[Gord Stephen]

What’s your camera’s recording format?DV Rack (or Adobe OnLocation as it’s now called) needs a DV/HDV stream (via Firewire). I think newer versions might support more formats, but if you’re buying ‘DV Rack’ it means that the software is going to be a few years old.

Another thing to think about… Do you know for a fact that it’ll run on your current OS? I have a copy of Ultra 2 (also from Serious Magic, before Adobe bought them) that won’t activate/run on Vista – Adobe developed a fix but only made it available in Ultra CS3. I’ve also heard things about the activation servers for older Serious Magic software being shut down… So it might be worth looking at just getting OnLocation CS4 instead… It’ll no doubt cost more though.

Hope that answers your question. I’ve used OnLocation CS3 for monitoring while shooting with an HV30 in the past, but have’t had much recent experience. It’s a neat peice of software though.

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

I definitely wouldn\’t mess around with the files in the PRIVATE folder – organising the clips in your NLE is probably your best bet. Then you can trim them and make subclips, sort, use the search function, etc. If you do transcode to CineForm, then you can call the files what you want and store them anywhere – but you\’ll still probably end up sorting and trimming clips in your NLE anyways.

Hope that helps,

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

[Todd Terry] “The 7D’s sensor is more akin to the size of a 35mm cine frame”

And yet there are those who complain about it (or the 1DMkIV now) not being full frame… We’ve gotten spoiled fast. 18 months ago the concept of a sub-$2k camera with a 35mm film-sized sensor was ludicrous. Now it’s a disappointment?

It’s an exciting time to be shooting video, to say the least.

As for Nocturne being taken down – apparently the same thing happened last year with Reverie (Laforet’s 5DMkII pre-release short) – I would expect it to be officially back up soon. Bureaucracy is weird.

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

Pretty exciting stuff, especially considering that it was all shot with available light… at night.

Todd, have you seen the photos from Rodney Charter of the 7D with big Panavision lenses on it? It’s quite the sight to behold…

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

[Shawn Whiting] “how i would make a “proxy” of my footage in CS4 then switch back to the original files”

In After Effects there’s an actual proxy feature that allows you to link two files (ie low-quality and high-quality) together and switch back and forth for different tasks – here’s a tutorial that talks about that. In Premiere, as far as I know, your best bet is to use the replace utility (right click on the file’s icon in the Project Panel and select ‘Replace Footage’) – that will swap out one file for another. I don’t work with proxies much though, so there could very well be a better method that I don’t know about.

[Shawn Whiting] “f i decide to shoot most of my project in 72030p, then want to use the dynamic range system on the HMC150 and i shoot a few shots in 72060p, would that be a problem for editing?”

60p and 30p work well together given that you can just take every other frame out of 60fps and voila, 30fps. That being said… multiple frame rates in the same project can sometimes introduce extra headaches. If you can, it would probably be simpler just to stick with one frame rate for everything. As for shooting everything at 60p – the only issue I can think of would be that you’re sort of cutting your per-frame bitrate (more frames per second of video therefore more compression needed). That could be problematic if you have a lot of motion or detail in your shots. It’s ultimately up to you though, your own testing and experience will determine whether or not you like the look.

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

[Shawn Whiting] “if im ending up on DVD and the web for my project, is there a reason to shoot 1080? or would 720 be fine?”

Long answer… I shoot 720 for most of my stuff, mostly because the camera’s recording bitrate it 21Mb/s whether you’re in 1080p or not… so in 720p you have less pixels and, theoretically, more data per pixel. Some suggest, however, that 1080p is the way to shoot because you’re getting more pixels of colour data. That might be worth considering if you’re doing something like greenscreen work.

Short answer… I shoot for web and DVD too, and find that 720p works fine.

[Shawn Whiting] “what are the differences between shooting intermittent or progressive in either mode?”

Ok, here goes… although a site like this would probably give you a better explanation.

Interlaced video (as in 480i, 1080i) is composed of ‘fields’ of video. When you look at an interlaced image at any given instant, you’ll see two fields at once: all of the odd-numbered rows of pixels in the picture are one field, and all of the even-numbered pixels are another. The first field might appear at 1/60th of a second, and then the second at 2/60th, then the third would be replaced at 3/60th, then the fourth would be replaced at 4/60th, and so on. They alternate in and out. It’s a compression technique used for things like TV broadcast. With interlacing you can get a nasty ‘combing’ effect.

Progressive video (ie 480p, 720p, 1080p) is way more straightforward to explain. It’s just your intuitive vision of a moving image: a series of (full frame) pictures being played in sequence. Just like film, flip animation, etc…

Unless you’re doing something like shooting for a TV station that wants interlaced, progressive’s definitely the way to go.

[Shawn Whiting] “what offline footage means in respect to PPro”

I probably didn’t use the term in a 100% correctly… generally an offline edit involves editing proxies of footage in a rough cut. Then the online edit is the final edit with the higher quality footage. In my case, I meant that I edit all my footage in Premiere, get all of the timing right, sync it up with audio, etc… and then import the sequence into After Effects to do ‘polishing’ work on it like motion graphics, colour correction, etc.

Hope that helps,

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

Hey Shawn – here’s my opinion:

For an NLE/suite – go with CS4. If you choose to edit your AVCHD native, PPro has great support for that (but more on editing AVCHD in a sec). For color correction and effects work, it’s dead easy to go between PPro and AE, which is really nice too. Plus it seems like you already have PPro on your machine. There’s also an option to switch PPro’s keyboard shortcuts to match FCP’s, which might speed up the transition for you. And if you don’t edit your AVCHD native, and decide to use CineForm, you can get CineForm ProspectHD, which has a ‘Real-Time Engine’ that accelerates CineForm decoding in PPro. The CS4 version has been missing for a while but it’s finally on it’s way…

[Shawn Whiting] “transcoding footage to a file type that is easier to scrub through and edit with, especially if your considering color correction or effects”

That’s just using an intermediate codec, like CineForm, which you seem to know about already. With 2TB of storage space you’ll have lots of room to transcode 20 hours of footage to something like CineForm Medium or High setting (I use Medium personally) – I would recommend going that route, even if your machine can handle AVCHD playback. Once you start applying effects and stuff, AVCHD will really bog things down. With an intermediate codec, the idea is that full video quality is preserved for editing (unlike a proxy, which generally is a lower res/quality version), so you don’t need to switch back to your original footage for the final render.

[Shawn Whiting] “shooting in lower bit rates to save on space and editing troubles”

The HMC150’s PF mode compression (21 Mb/s) is brutal enough… I wouldn’t use any of the lower bitrate shooting modes just to save disk space. 20 hours of footage really isn’t much… as AVCHD that’s a little over 200 GB, or just 10% of the space you have available to you. Convert it all to CineForm and the footage probably won’t even double in size – so you’ll still have loads of room left. Besides, hard drives are cheap. As for saving editing troubles… a lower bitrate means more compression, which means more work for your computer, which ultimately means more editing troubles, not less.

For what it’s worth, here’s my workflow:

1) Shoot with HMC150 (generally in 720p24 or 720p30)
2) Copy card contents to external USB HDD
3) Run CineForm HDLink to convert AVCHD -> CineForm Medium Quality
4) Store converted clips on external RAID 0 eSATA HDD
5) Offline footage in PPro, import sequence into AE for online
6) Encode AE comp to M4V / F4V / DVD-MPEG2, etc.. via Adobe Media Encoder
7) Write the encoded file to a seperate ‘output’ HDD

Hope that helps.

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

Yeah… yeah. I have some respect for Zacuto and their products, but I’d be interested in knowing how many (or hopefully how few) of these they’re selling… I don’t know why anyone who has no choice but to shoot something with a cell phone would be willing or able to drop $300 (or even $70 for the Jr. version) on a holding stick.

Have you seen their promo video?

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

Noah, I’m sure that there are plenty of other Cow readers who would be interested in your response as well… I know I would.

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

I like the 7D suggestion, given that you’ll be getting a 35mm adapter. There are lots of people out there willing to tell you why it’s not perfect, but with its comparable price I’d take it over a consumer cam any day. Manual exposure controls are nice…

If you do go the consumer route, the HG10’s a hard-drive based camera, which isn’t ideal… I would look at either tape (cheaper) or flash memory cameras, like the HFS10.

Another thing to consider – if you go with a camera that records to an H.264 codec (like the HG10, the HFS10, or the 7D) you’ll want to transcode to an intermediate codec in order to smoothly edit it with your machine. That’ll probably cost money – there are some free alternatives out there too, but something like CineForm is really nice to use.

Gord