[Jeff Brown]

The easiest way:
Make sure your camera is _SECURELY_ mounted, and won’t move. Not even when you press start/record/stop. Also, your lighting and exposure cannot change. At all.
Shoot the person on the right side of the screen. Then, shoot the person on the left. Use a mask to eliminate 1/2 of one shot. Lay this shot over the other. Putting a slight soft border on it typically helps. Done.

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

An HD format (though they don’t seem to specify which of the multitude of choices) would be better than digiBeta. DigiBeta better than BetaSP. Film could be better than everything, and of course the most expensive to do correctly.
Israel is on PAL standard, so apologies for my foolish assumption you were in the States, where cross-conversion is sometimes tricky.
Keeping your project in a higher resolution is good; the only downside is longer rendering time. But, that way you can output to DigiBeta now, and HD or film later. In AE, all that is needed is resizing the final comp output. If you need to edit in Premiere, I would still start with AE and render out clips at the size you will be mastering at (SD, HD, etc.). Premiere seems not so good at resizing things.

Most likely, you will end up with a QuickTime in the codec of choice of the post house, and then they can lay it off to tape for you. Again, tell them what you’re dealing with; they might be able to give you a good deal on doing HD with a simultaneous downconversion to SD, depending on what gear they have.

-Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

Congrats on getting your film accepted!

Digital BetaCam is a standard-def tape format. PAL is the UK/European standard for video (NTSC is North America).
You will need to find a way to get your project conformed and output to PAL DigiBeta tape, or it will likely not be shown. Are you near a medium or large metro area with professional video post-production companies? The best thing would be to contact one of them, be honest and say you’re new to this and need to do a PAL DigiBeta master for a festival. You have an advantage that you have a master format that is better than SD video; you will need to render out to the right format for the post house to lay to tape. The preferred format would depend on the post house, so ask them. The hard part will be finding a place that does PAL work. And, be forewarned, this will likely cost several hundred dollars…

If you want to do a “native” edit in Premiere/AE, PAL for DigiBeta would be 720×576, 25 FPS, Upper Field First, 1.07 pixel aspect.

Here’s a link that might help fill in some tech details:
https://www.mediacollege.com/home/sitemap/video.html

-Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

Sorry, I misunderstood. You say it’s a video file, so I presume there are moving elements? That will be a tricky one. Any compression that makes it a manageable size will smear the small text, as you’ve found. If I were to advise a client on such an issue, I’d suggest re-creating the screen(s) and doing Flash animation for the moving elements. Which would require considerably more time (money). That’s my thoughts…

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

You might want to look up “Camtasia”; it’s made for just that sort of thing.

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

Vince– I’ve never bothered with the method myself. I just let the software deal with fields. ‘Course, if you’re using steam-powered software instead of that new-fangled electric stuff, you might need the workaround…

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

What’s the original footage? I’d stay with that format, unless it requires re-compression. For robustness, export file sequences; PNG will save some space and is uncompressed. If you’re using interlaced footage, keep it interlaced.
Anyone recommending de-interlacing for keying or compositing probably means: convert fields to frames (i.e., 30 FPS to 60 FPS), key, re-interlace (60 FPS back to 30 FPS). Not really necessary with contemporary software.
That said, I haven’t used AE in several years (Combustion is my compositing app of choice), so your results may vary.

-jeff

Jeff Brown
Fire Mist Media
http://www.firemist.com

[Jeff Brown]

DV video is 25 Megabits per second, or about 3.1 MegaBytes per second. The files will be large– this is the nature of digital video.
If you do a direct capture of DV (which is what you should be doing…), one hour will take up about 11.25 GB of storage.

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

I also use Syntheyes, and it does have a setting for image aperture (it’s called “Back Plate”). You get more accurate lens calculations if your image aperture is also accurate.

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

Possible solution Yves:
Shift the image by one line vertically. You might be able to do this by cropping one line off the top and adding one line to the bottom? This would effectively reverse fields.
But I have not tried this.

-jeff