[Hamish Boyd]

Another vote for Dell here.
I plan to get a second this year t match my current 24″ dell.

Mac’s look nice and are good quality but dell match it if not come very close.

No contest in my opinion. For us video guys we are colour checking off a video monitor anyway. (Or should be) so precision is not AS critical as photographers or print designers needs.

Plus the all extra inputs including card readers is awesome!

[Hamish Boyd]

Agree with post above.

Definitely get into apps like After effects first. That I would say is almost essential to know, least in my experience as a freelance editor.

I’ve wondered over time if I should need to know 3D. Short answer is no.
For any project that I’ve worked on and has required 3D then dedicated 3D artists are brought in.
Not so for motion graphics by after effects.
Its kinda expected that you can dive into that program and get gfx done. Like someone said, if you know that program you can pull off a lot of 3D looks if you know what your doing.

And a few little plug ins like Zaxwerks which can do some lovely simple 3D and your covered for most projects.

[Hamish Boyd]

This has been a great thread guys.
I’ve been keen to look into varicam for shoot options myself. But the technicalities have always confused me to bits.

I’m still pretty confused, but I’m going to read this thread carefully a few times, I’m sure the penny will drop soon…hahaha

On a more general note..
Would you recommend during a shoot to keep all slo mo effects at the one speed on the one tape, seperate from real time shots?
As from what I understand slo mo is setting in the camera (to flag frames) even though the camera is always recording at 60frames. Yes?
So in theory it shouldn’t matter, but….

Cheers

[Hamish Boyd]

AHAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

Righto I’ll post the reason for anyone who digs this up later.

It turns out that a 2d layer was below it in the timeline.
I didn’t know that could effect it. But I guess it does.

So those in a pickle over silly shadows. Don’t have a 2D layer between object and background (in your timeline that is)

[Hamish Boyd]

Thanks for your response.

doesn’t seem to help me.
but I may have done it wrong.

I went to preferences and unticked “enable open GL”

Is that all there is to do?

The thing is that there is another light and other text in the same comp happily throwing shadows.

[Hamish Boyd]

ok this just gets weirder…

I have positioned some text behind the text that is supposed to throw shadow…

Still no shadow BUT

when I move the text behind it and as it is previewing while I move it in low res I see the shadow. Once I stop moving it, the shadow goes.

what the?????

[Hamish Boyd]

Something I have always done that has never failed me yet is to put an adjustment layer on the top of your master comp in AE, apply levels filter and adjust the outputs. I only don’t set it as high as others have suggested. I do mine at 8 for black and 247 for white. Never been rejected for broadcast and when I have had the opportunity to test on proper scopes etc it all comes up ok.
I’m in PAL land so not sure that makes a difference though.

I think there was a tutorial about this ages ago here.

[Hamish Boyd]

Just to throw my two cents in…

I really had no idea about PP artists until my last project.
Thinking all powerpoint presentations were one aweful cheesy slide after another.
But how wrong was I. Seeing what a proper designer can do with was really impressive. It was a beautifully laid out presentation, drawing on the themes of the event in an eye catching way and providing a great coherent look to all that happened on the event. And was not simply creating a jpg to have in the background. This artist built everyone’s presentation from the ground up.

Now thinking back on it, it makes perfect sense there are people doing this and seeing it so well done, I have the feeling these designers are grinning smugly to themselves as most designers “don’t go there” and they have potentially ALOT of work.

[Hamish Boyd]

I use an internal raid in my edit station. This is workable for me, just. But not a really great solution if you have anything more than a bare minimum of editing jobs going through it. If your just capturing for graphics work then this might work for you really well.

Really you should look at a SATA external raid solution for as your media drive. But its certainly do-able to use and internal raid.

I’m looking at a couple of SATA raids for myself at the moment.

[Hamish Boyd]

Ok this thread has finally cleared up some long time confusion in my head. I think I get it now. I could never work out how I was hearing 2 vastly different numbers when talking about speeds for various formats and drives.

It just never really made sense to me. But I’ll read this thread a few more times to get it in head!

But the long and short MB/s is different to Mb/s. I get it finally!!!!