall once popping in mean streets and not setting the speakers properly… and the rhythm/pacing in the opening sequence without music/audio was quite mind blowing. It was something i would never have seen without having the music off.

[Gerard Tay]

An old saying, “If you find yourself stuck in a rut the first thing you should do is stop digging.”

Another went, “if you’re going to dig yourself into a hole, keep digging

[Gerard Tay]

Cropping from within final cut will cause a black band. I ended up cropping in compressor (I’m in SD 4:3, so I crop in ratio- 4 pixels on each side, 3 pixels up and 3 down; cropped all the way to 24:18). But i’m faced with this blasted problem now- it plays fine in final cut, but i can’t export it without the audio going out of sync. Every setting seems right- all audio at 48khz/16bit.

[Gerard Tay]

What settings do i put if i want to crop a video to action safe, and scale it down afterwards?

[Gerard Tay]