[Jason Porthouse]

I find it odd that anyone thinks it’s acceptable to have stuff at the wrong aspect ratio, which it would be if stretching 4:3 to the 16:9 frame of HD.

A recent feature length doc I cut had around 20 minutes of archive, all from SD. I did a quick n dirty resize in FCP for the ‘offline’, then redid the blow up for the online using ReSizer, though I think that’s no longer available. Motion does a pretty good job at upscaling these clips too.

Please, no stretching. The world has enough short, fat people and only clowns cars have oval wheels.

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

All grist to the mill for those of us who champion FCP. As an editor raised on Linear, then Avid, I much prefer FCP, but still come up against the old mantra that Avid=Professional. A certain Big Broadcast Company over this side of the pond have had a bit of a backlash against FCP of late, mainly because old Avid lags haven’t made the transition willingly, and seemingly look for reasons to go back to Avid. Now that’s fine if they’re legitimate concerns, but I don’t like being forced to cut on a tool that I don’t like using because of some old prejudices…

Still, twas ever thus, and I daresay it will be in the future… in the meantime, kudos to all who were nominated, that in itself is no mean feat!

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

How long is a piece of string?

Until we know your budget and requirements, then any answers will be a bit general. I run a Blackmagic Multibridge Pro in my suite. It copes with everything I throw at it, more or less. Would I buy AJA? Yes. Matrox? Yes. If you’ve a few hundred bucks to spend, then Blackmagic looks likely. Few thousand? Get a Kona. Need H264 encoding? Matrox.

None of the ‘big 3’ are bad products now – it’s just a case of picking the most appropriate for your needs. You need to do some homework and identify what those are. If you don’t do that, expect some interesting answers here 😉

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

Thanks for the advice, Michael & John. I’ve used Natress’ Standards Converter before, with excellent results – I just don’t have it on my suite. Been meaning to get it for some time so now is the time to spring for it I guess!

Michael, I appreciate what you’re saying about zero budget – this is essentially a favour for a client who is both regular and very good, and whilst I don’t usually do freebies in this climate, with this client, I’m prepared to make an exception!

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

Anyone?

I really need to nail this as soon as possible!

Thanks in advance

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

Lynn,

Let me see if I understand you…

You’ve got footage that’s SD, 4:3, NTSC. You’ve already edited some in a sequence and that’s fine. But the second sequence has been set to HDV1080i50 – and now you can’t change it, yes?

If so , converting to NTSC is simply not needed…

If you place SD footage in an HD timeline FCP will scale it to fit. If you then change the timeline (sequence) settings to SD 4:3 you’ll see (as it appears you have) that the footage is now too big – this is because the scaling FCP applies to the footage is now wrong for the sequence and still on the clips. Soooo…. I’d be inclined to duplicate the offending sequence, change settings to the correct format and aspect ratio, then select all clips (lasso them or CMD-A) and right click – go to ‘remove attributes’. You’ll get a dialogue with various options – check the boxes for ‘Basic Motion’ and ‘Distort’. This should remove the enlargement.

HTH

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

I regularly cut HDV on a dual 2.0 G5. It’s fine, responsive and snappy. As an editor, I notice little difference from this to my MacPro. When it comes to renders and exports – well, I taught the client who owns this setup to do those herself – no point me hanging around for that.

I think a lot of the time computers in edit suites are like sports cars – you can spend loads on the last nth degree of performance, but for the large percentage of the time you’re just cruisin’ with the rest of the traffic. It’s how much time you actually get to let rip that determines the speed you really need…

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

I’ll throw my 2 cents in for the option of getting a 500gig for your system drive, and another 2tb for a RAID. The internal Raid 0 option on the mac is the cheapest way of getting a decent performance (for 90% of real-world needs) there is – with one caveat. Make sure you have a backup in place, else your data will be at the whim of drives failing, and with 4tb of RAID 0 that could be a lot of data to loose.

Altenately, and possibly more cheaply, you could (assuming you don’t need 4tb of media storage) get a 500g for the system, 2 1Tb for an internal raid (can then expand with another 1 if needed) and use your 2tb drive in an enclosure for backup.

Whatever you do, I’d bite the bullet and ditch the 2tb as system drive. You really don’t need that much, it’ll fill up with cr*p and just give you problems later on…

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

Another vote for calibration. Do a search for ISF calibrators in your area. They’ll be able to get in to the engineering menu of your monitor and tweak the grayscale and color points to as near to REC709 as your monitor will allow. Should make the picture far closer to a ‘reference’ – with all considerations of price, non-broadcast kit etc. taken on board. Some of the new HDTVs get pretty close to REC standard.

Make sure you get a good calibrator though, who understands what you need it for. They’ll tell you how tweakable yours is; no point throwing money at it if there’s no hope getting it near, like some of the units out there

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

Great idea Ron, and I think that given time it will help ‘direct’ people to Basics too. I think around 7 ‘strikes’ would be good initially, if not reached then you can always reduce…

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*