[Mark Hollis]

There really is no such thing as DV versus DVC Pro, unless you mean Mini-DV, which is a consumer-prosumer format.

As to the bitrate, mini-DV has a lower bitrate and lower chroma sampling. In NTSC, it’s sampled at 4:1:1, while DVC Pro is sampled at 4:2:2. Mini-DV takes advantage of the same characteristic of the human eye that S-VHS did: The human eye, having fewer cones than rods, tends to see less detail in color and uses brightness and contrast to determine resolution of an object. S-VHS captured 400 lines of B/W information while treating color with the same disdain that any cheap “color under” system would do.

With mini-DV, the black and white information is oversampled 4 times (allowing for very good resolution in B/W and the color channels are not oversampled.

This doesn’t seem to matter much, if you are shooting a well-lit talking head. But if you are doing green-screen work, you’ll have problems in the keys with 4:1:1-sampled video. Believe me, I’ve been there.

As Kevin’s working with DVCPro, he’s at least 4:2:2. And that can be good.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Thanks for all of your help, Vince.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

OK, I’m using the Panasonic AJ-SD255 (which is limited to NTSC and PAL standard video). It works great over firewire and I am ingesting with Adobe’s Premiere Pro version 1.5, so any version should work for you over firewire.

As to how much drive space you would need, I’m using a 1T external drive (WD MyBook) that I reformatted to NTFS (they come formatted to FAT, which limits your file size to under 2G). I cut a weekly news program and I try to keep the material from several weeks back so that I can revisit material as needed within the context of the show.

If you are in HD, you may need an array to play back a stream of video and there are 2G and bigger arrays that are very good. I particularly like Sonnet Tech’s SATA arrays because of their outstanding customer support.

As you begin to capture, Adobe’s Premiere Pro will tell you how many hours and minutes of video you can capture. Less if it’s HD, more if it’s SD.

In that you have a VCR, I would use that over using a camcorder (unless the camcorder uses solid-state recording), as I try to limit head wear on camera’s tape mechanisms.

You need a VCR that can record. You need a Firewire 400 card on your PC. If you get an external firewire drive, you need to make sure that ingest from tape is done on one firewire channel, while recording to a hard drive is done on a separate channel, so a two-port card needs to have two separate chips driving it (one port per channel).

Premiere Pro will control your VCR wonderfully, though I note that, with Premiere Pro 1.5, batch capture fails at least 50% of the time. I think that the problem is that when the application controls the deck, it does not initiate its search-to-cue properly. To the extent I have problems capturing (where it suggests I increase pre-roll) I hit the virtual stop button and it seems to find where it needs to go.

I did not answer your “how much drive space” question because I don’t know if you are in HD or SD and I don’t know how many tapes you have. For SD, I’m recommending a 1T drive to start. You should not capture to your C: drive. You will need an array if you are in HD.

Drives you buy need to be 7200 RPM with a 1M buffer or faster. HD arrays tend to be more expensive but worth the money.

I am not producing blu-ray disks and cannot help you there.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

I recently did a comp with 114 layers, mostly text over video backgrounds, but some moving video dissolved in. There were also some documents that were either scanned in or created by pulling PDF files into Photoshop, merging visible layers for the first page and saving as PSD files.

End result was pretty good.

All of the books tell you about precomping elements in AE. For example, the wheels on your train would need to rotate. If you create a layer with the wheel slowly turning, gaining speed and really cranking until it became a blurred spinning circle, you’d be able to use that for all of the wheels on the train, save an old-time steam locomotive (which has levers attached to wheels). Any element that is going to repeat in a scene can be precomped like that and then brought in as you will.

Passenger cars tend to look the same on trains, with an occasional viewing car (bi-level with a glass top) interspersed every so often. if you have a freight train, freight cars tend to be fairly similar, with just a few types.

I should mention that I have never seen a train gather such speed that it blurred in 60 seconds — trains are really heavy and gather speed much more slowly. But we can pretty much alter any type of Physics we want when we animate.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Export using no codec in Quicktime — Set compression to “none.” This will preserve as much information as possible for your colorist.

Where you may have problems is on re-import. If you are on a PC and he is on a Mac, Quicktime tends to shift gammas (at no extra charge). Also the Apple ProRes codec can give you hives unless you have it on your PC and it works within your system.

https://support.apple.com/downloads/Apple_ProRes_QuickTime_Decoder_1_0_for_Windows

But it tends to introduce a slight gamma shift, so if your colorist exports as an image sequence, you will get no gamma shift from Mac to PC (though you may really fill up your drives…).

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

AVIs that are made through your firewire capture will be very nice as will uncompressed video. Problem with uncompressed video is that is is really large — but if you are doing blue or green-screen keying, it’s a really good idea.

Beware of MPEG and long-GOP material. We converted a large number of previous shows into MPEG that originated on DVCPro, P2 or Betacam SX and the result is not good. While these archives are viewable from the standpoint of being historical shows, they are not good for inserting material into current timelines. We get MPEG motion artifacts that border on the “Max Headroom” objectionable.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Another translation:

He thanks me for the translation.

He is using an Intel Core2Duo PC running at 2.4 GHz Windows XP with 4G of physical RAM. He has tried CS3 and CS4 and the problem is the same. This is the first time this problem of skipping has occurred — other projects he has done have not had this issus (I wonder if he has a corrupted Project).

He believes that the problem may be in the types of archives that he uses.

Because the project is really big, he has divided it into three sections and has exported them into Blu-Ray and M2V files (h.264, I think). He then puts the three parts together and tries to export to HDV.

The cuts and jumps seem to be related to the changes between one section to another. He has tried applying a video limit filter (perhaps what he is saying here is he is trying to make the video PAL-Legal with a color space adjustment) and that has no effect.

Anyone have any ideas for Alfonso?

I am imagining two possible causes: He may be in long-GOP hell or he may have a corrupted project.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Well that doesn’t work for me as it’s not an option. But that is not to say it’s not an option for others.

I’m using Premiere Pro 1.5 and AE 6.5 and I think they came before CS3 and CS4 where integration really started happening with the Adobe applications.

I did have this demonstrated with CS3 by a friend of mine who works at a station in New Hampshire. And if that’s not working well for you, Tracy, it may be due to limitations in your current processor or RAM limitations.

When/if Adobe upgrades Premiere and After Effects to 64-bit, lots of the RAM issues will automagically dissappear — assuming you have enough RAM in your system and are running a 64-bit OS, which means Leopard, Tiger or Snow Leopard (on the Mac, which can all run 64-bit Cocoa-only applications — Oh wait, that’s right Adobe uses Carbon, which was the transitional API that came out in 2000 to get people over the hurdle between System 9 and OS X and Apple told everyone it’s being deprecated.) or Vista or Windows 7 on the PC.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

I am passionate about my work, but rarely kill myself over it.

So let me get this straight: You have killed yourself over your work but that doesn’t happen often?!

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Hopefully, I’m the culprit, because there is a solution to that problem.

Euthanasia is not necessarily a good idea.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?