[Glenn Chan]

The following site is good for information about free+commercial plug-ins for FCP:
https://www.digitalzoo.com.au/lunchtime/

Some filters that will do film scratches:

Nattress’ Film Effects
https://www.nattress.com/filmEffects.htm
This may be your best bet- low price, free upgrades, support from Graeme Nattress himself.

Magic Bullet Misfire

I believe demos for both are available. There are probably other film scratches filters out there.

[Glenn Chan]

I would try to shotgun the audience with various choices, and they choose whatever works for them.
Windows Media
Quicktime
H.264 (label it something like this, so you don’t confuse people with another quicktime)

If you do H.264 for quicktime then it’ll have a lower chance of working. If they’re viewing your demo reel, they may not have the time to install QT7 (they may be viewing a lot of demo reels).

2- For Quicktime, the IMA compressor doesn’t give very good compression (only 4:1) although it does give lossless quality most of the time. Alternatives:
mp3 or qdesign music: You have to pay for this, but it gives good compression (about 10:1 you can’t tell; 20:1 is pretty reasonable) and is pre-QT5 compatible. However, you need to pay money to get either of these. mp3 is an option in Sorenson Squeeze.
MPEG4: excellent compression, and free. However, the audience now needs QT6 instead of QT5.
the free qdesign music: Sounds pretty bad, but pre-QT5 compatible and free.

If making a lower bandwidth version, you might want to look at something other than IMA.

[Glenn Chan]

If you have around a million dollars, you can look into quantel iQ (voted the best by the Telecine Internet Group). You can attach motion trackers to points on a mask to do automated rotoscoping.

Below that there’s discreet lustre.

Below that there’s Final Touch, which is interesting. IMO it’s alright.
At around the same price point, there’s Combustion which may be a little better than After Effects (add Color Finesse to it). There’s also Combustion’s bigger brothers like Inferno.

There’s Magic Bullet Editor’s, which is easy to use (and doesnt need much creativity when you can cycle through presets) but really slow.

You can also use Final Cut Pro + Color Finesse. It can be more productive since everything is conformed properly and you can grade in context of your FCP project.
Vegas (PC) can do something similar, and you don’t need Color Finesse for Vegas.

There’s also hardware-based color correction systems which can do tape-to-tape (i.e. da vinci), but you’d only want that for the colorist ‘attached’ to that system.

2- The easy answer is to stick with AE + Color Finesse.

[Glenn Chan]

That effect comes from magnetic interference between the monitors.
When a monitor powers on, a lot of them will degauss themselves. Degaussing involves a strong magnetic field that reverses itself often… this will get rid of any magnetic “residue” (non-technical term) in the monitor. Anyways, that’s why you get a big disturbance when the monitor first turns on. Degaussing won’t hurt your monitor, and will sometimes fix things.

Foil doesn’t work in my experience. Numetal (something like that) will work, but it’s expensive.

If magnetic interference bothers you, get a 30″ apple cinema display to put beside your broadcast monitor. LCDs aren’t affected by magnetic interference from your broadcast monitor.

[Glenn Chan]

You can also check out some of the freeframe plug-ins out there. Some of them are pretty psychadelic.

https://freeframe.sourceforge.net/downloads.html

You will need to get the AE host plugin.

Pete’s plugins contain bloom, which is a neat filter.

Gallery of some freeframe plugins:
https://freeframe.sourceforge.net/gallery.html

Freeframe plugins are mostly free.

[Glenn Chan]

re: https://www.screeneditors.com/forums/printthread.php?s=ae26eb5947907fbee22987b250cc2c3b&threadid=55

I think they are all just spreading misinformation?

What I believe they’re talking about:
Fixing these kinds of errors lowers the quality of the pictures. On DV and DVCPro programs the quality drops away quite fast as the picture is blown up to reach the edges. This not only reduces the markets for your program but is also going to limit the life of your program.
DV frame size is 720X480.
Many editing systems that follow the ITU 601 spec use a frame size of 720X486. (They can probably do 720X480 too.)

They may be trying to scale the video up so the 720X480 picture fills the 720X486 dimensions. There’s really no reason to do this, although some editing systems may do this by default. What you should be doing is moving the image down 2 or 4 pixels (but not 3), with no scaling/resizing.

Or they can be talking about something else entirely… there’s such thing as a blanking interval, but shooting DV doesn’t affect that.
Read about analog video at https://www.danalee.ca/ttt/analog_video.htm
*Some of the little details may be wrong, but I don’t know of any better sources on the internet that are free, as easy to read, and as correct. Poynton’s books and SMPTE publications would be more technically-accurate sources.

**Those figures are for NTSC, not PAL.

2- DV generation loss is pretty low in a properly configured editing system using a decent DV codec. see https://codecs.onerivermedia.com/articles/adam_dv.htm

You can however use lossless codecs while editing, so generation loss isn’t really an issue.
Also, firewire/ieee transfer is lossless (while sdi is not). SDI/digibeta dubbing to SDI/digibeta over and over will actually pickup generation loss, while firewire/DV to firewire/DV won’t (SDI/DV to SDI/DV will however).

