[Jimmy Brunger]

I feared this might be the case! I know it’s a woefully old system, but my boss is umm’ing and ahh’ing about what to do HD-wise and we’ll probs either go the FCP route on a MacPro or Avid Symphony/Adrenaline on a fast Opteron/Xeon PC.

In the meantime I just wanted to offer a short-term fix for what is an embarassingly slow system that we mainly use for offline (still fairly competent for that) but if you key a still graphic over it for 3 seconds and it then takes 3 minutes to render!?! I noticed there are several versions of the G4 (PCI & AGP) and they run 8.6, but wasn’t sure on the compatibility of the internal AVID boards..

What takes most of the load when rendering BTW….the mac processor or some kind of internal avid-based proc?
Would a top-end G3 make any difference?

Thanks for your help guys.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

“I only work in SD, will have to evaluate when we go HD”

Ha! I was beginning to think we were the only facility in the world that hadn’t gone HD yet! That’s *kind of* reassuring to hear. 😉

Steve – Thanks…I thought that might be the case. Only just ventured into progressive land myself, so not had chance to test everything. Prog GFX created in AE then laid over interlaced footage in Editbox doesn’t seem to pose a prob though. In fact, if the editor wants to freeze your animation, or resize it over video you get a better result with progressive gfx I’ve found. Paused interlaced looks jagged and nasty.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

After a lot of head scratching I think I have my head around why and when to use or not use fields..

If you ARE using fields however I believe UFF (upper field first) is the norm for Digibeta (in PAL at least) and DV is LFF. I could be wrong, but that’s how it works at my facility.

I have recently taken to rendering progressive, but adding motion blur where needed. Some slow movements (a crawl or scroll) can call for interlaced for a smoother move, but like Steve said, it’s an aesethic choice.

One thing I have just thought though….If our editor is editing interlaced footage, gives me some footage to treat and then give back to slot it – that would need to be rendered interlaced wouldn’t it? Otherwise it wouldn’t match? Not had chance to test it yet…?

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[Jimmy Brunger]

You could just paint out a matte frame by frame by hand (or every other frame)with vector paint? That’s how I used to do it on me ol’ Paintbox!

Still alot of manual work there, but at least you can paint the exact parts you want, as you want?

Failing that, is there a text preset in AE7 for something like that? Haven’t got it in front of my, but might be worth having a scout…

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Look at the help files for using ‘magic wand tool’ and ‘colour range’. They are your main keying/colour isolating tools in PS. If the colour you want to separate isn’t defined enough to get a key, you’ll have to cut it out by hand, using the pen tool and masks.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

I am using Prod Studio with a much lower spec system than what you describe..I work in uncompressed SD and the system copes just fine. If you’re mainly dealing in Standard Def DV then you should blister through with that setup I’d say.

Only thing I’d suggest is to setup a RAID-0 on your media drives to keep data read/write fast, but with DV you probs don’t need to worry too much about that. I guess certain processors/GPUs will allow more realtime effects and transitions than others in Premiere, but most of that info will be on the adobe site. I don’t really use Premiere that much at the mo, so can’t be sure.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

http://www.totaltraining.com has some good stuff. DVD-ROMs with customisable video training and project files.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Are you using Vector Paint? Woks fine for me..

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[Jimmy Brunger]

This be true.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Auto Trace indeed. very ace.

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