[John Blankenship]

It’s still about the camera perspective and ratios since, at a given aperture and focal length, a percentage in front of, and behind, the optimum focus distance is considered “in focus.” That distance is what is referred to as “depth of field.”

One way to extend the depth of field is by stopping down to a smaller aperture.

So, in your case, to keep everything in sharp focus, position your subject fairly near the background and have sufficient light that you can stop the lens down to a smaller aperture (e.g. F5.6 instead of F2.8). The smaller the aperature (which has a correspondingly larger number), the more depth of field you will have.

You will likely want to have the subject a sufficient distance from the background to allow for a “kick” light in order to create a feeling of more depth in the image. That takes us into the whole topic of lighting which is better served on the appropriate forum.

Keep in mind, there’s no substitute for actually trying a setup to see if it fits your specific needs. You may find that what you theoretically thought would look good may look better another way when you actually do the setup.

I hope this helps clarify.

John B.

[John Blankenship]

The main difference is perspective.

Perspective is a function of each element in the frame relative to the camera position.

For instance, in simple terms, if the key subject is ten feet from the camera and the background is twelve feet from the camera the perspective is quite different (10/12 or a 5:6 ratio) from a setup where the key subject is four feet from the camera and the background is twelve feet from the camera (4/12 or a 1:4 ratio).

Also, as mentioned, depth of field comes into play. In the first example, the depth of field would likely have both the subject and background in relatively sharp focus whereas in the second setup, the background might be out of focus. This depends a lot on various other factors such as aperature, focal length, size of imager, etc.

John B.

[John Blankenship]

I’m running FCP (Studio 3, FCP 7) on a Mac Pro with four monitors driven by two NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT cards. I ran FCP 5 this way before I upgraded (I skipped 6).

The only issue I’m aware of has to do with which monitor I can use as a full screen playback monitor which is related to which monitor I have the timeline on.

FWIW, I also have Avid (3.1.3) on the same machine and it handles four monitors flawlessly. FCP is using an AJA IO but the Avid is software only.

(Mac Pro, Dual-Core Intel Xeon 2.66 GHz, 2 Processors, 4 Cores, 10GB Memory)

John B.

[John Blankenship]

Mark,

Even though Jeremy’s answers cover it, I get the impression they’re not the simple explanation that I think you want — so, here’s the simple version:

The camera normally shoots 50 frames per second and flags which frames to play back.

If you were shooting interlaced it would play them all back, since in interlaced mode it takes two fields to make up each frame. If you were shooting progressive, it would play back every other frame since each frame is complete unto itself. In 25PN mode, the camera only records the 25 flagged frames to the P2 card, therefore you get twice the space.

I hope this helps.

John B.

[John Blankenship]

Even the HVX-200 will do this.