[John Kirkilis]

I’m green to HD workflow, but not so green to not monitor my audio. 😉

I knew I had a problem and that I was tempting fate by using the low-cost Azdens. We shut off cell phones, ceiling fans, and anything else I could think of at the time that might generate an EM field. I just didn’t have the experience to ask about a baby monitor when the subject said that her baby was peacefully napping. Her husband had the receiver with him in the garage, which was far from the room I shot in. I didn’t think to ask until we returned home and I did web searches about wireless interference and came across references to some baby monitors causing mischief with some low-cost wireless lavs.

For the subsequent interviews, I ran out to a nearby Guitar Center to get a pair of Sennheiser wired mics, which worked just fine.

Live and learn.

[John Kirkilis]

Jeff, I’ll give that a shot and see if I can get close. I did try several EQ operations when I first discovered the issue, but it is worth another session.

John

[John Kirkilis]

Steve, it looks like I’d need the Advanced version of RX to get the adaptive denoiser.

Is that the specific tool you referred to?

If so, I’d need to see if I can afford to add this to my arsenal at this time vs. outsource vs. reshoot. I need to see how much footage is affected.

[John Kirkilis]

Hi Alex,

Perfect timing on your reply. When my question didn’t receive any replies, I wondered if there was something obvious I was missing. My wife has been fighting a nasty bout with bronchitis, so she hasn’t asked me to show her how to proceed… until yesterday.

Thanks for letting me know about favorite renames being included in text searches in 10.0.3. My background is in programming and databases, so I tend to question appropriate levels of structure and abstraction. A clip in the event library is created during the ingest process. It is a pointer to a range of time on a physical clip that just so happens to cover the entire physical clip. At a functional level, if I create a duplicate of that pointer and change the in and out points, I have another pointer with all the same capabilities as the original.

To me, interview questions seem to be hard structural demarcations that deserve more than the slipperiness of favorites and keywords. Within the footage associated with a particular interview question, I would use favorites and rejects to point to the usable and unusable sections. I would use keywords to identify who is asking and answering the question, which parts are the question vs the answer, emotion (sadness, laughter, tears, anger), interior/exterior, location, subject matter, etc.. Notes could capture anything else that doesn’t need to be consistent across clips.

I haven’t amassed any experience yet to validate or contradict these criteria for organizing footage. I did not physically record separate clips during an interview session, since there can often be a flow of questions that I wouldn’t want to interrupt.

I’ll know shortly if this makes sense in practice. I’m all ears if you beat me to it.

John

[John Kirkilis]

RAID 1 is mirroring, not striping. Software-based file corruption will mirror the corruption on the other drive. Striping won’t protect you from this either. I’m using RAID 6 since I have the headroom, which means the project will survive up to two drives failing concurrently. This could happen if one drive fails while another is being rebuilt, although it is unlikely.

For software induced corruption,, I’ve pointed Time Machine at my RAID and back it up to a separate 4TB drive. The media files never change, so they’re backed up only once. The metadata files are archived every hour, and I should be able to go back to any prior version supported by TM. That’s the theory anyway. I need to add a TM exclusion list for the Render Files directories in each event, or it will gobble up the backup drive. These directories can be regenerated by FCPX as needed.

I haven’t tested any of these scenarios however.

[John Kirkilis]

At the risk of alienating even more non-US sports fans, perhaps basketball would make for a more apt sports metaphor. How long did it take high-schoolers Kevin Garnet, Kobe Bryant, Lebron James, Dwight Howard to be dominant in the NBA?

p.s. I went to high school with the late Mark Fidrych.

[John Kirkilis]

I’ve got few bugs to flush out before I give these settings a try… literally. I came home to discover a bunch of tiny ants crawling on my laptop. Some seemed to be coming out of one of the air vents of my MBP. I’ve seen ants destroy less expensive electronic devices. I powered everything down and moved my gear to a white surface where it would be easier to see the little buggers. I should probably open the laptop and take a peek inside just in case.

