[Jason Porthouse]

OK, I’ll add my 2 cents (or pennies). I know Walter loves AJA, and they are undoubtedly the Rolls Royce of cards, but it ain’t your Multibridge that’s making your video look cruddy.

If it looks OK on the comuter monitor, then I’d wager your HD monitor is making a bad job of converting. You seem to say you’re downconverting HD to SD, out of the HDMI, in to an HD46″ monitor, and its looking bad – well yeah, it will!! Most HD LCDs do a crappy job at best of upscaling SD to HD.

You need to hook a SD TV to your BM MBPro. Even composite will give you a better idea of any nasties like interlacing issues. Ideally use component to a decent monitor. If it’s still crappy then, make sure ALL your settings are OK. I’ve used my MBPro to downconvert HD to PAL SD and the quality has been more than fine.

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]

Having just been through this with another project (200+ rostrum photos) I’ve found the best way for me –

Use flattened images where possible. Don’t use PSD files unless you want the layers to remain separate. Full quallity JPGs (saved with quality at 100) are fine, TGA files bigger but slightly better.

If you’ve got twitter or moire patterning, use a blur – usually set to 1, and as most twitter is in the horizontal plane, you can use a directional blur.

Don’t go too big. Use the smalles size you can, accounting for any moves you may wish to do.

I used Motion for the rostrum animations, and was very pleased with the results. I used the keyframe editor and was able to work quickly after the first few – simple moves, rotates and zooms are a breeze. More complex stuff is achievable with a little head scratching, but overall I was very happy with the results…

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]

Joseph,

If I’m getting you correctly – you want to minimise the media stored on you machine. So for a 10 minute video (cut) where you’ve digitised an hour’s worth of footage, you want to have the project along with 10 minute’s worth of video rather than the hour.

If I’m correct in my assumption, Media Manager is your friend (and I never thought I’d write that!) as you cen use it to create a new project with only your used media, discarding the unused stuff. You’ll need to RTFM and do a search on the Cow for tutorials and advice on how to best achieve this…

If I’m not correct then I haven’t a clue what you’re on about!

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]

Your component connection to the monitor won’t, in all probability, be RGB. They’ll be labelled something like Y, R-Y and B-Y (I think – not in front of the computer now so can’t check) so double check your settings. Make sure the monitor is set to Component and not RGB.

It sounds like you’re getting a signal but not in the right order – pinky-green colour bars would indicate you need to check the order of your cabling. You’ll most likely have two round the wrong way. Start with Y – you should have a B&W image.

AFAIK the LHe outputs bars when no FCP signal is present so you’ll need to check all the seetings in the AJA control panel as well as your FCP settings. I’d use an easy setup in FCP, and make sure View Frames is set to ALL.

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]

Jon,

I hope someone with expert knowledge will chime in, but in my opinion the MBPro won’t acceletate your workflow. It doesn’t have any form of render acceleration – in fact, I don’t know of any card form any manafacturer now that does, save for the specialised renderfarm-in-a-box type ones.

If you’re working in the HD or SD video domain then I’d say it would be essential, and so far I’m extremely happy with my MBPro. It does everything I ask of it and does so without fuss. For your needs it sounds like some sort of renderfarm/acceleration would be most useful, and that’s beyond my ken….

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]

Christopher,

What is your final delivery? I doubt if it will be HDV…

Also – is this a ‘Cuts only’ doc, or one where you’ll be using effects and composites?

Your system will probably handle HDV fine for the cutting – I’ve used similar and it was pretty much the same as DV. As others have stated though, render times and conforming will be the killer. However it is unlikely you’ll do an HDV conform.

If you’re serious about upgrading your Mac to edit HD on, do your sums first in terms of cost of ALL peripherals and the associated implications – you may find that ‘offlining’ on your suite and ‘onlining’ elswhere is a better proposition financially… then you could cut in HDV and take your media and programme to an HD ready setup to grade and render as HD. Alternatively use the DV donconvert to produce a locked offline for re-ingest as HD elsewere…

Think about where you want to be at the end of the process, and that will give you the best route through…

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]

Hi Jason,

Just completed a doc online where the 70+ tapes were recaptured using a J3. If you’re going SDI you don’t need a J30 (but it will work fine) if the J3 is cheaper – some rental places put a premium on the 30 as it has the firewire interface too. Oh, just a thought – maybe the J3 doesn’t do audio via SDI – might be worth checking.

Deck control wasn’t a problem, though it is crude compared to the 500. For digitising it’s fine though.

One gotcha we had (this is using a multibridge pro) was digitising 16 channels of audio (14 of which were blank) because Doofus here forgot to turn the other 14 off for the first reel. Oh well.

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’ll put a vote in for the Multibridge Pro – does everything the eclipse does AFAIK (stand by for incoming from Bob;-)) but not with the zillions of audio ins/outs. Cheaper but a long way. Not as sexy though (gotta love the lights on the Eclipse)

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]

Andrew,

You might want to try your handles settings in Color – I had a few funky clips when I rendered sequences with handles, especially if there were any clips that had no handle media – for instance motion MOVs. It didn’t screw the timeline (i.e clips started in the right place) but the sync within some clips was odd, and there were a few shortened clips too. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed with some slipping and sliding but was a PITA.

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’ll chime in here with a vote for Shane’s method, works well if you have a small amount (or time to render overnight) and the results have been very good so far.

I’ll also throw in another software suggestion – Digital Anarchy’s ReSizer. Just been using it on a doc (converting 4:3 archive to 16:9) and for the hell of it tried SD to HD. Surprisingly good.

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*