Joseph W. bourke
Forum Replies Created
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Richard –
Are you sure the noise floor in the room is only coming from the PC? Often times there is air conditioner rumble, especially if you’re in an office building, and machine noise from other rooms vibrating through the walls and ceilings.
In a way, it doesn’t matter where the noise is coming from. The important thing is to isolate the noise floor (from points in the clip where the speaker is silent – which you’re doing), and then remove it from the audio.
The frying noise you’re talking about – could this be a battery in the mic on its’ way out, or is it just a cheap lav mic? Another thing to check is the gain on your mic while you’re recording – is that coming through a mixer with a master volume? You might be introducing noise there as well. There will always be some noise in the audio, due to ambient sources and RF interference, and a million other possibilities. The key is to track down the ones you can control before you record, and remove the ones you can’t in post. Since every audio recording situation is different (unless you’re in a studio), and mics are all over the place as far as signal/noise ration, there is no useful number in db to give you.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Jack –
You don’t say whether you have After Effects in your arsenal, so I would assume you don’t. That would be my first suggestion – the possibilities are endless with AE.
You should certainly be able to achieve just about any color correction effect without third party plugins or AE. The question is – do you want to learn how to do it, or do you just want a plugin to choose a canned effect? I would suggest getting under the hood, because it will open up a whole world of capabilites in PPro. Here’s a start:
https://www.lynda.com/home/Player.aspx?lpk4=88619
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Stuart –
I’ve done a lot of motion tracking, using both Combustion and After Effects, and every single project required a certain amount of hand keyframing. If you really want it to look right, there are always places you have to go under the hood and tweak.
That said, it should be possible to get very close with the tracker(s), of course depending on the points you pick, and bearing in mind that both of the trackers I’m talking about are 2D trackers. In any given project I worked on, I would say that the tracker hit the mark in about 60 to 80 percent of the data – the rest was frame by frame hand work.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
That’s because the DVD standard calls for a 720 x 480 file (in NTSC – looks as if you’re working in PAL – the standard there is 729 x 576). It just won’t burn anything larger.
Here’s a link which will help clarify that standard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video
It seems to me that it’s an MPEG-2 limitation, but that’s the nature of the DVD-Video consumer format.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Personally, I love Dropbox. I had tried many of the free services, such as TransferBigFiles, and a couple of others. They were sometimes fast, sometimes slow; as a result, unreliable.
I tried out the 2GB free Dropbox account, and found it simple to use, and simple for my clients to understand. I could set up folders so that only certain clients had access to their folders, and certain people within that company. I now have a 50GB account, and it’s only a hundred bucks a year.
As far as encoding, after my master is done in Premiere, or AE, usually at 1920 x 1080, I will output that uncompressed. Then I encoded Quicktime movies at 640 x 360 for approval. Since this is the size that many of my clients end up using on their websites, it’s perfect for approval. They don’t see something that’s better than the final delivery encoding. After changes/approvals, I deliver the final files via Dropbox as well, usually sending .flv and H.264 files. Works great for me! I haven’t sent out a DVD in over a year!
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
As a matter of convenience, when I’m doing distribution files which differ greatly from my master, I’ll output my 1080p “master” from Premiere (via AME), and then queue up my distribution files for the client in AME (I often send out, for a particular client, 640 x 360, and 320 x 180 files for the web, in H.264, as well as .f4v formats, plus a file encoded for the client’s Blackberry as well).
I find that by getting my one master done, I can then manage the encoding process better in AME, because I can look at the queue, and keep track of which formats I’ve got ready to go – then I hit the “go” button just once, and my deliverables are done.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
No offense meant, Ted, but shaking the footage isn’t going to help anything here. The people going to this practice need to be calmed down and reassured, not blasted with some hip, now, type of bandaid. It’s the message that needs to be tweaked, not having some current style slapped on top of it.
This is a content based video which is trying to tell a story, albeit a bit scattered right now. The key to it is the message – the visuals are secondary, but, that said, by consistent color choices which fit the corporate color scheme (the logo at this point), smooth motion (with keyframes that ease in and out), and some soft dissolves, will help relax the viewer, and help them feel at ease making their choice. In videos such as this, style is always secondary to content. That said, I’m glad the PIP went away – also the beveled boxes on the PIP were just canned looking. The opening shot could be greately improved by having a slow zoom in to the picture. You can do this yourself – just study other people’s work in a similar context.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Yeah Dave, but the Lipton tea bag has the pleated fold design, with the staple string-tag retainer, so it takes two extra steps to get it into the cup. I want to stick with the Twinings – it’s the pro tea drinker’s choice.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
You can do what is called a “dissolve loop”. I believe that there is even a script which will automatically create one for you – yup, there is:
https://aescripts.com/the-loopmaker/
To do it from scratch, you take the video which you want to loop, split it in the middle, swap the start half with the end half, and then put a dissolve in the middle (as long as you need it to not look distracting).
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Having used the Wacom serial models for years in my broadcast job, although mostly for Photoshop and Illustrator, when I started my own business, this was one of my must haves.
The sticker shock of the Wacom (it’s worth it, but I’m a cheapskate) made my first foray to the MonoPrice tablet. They have a selection of tablets, very cheap, but I found the pen was clunky feeling (little better than drawing with a mouse, which is like drawing with a potato!), and the resolution just wasn’t there.
I managed to find (on Craigslist) a USB Wacom Intuos 3 which was very lightly used, and works perfectly with Photoshop, AE, Artrage, 3D Studio, and other software in which a tablet is a necessity. I find the resolution just fine – it’s the PTZ-431W model – and its’ fairly small footprint lets me work with it in my lap comfortably. I had a few issues with drivers and CS4, but with CS5 on my laptop, I find that it works perfectly plug and play. No driver install – it just works.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com