3- Adam Wilt (video engineer who writes for dv mag and has the excellent DV FAQ) rates DV as 9.0/10 for picture quality, and betaSP 8.9/10 as far as the FORMATS go.

In practice however, you’ll probably get better results with betaSP for non-technical reasons. The budgets are generally bigger, the cameras better (tens of thousands versus thousands), there’s a greater knowledge/experience base for betaSP, etc.

And of course, shooting digibeta will yield better technical quality. And 35mm is likely better yet.

4- the online will be 8bit uncompressed thru AJA component input.
You might get slightly better quality if you maintain a digital workflow by capturing through SDI. Going to analog will add a generation.

If you want to be assinine, you kind of incur a generation if you capture through SDI. see https://www.lafcpug.org/feature_capture_card.html

Disclaimer: Take what I say with a grain of salt! I’m still learning about this stuff and I’ve been wrong many times. I have tried to point out references to sources that are much more well-informed.

Disclaimer 2: Even experts are sometimes wrong (although this is a lot rarer).

See https://www.poynton.com/papers/YUV_and_luminance_harmful.html
If you read that article, the author points out that many textbooks on digital video are kind of wrong.

[Glenn Chan]

Used monitors: I recommend against this. Used monitors can pickup a number of problems on top of phosphor wear.
Phosphor wear: As the phosphors in the monitor get hit by electrons, they undergo changes and become dimmer. This means the monitor gets dimmer (ok) but also the gamma response/curve for R, G, and B will change (color shifts).

A used monitor can be ok if it has low hours and you run some test patterns through it to check for problems (convergence, focus, burns, etc.). Really high-end monitors like BVM-series Sonys and Ikegamis accept calibration probes to compensate for phosphor wear.

Monitor calibration: A CTB won’t give that good results for calibrating to color bars. A better “blue-only” gel (like the specific wratten gel they mention) may be better, but I haven’t tried. The blue gel trick will be slightly off compared to blue gun or automatic calibration.

2- From a practical standpoint, it probably makes a lot of sense to get a small broadcast monitor designed for field use (ikegami, sony, JVC). Look for blue gun, 16:9, underscan. The monitor could be used in the studio and you know you are getting a fairly accurate picture.
As well, it can be useful in the field for checking exposure and focus and whether the boom mic is in the shot (that’s what underscan is for). A field monitor can be very helpful.

A field monitor is about $600USD + shipping (expensive). A battery will cost extra.

Avoid LCD, stick with CRT.

3- Studio setup is just as important as having a broadcast monitor. Things to look for:
A- 7.5IRE setup. For FCP-specific info, check out https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/video_levels_nattress.html
Unfortunately the 7.5IRE setup/pedestal issue is VERY confusing and there’s lots of misinformation about it.
B- All light sources (including computer monitors) in the room have the same color temperature. *This may be a little difficult to achieve.
Ideally, the color temperature would be 6500k but that may not be such a big deal.
C- The line of sight around the monitor should be a neutral gray.
D- Try to minimize glare on the monitor. Turn it off and look at it to check.

[Glenn Chan]

Chroma keying with DV versus betaSP:

From Adam Wilt’s DV FAQ https://www.adamwilt.com/DV-FAQ-tech.html

With some care, DV25 keys at least as well as BetaSP; read on… […]
The single most important factor in good DV chroma-keying is low-pass filtering or interpolating the chroma prior to applying the keyer, so that the

[Glenn Chan]

Some more options:

A- You can get PATA to SATA adapters for the drives in your G4. You should be able to then install them into your G5 (which only takes serial ATA drives inside).
Example: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822998001 * may need the SATA power adapter too.

B- You could boot up your G4 as a firewire drive, and hook it up to your G5. You need to hold down a specify key during startup… you should be able to google this.

C- You could stick the G4 drives in external enclosures, although this is probably not a good idea because there’s limits to how many firewire devices you can have on one bus without problems.

D- You could also install more SATA drives into your G5. IIRC the G5 is limited to 2 drives unless you add a 3rd-party “hack” like the G5 Jam.
400GB SATA is about USD$258, lower capacities are better GB/$ (but can be more GB/$ when you run out of space, SATA controllers/ports, power).

[Glenn Chan]

Graeme: That’s certainly a very interesting plug-in. I noticed the speed function in Final Cut can’t do that (at least I wasn’t able to figure it out). It can’t map each field to its own frame.

Shake can convert 1s of 60i to 2s of 30p (and it should be easy to convert 2s of 30p to 2.4s of 24p). Still, it would be more convenient if it was a 1-step process inside FCP.

If you have the patience, Shake can slow things down by another factor of 2X-4X with its retiming features. Overall, that’s 20-10% slower. *Shake doesn’t actually give increased temporal resolution (or fps), it makes the slow-down look nicer.