[Kevin Hamm]

Ok, so here’s what I’ve done to replicate the look just using Final Cut:

Select the scene, edit timeline to taste.

Choose from scene the brightest clip bit and double-click to put it up in the viewer.

Go to Filters and find your Overdrive Effect Filter, which will allow you to make everything appear to be overlit.

Then adjust to taste a bit.

Back in filters, choose the ‘Tint’ filter, and choose a color that will give you the effective wash you are looking for.

You can also, now, add the 3-way-color corrector to adjust your levels and tones for each level more precisely. You’ll end with the same effect.

Now, how you translate that your system, I don’t know, but I hope this helps some.

[Kevin Hamm]

You’re welcome!

Yesterday was another show for me, and there is one other thing I meant to tell you about – commercials. If you end up selling this show to advertisers and then having to add in the commercials yourself, be sure to import them and normalize them to exactly 30 seconds in length, and whatever audio levels you are told to use – I set mine to hover at -12db so I have room for peaks, but most everything is between -12 and -18db. That way, when you need to drop them into your show’s timeline, you know that it’s the right levels, the right end tags, the right everything, and your timeline is clean and random edits don’t mess with your commercials. Advertisers hate that; who knew?!?

Have fun, and if you need or want more of my vast wilderness of insanity information, I’d be glad to help. Just let me know.

kev~!

[Kevin Hamm]

I do a weekly show for the local college athletics covering (shocker) sports, which basically means football at this point. We (me and a student athlete that runs the second camera) film the bits on Sunday at noon and it’s on air Sunday at 10:30 pm. I’m the editor. I’m the graphic designer. I’m the everything-behind-the-scenes for this.

Is it ideal? No. Workable? Oh yeah. Fun? Like you wouldn’t believe. So… some suggestions and advice for you.

First, stop the panic. While people run around worrying about what they don’t have, let’s cover what you do have first:

Cameras – you’ve got 2 of them. I’m presuming that you actually do have some lighting, but even if you don’t, you can get good shots from normal lighting if you adjust the settings. How do I know? Our lightkit took an unscheduled trip one weekend, and I was left to use bar lighting and sunlight-thru-windows with well place reflect… er, white posterboard and a mirror.

Talent – they already do this gig, they have an idea how it goes, and they know what they want. They’ve given you notes on a napkin, but that’s still a start.

Self-Talent – take that story editing skill and extend it a bit by taking the notes from that napkin and creating the outline you seek. I presume that it’s a 30 minute show, so you’re going to have a RT 28:30 when finished, and have 8 to 9.5 minutes of commercials. (speaking of which, how those are added is a concern for you to discover, but is easy to deal with in editing).

Timing – this is critical for a hosted show. People tend to talk at length. Too much length. So, find out the number of commercials, normalize them to 30 seconds each, and then break the rest of the time down into logical bits that give a nice float to the show. Longer towards the beginning to help establish the subject, shorter at the end to allow for cuts and breaks to build suspense and keep interest. No section is going to be much over 5 minutes anyway. You can easily handle this.

DV – yeah, ok, the DV gamut isn’t as wide as the full NTSC. You know who notices? TV Geeks. Unless you do something horribly wrong in filming and have exceedingly flat video, you’ll be fine. A trick in FCP that I use is to add the Desaturate filter to the track and drag the setting to -50 or so if I have a flat look to begin with. I don’t know why the Desaturate function has a negative value, but it does, and it’s not the same as using the any of the saturation controls anywhere else in the program. it truly is a gem thing to try.

And here’s a great secret about a lot of cable systems. Anything that comes to them, no matter if it’s from HugeMultiNationalMediaConglomorate-via-DigiBeta or from MomWithHandiCam-via-Hi-8 they will import it and store it as an .avi using Windows Media and settings that work with their players, which, guess what, don’t support the full NTSC gamut either. So DV is usually fine to deliver the final.

And yes, it goes to cable as well (shown on Wednesdays). And guess what? They take the DV and put it over to Beta (not digiBeta, just Beta) and I still have a better looking show than most of what they get from bigger houses with more money, staff and (supposedly) better equipment.

