[Larry Melton]

Thanks again to everyone for your responses. I’ll be checking out the demos of the products suggested and see what works best for me.

Larry Melton

[Larry Melton]

Thanks to all for your responses. I could post a frame of my scene, but I’m not having too much of a problem with any single frame – it’s the changes in the shot over time (moving camera) that make this more difficult.

Rendernyc, you mentioned Primatte – how does that compare in terms of performance and speed? Tmvc, I may be in touch after I check out the demo.
Thanks again everyone for taking the time to respond.

Larry Melton

[Larry Melton]

Is the image being “upsized” to fit the HDTV screen? Your HDTV LCD is probably 1280 x 720 (or similar) so even if you have an upconverting DVD player, there’s a lot of digital manipulation going on to make it fill your TV. Try playing it on an SDTV and see if it looks better.

Larry Melton

[Larry Melton]

These are interesting questions….

There’s more competition than ever. Cheap technology is probably the biggest reason, along with the maturation of the industry.
This keeps prices competitive. In the midwest where I operate a small production company, budgets were up a bit in 2006 – but that was the first time I’ve seen that this decade. We do a lot of commercials, and one thing I’ve noticed is that TV stations are doing better work in this area. How do we compete? As Nick said, it’s important to try to build strong enough relationships that we become part of the process.

While nobody is specifically asking for HD yet, I dove into HDV about 18 months ago and have been trying to educate clients about it. One of the selling points is that by shooting in HD now, they’re building an archive that will work better for them down the road. The other benefit to this is that I am able to provide quality that compares favorably to film production
(especially for TV spots) at a much lower cost. I also like the results better, and that’s worth something.

On the road to finding the right solutions to where I am now (JVC Pro HD, Adobe Production Studio with Matrox Axio LE), I tried a few different solutions at a cost of a few thousand dollars. It occurs to me that this is a trend as well – we will be moving through new technologies faster and faster, there will never be another Betacam SP. But the monetary risk is much lower.

Clients are looking for someone they can trust. Whether they want me to write, produce, direct and edit, or just turn on the camera and point it at something, they want to know that I will do what I say – and more – and that I’m honest and worthy of their trust and money. And they want value –
not the cheapest price, but the most for their money. This hasn’t changed since I started my business 20 years ago.

I’ve had a lot of discussions lately with friends and peers about how much this biz has changed over the last 10 years. I have become a computer geek by necessity. I spend at least half of my working hours in front of a computer – editing, compositing, communicating with clients. I can’t believe how indispensable e-mail has become. There are times when I complete a project and send out dubs and never speak to my client in person or on the phone – it’s all via e-mail. Last year I produced a fairly significant TV spot for a major NASCAR speedway. While I did have some phone conversations with my client, I didn’t meet her in person until after the spot had already aired for months. To me, this was a kind of amazing thing – internet approvals and e-mail had removed geographic boundaries.

And yes, VHS is dead. But I also believe that DVDs are on their way to the grave already. I have almost completely stopped making DVDs for the purpose of client approval – I just post it online for them to download. And as the television and computer converge, I’m convinced that’s where it’s all going.

I have a real love-hate relationship with the current state of this industry. I turned 50 in 2006 and despite my best efforts, I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up with the swift changes in technology. When that technology betrays me I find myself incredibly angry and frustrated. But it’s amazing that I can produce high-quality video with network and feature-film quality effects on a desktop computer. So that’s what I’m trying to do these days, and when it works, I realize I’m lucky to be working in this business. When it doesn’t, selling insurance seems pretty attractive.

Hope this was a little helpful.

Larry Melton
Triangle Productions

[Larry Melton]

Thanks for taking the time to provide a thoughtful response. I appreciate it. Does it help at all that I also see words backwards, Sitruc? I named my daughter Hannah because it’s a palindrome. Then we adopted a little girl from Ukraine named Natasha, despite her backwards name….ah satan. Anyway, if reading words backward will help me learn Dreamweaver, then it shouldn’t be too hard!

Thanks,

LM

[Larry Melton]

ISO export was a no go. I called Adobe about this and they tell me that Premiere Pro is not capable of a direct export to DVD on an HD project. This is 1280 x 720 JVC HD 100 footage. Frankly, I’m skeptical of that response – I swear I’ve done this before with no problem. And since it can export to MPEG2DVD, it seems like it shouldn’t be much different. Oh well.

Thanks for the responses.

Dean

[Larry Melton]

Thanks for the responses….the external drive is formatted NTFS. The C: drive has 20 gig available. I set that as my “DVD encoding” drive in preferences. Same result.

My alternative has been to export an MPEG2 DVD movie and then put into Encore. The irony is that these files are only about 500MB when encoded. I’d really rather just export to DVD, which seems like something that should work here.

Still welcoming your suggestions. Thanks,

Dean

[Larry Melton]

Thanks Tim and Dezmond for the suggestions and info. Tim, is this procedure documented somewhere?..I must have missed that in the manual :).

I’ll contact Aja support to ask them about it, but it really goes to my point regarding the need to be a IT
pro or software engineer in order to edit these days. It also seems strange to me that these drivers would be in conflict – didn’t Cineform just have a promo that bundled their product with the Xena card?

Thanks again for the responses.

Dean

[Larry Melton]

Actually, this plays into another question that I’ve had….I come from the Avid world, as well as the Accom Affinity, and in both of these apps, one of my best friends was the “T” key, which immediately
marked in and out points on the clip you had highlighted. I’ve looked through the “Keyboard Customization”
options and don’t see this command anywhere. And to address the original poster, this option would allow you to push “t” and “q” (go to in point) and immediately be at the head of the selected clip.

Does Premiere have this command? Thanks for any help.

Dean

[Larry Melton]

And that, fellow bovines, is why Nick Griffin is a legend. Thanks for the great insights. Bob says Hi.

Dean