Jason Porthouse
Forum Replies Created
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Actually I meant to say ‘it’s nice’ rather than ‘it’s mice’ but with some drugs the latter is probably more apt.
JP
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I’ve often used a whole stack of the same shot offset by 2-3 frames to get a dreamy trail – you can try putting blurs, glows etc on some to enhance the effect – it’s mice when motion stops and everything catches up to resolve in to a coherent image before going all bluurrry again.
Ahhh takes me back….
‘It’s called a Camberwell Carrot because it comes from Camberwell and looks like a carrot…’
JP
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[BW] “Here are a few useful tips offered on the Promax.com website on configuring your new MacBook Pro….
Get your machine configured by the professionals at ProMax so you don’t have to worry about tip number 4!
“This commercial break has been bought to you by the kind people at ProMax…
Bill, forgive me if I’m way off beam but this smacks of ‘product placement’… I’ve no axe to grind (I’m in the UK after all) and ProMax seem to get very good customer feedback, but less cheese and more sincerity next time eh? 😉
Jason
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[BW] “Here are a few useful tips offered on the Promax.com website on configuring your new MacBook Pro….
Get your machine configured by the professionals at ProMax so you don’t have to worry about tip number 4!
“This commercial break has been bought to you by the kind people at ProMax…
Bill, forgive me if I’m way off beam but this smacks of ‘product placement’… I’ve no axe to grind (I’m in the UK after all) and ProMax seem to get very good customer feedback, but less cheese and more sincerity next time eh? 😉
Jason
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Mortimer,
You’re offlining and paying a post house to online right? Have you talked to them? What do they suggest? Path of least resistance would be to talk to them and see what they’re happiest with – that way the onus is on them to get it right. If they’re just chucking it back at you then the cart is pushing the horse to an extent and you will be the one liable for any cock-ups! They should be suggesting the optimal workflow (with an eye to budgetary constraints naturally).
If they’re able my inclination would be to offline HDV and then online HDCam. Either way you’ll need to transcode one or the other – and as your master needs to be HDCam it makes sense to go higher (HDV-HDCam) rather than the other way round. Your alternate of keeping it DVCProHD would work if you’d digitised the HDV material in to that format from the get-go, but mixing and matching formats (when you don’t have the mixed format timeline of FCS2) is a complete ‘mare.
Talk to your post house. Even if it costs you a couple of hundred extra to sort, I think it will be money well spent. You can’t put a price on hair…
Jason
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None specifically that I know of, just passing on the percieved wisdom… I’m cutting on a system that has a mix of journalled and unjournalled media drives. I would be inclined, if you are ever in a position to do so, to re-format your media drives – it’s a good thing to do once in a while anyway, so if you can without too much disruption then do (turning journalling off of course). Journalling is fine for system drives BTW.
If you’re cutting DV, ingesting via firewire and you’re using FW drives without a separate FW card installed (separating the buses for ingest and data to the drives) then this may be a source of other problems – though many people do exactly this and never encounter problems. There seems to be a certain amount of voodoo with drive configurations, so make a sacrifice to whatever god of editors you believe in and keep em crossed!
Seriously though, by following the ‘best’ wisdom on here you stand the best chance of having no problems. So journalling off for media drives, and separate buses for firewire ingest and storage drives is the way to go. I’m sure others with more intimate knowledge of the pros and cons of journalling will chime in if I’m way off beam 😉
Jason
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Rick,
I quite often have to use DV footage in HD productions, and depending on the nature of the footage it can go from atrocious to really quite good. I usually use compressor to uprez the footage, and depending on your settings and time (better quality needing more render time) the results can be very satisfying. Whilst it cand *add* to the image quality in the sense that you can’t put in what isn’t there, it can definitely smooth artifacts and eliminate some of the stepping of pixels when viewed on a larger screen. The exeption to this is, I find, graphics – name supers and the like. They always look a bit pants.
For you, this would, of course, mean projecting from an HD source – so that opens up a whole new can of worms…
Jason
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Mortimer,
I do believe the accepted wisdom is to ensure media drives are NOT journalled – I think it’s OK when they’re barely full but will have a serious impact on performance when they start getting a little more crowded and they will, quickly)…
Jason
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I’m using a Wacom A6 Wide, and as a compromise between portability and usability I find it just about perfect. Easily luggable and wide enough for accurate placement of the cursor – that’s on a variety of systems, mac and PC – for FCP its great on a 2×23″ cinema display desktop. Ergonomically I wouldn’t be without it now – I’ve suffered from elbow strain and using the mouse was making it much worse – at one stage I was worried I’d have to take time off, as that seemed to be the only thing that made it better – but after 3 months with the Wacom all’s well. Do it, wou won’t regret it!
Jason
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[Nick Griffin] “YOU, my friend, have made the mistake of letting them think that this is realistic and do-able in a very small number of man hours.”
I can see I’ve given you that impression… and certainly, I thought it was more advanced and less of a size than it is. When the project was first mooted I think that it could have been manageable, but like Topsy it ‘growed and growed’ till it became the ‘doc that ate Paris’. It’s not so bad, they’ve done burns and transcripts, it’s just the story that needs the honing, and I’m happy to be in the driving seat – storytelling is what I do best – but it was really more to do with timescales, what is realistic. The client is great, very amenable and ultimately if I say ‘This ain’t gonna happen in X weeks’ they’ll listen. There has been no pressure, just an expectation (or rather an assumption) that has been off-beam for a while now. I don’t forsee any problem in re-alinging their expectations, as I said I don’t do fixed price, so ultimately either they’ll find the budget or not. Its just good to know I’m not way off the mark – for some time now post budgets in the UK have been squeezed beyond sensible to the realms of the seemingly impossible by certain companies (Sure we can cut a half-hour show in a day! Oh, you want it onlined too? Hey, how ’bout I shove a broom up my **** and I’ll sweep up whilst I’m doing it?!) so one’s sense of reality can get a little skewed. Suffice to say I don’t work for those companies any more… 😉
Thanks for all the advice!