I’m reading up on some DNxHD white papers on Avid’s site at the moment. If my setup can handle the bandwidth, is there a benefit to going with the 10-bit 220x option if we’re only dealing with a rough cut for the foreseeable future?

Also, have Vegas’ export capabilities improved in the last few versions that would allow us to hand off a rough cut to a real pro for color grading, etc. using their own tools?

John

[John Kirkilis]

I don’t know about PMU, but for my camera, they refer to CMU, Content Management Utility, which I’ve downloaded and run before to handle the case when a clip spans memory card A and B in the camera. You’re absolutely right, I should run all of my archived AVCHD directories through that utility first before doing the transcode to DNxHD. If I run everything through Compressor to get to DNxHD, I wonder if Vegas will employ Smart Rendering logic for the raw footage splitting. I’m not sure I’ll be able to tell if Smart Rendering is being applied though.

I’ll experiment when I get home, but if you have any thoughts to offer, I’m all ears. Thanks for helping me negotiate this terrain.

[John Kirkilis]

Here’s some info on a sample mts file from my camera:

From Videospec:

*** General Parameters ***
– Name: 00006.MTS
– Container: Mpeg Transport Stream
– Size: 1.084 GB
– Duration: 6mn 29s
– Bitrate: 22.2 Mbps

*** Video Track Parameters ***
– Format: H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
– Bitrate: Max.: 22.0 Mbps / Average: 21.1 Mbps / Min.: Undefined
– Frame rate (fps): Max.: Undefined / Average: 23.976 / Min.: Undefined
– Encoding profile: High@L4.0
– Image size: 1920*1080
– Pixel Aspect Ratio: Undefined
– Display Aspect Ratio: 16:9
– Interlacing: Progressive

*** First Audio Track Parameters ***
– Format: AC3-A52
– Bitrate: 256 Kbps
– Resolution: 16 bits
– Rate: 48.0 KHz
– Channel(s): 2 (stereo)
– Position: Front: L R

From Media Info:

General
ID : 0 (0x0)
Complete name : /Volumes/Lili Primary/AVCHD AX2000 Raw/Lili Interview 3 and Mary/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM/00006.MTS
Format : BDAV
Format/Info : Blu-ray Video
File size : 1.01 GiB
Duration : 6mn 29s
Overall bit rate mode : Variable
Overall bit rate : 22.2 Mbps
Maximum Overall bit rate : 24.0 Mbps

Video
ID : 4113 (0x1011)
Menu ID : 1 (0x1)
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : High@L4.0
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, ReFrames : 2 frames
Codec ID : 27
Duration : 6mn 29s
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 21.1 Mbps
Maximum bit rate : 22.0 Mbps
Width : 1 920 pixels
Height : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate : 23.976 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.423
Stream size : 978 MiB (95%)

Audio
ID : 4352 (0x1100)
Menu ID : 1 (0x1)
Format : AC-3
Format/Info : Audio Coding 3
Mode extension : CM (complete main)
Codec ID : 129
Duration : 6mn 29s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 256 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel positions : Front: L R
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 11.9 MiB (1%)

When I go to create a custom Quicktime template in Vegas for the DNxHD codec, I’m given several attributes that I’m not quite sure how they should be set for this joint use of footage between FCPX and Vegas such as:

Color Levels: 709 or RGB Levels
Alpha: None, Compressed, Uncompressed
Resolutions: (there are many choices. I can decipher the 720 vs. 1080, progressive vs. interlaced, framerate, and bit-depth, but there’s another number without any prefix or suffix, which might be the bitrate, but I’m not sure.

I’ve attempted to attach a screenshot to this post:

[John Kirkilis]

Supposedly, FCPX takes the original AVCHD footage and rewraps it with a Quicktime container, leaving the H.264 intact. Since FCPX cleanly rejoined the 2GB segments produced by the camera, is there any reason I shouldn’t use these mov files? Recall that Vegas will not correctly join the 2GB mts file segments when I place them contiguously in the timeline. Vegas does not seem to care about the meta data in the AVCHD directories archived from the memory cards, since it doesn’t enable the “OK” button until I’ve selected an mts file in the Streams directory.