Joe Murray
Forum Replies Created
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So are most of you converting Red footage to ProRes before editing? We’re doing our first major project with Red right now and are just using the half-res proxies to edit and will then conform in FCP and Color. Other than seeing the footage higher quality by converting to ProRes, are there other advantages to that workflow?
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
Yes, given the price of licenses/updates for Automatic Duck, if this works well it would be really nice. I don’t have CS4 yet, but I had heard about this feature. We only have one license of AD and use that system to convert FCP projects for AE – it works because of centralized storage, but would be much more efficient for each edit suite to be able to do this locally.
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
Filters schmilters…if you want really clean graphics with highly saturated red in them, you need to do as suggested, convert the sequence to Prores, and if you have After Effects, try rendering the logo over footage within After Effects then reimport to FCP and compare to Prores. FCP’s rendering of reds has never been perfect but I’ve gotten around it sometimes by rendering a clip in an external program like AE or combustion (probably even Motion would do it but I’m not a Motion guy so I don’t know) so that all FCP has to do is play the footage, not render anything.
HDV is OK as a shooting format but it has a lot of issues as a post format and should be converted to a 4:2:2 codec for best quality, and filters in 4:2:0 are no subsitute.
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
[mike miller] “are you just editorial, or, do you handle the shooting as well out of your shop? can’t hurt for me to gather a bit of info, one of my clients is bcbs of north carolina!”
We started out focusing on creative editorial, motion graphics and effects, but have had good success as time goes on by packaging production for clients as well. So many spots these days need effects and design work, and some production companies have a tendency to shortchange post as a cost line item that must be beaten into as small a number as possible. In that model the creative suffers. Would be happy to discuss further if you’d like – please use the contact link on my site and it will come directly to my email.
And thanks for the complement on our work!
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
That’s completely different than the problem I was having. My deck was recording little digital blocks randomly on the screen.
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
What problem are you seeing with the deck?
playback isses with tapes you record?
playback issues with tapes recorded elsewhere?
record issues?
channel condition lights – staying green or going orange or red?
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
The spot sync issue may be happening at the local station rather than the closed captioning stage. I had this problem recently with a spot – we sent it through DG, although I did the closed captioning in house so that was definitely not the issue. What we figured out was that the sync was different between the digital and analog signals being sent by the stations. One was in sync, the other was out. Can’t remember which one was out. The question to ask is “was everything else on the station in sync?” because most likely there were similar problems with the other spots on that station. Did the same spot look out of sync on other stations?
For closed captioning, check out http://www.unisay.com. MUCH cheaper than MacCaption, at least on the front end, and you just pay for it when the project requires, per spot or per minute. Basically, you upload a text file of the script, and an audio file of your program (preferably a voice-only audio file), and Unisay’s server uses phonetic recognition to match up the captions with the audio. You preview the captions, make any revisions necessary, then export an animation codec Quicktime and put it on a layer above your program in FCP, set bottom crop to 99 and you’re ready to export a CC’d file. Coolest thing I’ve found in a while. Well, at least it’s as cool as closed captioning gets.
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
Which board needs to be replaced? Does your deck sit idle in a dry, cold environment for long periods of time? The reason I ask is that my deck engineer initially diagnosed a problem as a bad control board (several thousand $) and upon doing some more research found a technical service bulletin about DBeta brushes going bad if the deck is not used frequently. A set of barely used brushes fixed the problem and cost a whole lot less than a new board.
I’m sure you’ve probably gotten a good diagnosis of the problem you’re having, but thought it might be useful to post my experience just in case.
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
Autodesk’s higher end products use visual data recorded on DBeta or HD tape to archive projects. The video gets laid to tape as video, but audio, project files, and certain settings are archived to tape as what looks like static, but is really encoded data that can be retrieved and decoded later. Sure wish this was available as a standalone app, but since it’s not I ended up with an LTO3 tape drive instead.
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
Sorry, overlooked your reponse about mastering format. Usually, I choose to edit with whatever format I have the most of, and capture the rest via the Kona to that format. If it’s tapeless and can’t use the Kona to capture, I transcode only what’s needed, at the end of the edit. I also tend to stay HD as long as possible, unless we’re doing complex graphics or effects work for 4:3 delivery.
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC