[Joni Church]

Thanks Shane, Jeremy,

I’ll be capturing all my footage at DCVPro HD, the only problem is the other editors don’t have HD decks, and my suite is in use pretty much around the clock so I can’t lend them my 1200A or have them capture here to external drives. I really don’t want to do an SD offline, but should it come down to that I need to figure out a way for the other guys to get the footage into their machines. Maybe we’ll rent a second 1200A and work out a sharing system. Seems the easiest method.

Thanks for the clarification about the Varicam timecode being based on 30, not 24. I think I should have realized that…ug.

The show isn’t really graphics intensive so I’m not too worried about having to redig at uncompressed 8 or 10-bit.

[JeremyG] “Do you have an HD monitor?”

Currently I’m working with an Apple Cinema HD Display, and viewing on an external 42 inch Panasonic plasma screen, and doing my color-correcting on a standard Sony 14 inch NTSC CRT monitor. I’ve got a Panasonic external HD monitor on order which I’ve heard is pretty good.

Bean-worms: An undesireable can to open up.

Thanks again,
Joni

[Joni Church]

Hi Stephen,

Your AE render settings should be determined by the field order of your destination program. So if your FCP sequence’s Field Dominance is set to Upper Field, then you should render your AE comp out to Upper Field. Maybe you already know this, but the preference for Field Domincance in FCP is in the Audio/Video Settiings, then Sequence Presets menu.

Try making a new seqence, and ensuring that the field dominance is Lower (which it should be for a DV-PAL sequence), then re-importing you AE render, and see if that forces the field order to come in properly. Also make sure your capture preset is set to DV-PAL. It shouldn’t matter, but sometimes it does, as when importing Photoshop files with layers- they’ll come in with the frame-rate of the current capture preset.

Good luck,
Joni

[Joni Church]

As far as I know, you can’t open an XML in Excel, but you can indeed export a “Batch List” from FCP and open it in Excel. I don’t know if that helps you since I don’t know your reason for wanting to open the XML in Excel, but I used Batch Lists on a movie I just finished in order to print out log sheets and clip information for the continuity people and the director, and it worked great.

Good luck,
Joni

[Joni Church]

Hi William,

I’ve found After Effects to work best in the past, but I just pulled a really nice chroma key in FCP on some 720p HD footage…the only difference being mine was blue screen, not green.

1. Color Smoothing filter (4:1:1 for NTSC or PAL DV, 4:2:2 for DVCPro and 8 & 10-bit uncompressed video)
2. Chroma Keyer filter (you can also use the Blue Screen or Green Screen filters but the Chroma Keyer worked best for me)
3. Matte Choker filter
4. (Spill Suppressor if you need it)

It would be too drawn out to go over my exact process with you here and yours will most likely vary anyway, so have a look at pages 398 through 403 of the FCP manual (Part II). That will give you a really good starting point.

Good luck.

[Joni Church]

Actually, I did end up doing that in the end. I’m brand-new to HD and the Varicam and all the different frame rates and conversions, so I didn’t realize that I could drop an audio clip that I had captured with a different frame rate into a 29.97 SD sequence and have it play out fine. I shouldn’t have assumed it was more complicated than it ended up being.

Thanks for the post,
Joni

[Joni Church]

Start with the 3-way color corrector, if you haven’t already. It’s a basic standard in FCP and it works pretty well as a starting point. You should be able to pull a little light out of the shot, provided it’s not so dark that ther’s no information to pull out. Good luck.

[Joni Church]

Thanks Gary. I was kind of hoping I was missing something and there would be a better way. I suppose the better way would be to tell our DOP not to shoot HD when we’re captioning.

[Joni Church]

Thanks guys.

Yeah, I can’t claim I’ve never chosen to capture a whole tape in one pass, but I sure prefer logging and capturing smaller chunks for it’s organizational and technical benefits. I try not to insist that everone do things “my way,” but when I’m onlining somebody else’s project I just like evrything to be as efficient as possible. Hopefully your posts will help me plead my case with the editor over at the other post house.

Thanks again,
Joni

[Joni Church]

Hi John,

Thanks so much for replying so quickly…it’s good to know that I’m at least somewhat on the right track. Now to get the production crew to shoot all the off-speed stuff on a separate tape!

Thanks again,
Joni