I use FCP Studio 1 (need studio 2, it will help a lot with some bits I’ll cover in a minute) on a powermac G5 with 1GB ram and way too many external drives attached to it because we have lots of small clients. I have 2 sony cams, a deck, and me.

Use all the tools in your arsenal. Editing in FCP is great, but do your lowerthirds and titles using Motion or LiveType. Do them now, build them and get them out of the way and approved so that you can drag and drop them in and be done with them when editing a show on deadline. This is one area where FCPS2 will make a huge difference because Motion projects can be created as templates with drop zones and text fields so multiple instances of the same template can be used directly in FCP, rather than a new motion project for each variation.

Organize. Organize. Organize. You can’t be too organized. I’m a huge failure when it comes to this, but everyone else keeps telling me I have to do it. And as you can see from the advice that everyone else gives, it’s important to do what they say. HA!

Organize for yourself. If someone else needs to know how your system works, document it. But don’t adopt something from a system you read about if you don’t think it will work. Don’t be afraid to change things up if you find out that the systems need changing, but do it however is best for you.

Some people will disagree with me but since I do this every week and it works, I know you’ll be fine. In fact, I took over the show last year, and we went from 13-15 days for the director/editor to 7 hour days. Not because she was a bad director, far from it. She didn’t have the time to chill and figure out the shortcuts to make it easy on her. She still covers on weekends when I’m away, but she doesn’t work 16 hours that sunday, she works 8. And that’s not bad at all.

So, relax a bit. Chill, and enjoy the challenge. You’ve got a HUGE opportunity here, enjoy it.

[Kevin Hamm]

Oh, you’re not that late, we just got the Chyron (thankfully we didn’t spend that much on it) and it’s arriving next week. I’ll let you know.

I’m not too worried about it, it’s not like it can’t be l’arned, right?

[Kevin Hamm]

Well, here we are at, well, we missed a week. AUGH. However, we don’t have the chyron, and I don’t think it’s coming. The company that sold it to my boss didn’t bother to have one in stock, and, after reading the posts here, I’m thankful. I’m checking out the other ideas, and I really appreciate everyone’s insight. Please, if you have more suggestions, please please please let me know!

kev~!

[Kevin Hamm]

Crap, I type 117 wpm most days, but sometimes fall to drinking and then I type faster but with more backspacing, which is why my pinky finger on my right hand is roughly the same diameter as the Washington Monument.

I’m concerned that the Duet, while *supposedly* already bought is not here and not available for me to play with means I’m going to be learning this thing live. But that leads to another question – what would anyone suggest instead of the duet? Is there a Mac-based solution that would work?

[Kevin Hamm]

Thanks for the info!! I’ll check them out and see what I can find.

[Kevin Hamm]

Since I put the Tape in and it Played, yes I’m sure it plays… I just think it very odd that it can play it but not pump something over the firewire.

[Kevin Hamm]

Ok, so this is my experience, and while not extensive it did work. I cannot say that it was fun to sit through, but in the end, it worked better than I expected. The biggest problem that happens when converting between PAL and NTSC can be seen on shows like “Will & Grace” in the UK – the sound slips out. I was having the same issue, so I decided to two step the process.

Export your video tracks to a PAL format from your timeline
Export your audio to AIFF.
Start new project in PAL format
Import video
Import Audio
Export PAL movie.

Now, this caused *none* of the problems that I was told to expect, and my project was a 30 minute corporate piece, with chromokeying, titling, and lots of full-view scene changes, but perhaps I was just lucky. YMMV

Kevin Hamm
Video, Web, Print and coloring books.

[Kevin Hamm]

a couple of things to try – first, recapture that particular clip, as it could just be corrupted. If you don’t know how to do this, the simplest way (and the way that saves the most HD space, too) is to locate the original capture and delete it, open the project and batch capture.

If you then can’t play still, trash the preferences for FCP, restart and check to see if you can get it to work.

If none of this works, and that’s possible, you can still edit without using the viewer, just drag do your timeline, and cut using the player as a viewer – it kinda sucks, but you’ll at least get through it. And once you’re done with the project you can do some heavier digging into your system and update the OS, which is possibly part of the problem. I would wait to do that, tho, until you have this project done. Updating in mid-project is never a good idea…

Kevin Hamm
Video, Web, Print and coloring books.