[Mark Hollis]

Firewire is supposed to give you control and I/O, not just “I” and control.

I like your preference for a CRT and there are LCD monitors now that one may use as a reference. But they are hideously expensive for all but a pretty busy post facility (or television station or network) to afford.

My absolute guides are a CRT, a waveform monitor and a vectorscope, but I’m only working with NTSC. When we transition to HD, I’ll be looking at an LCD and really double-checking everything carefully on waveform and vector. May make my eyes fall out but, for the price of the reference monitors, we just cannot handle that.

I learned how to read waveform monitors and vectorscopes back in the early 1980s and learned how to do fine color correction in the 1990s, all with analog equipment. The transition to digital has introduced people who don’t know what waveform or vector displays are showing into the mix of people considered “editors.”

I don’t mean to sound like an old, fossilized curmudgeon but the tools for fine color correction (and scene painting for looks) have been given to editors with the switch to digital media. That gives us more power for anyone who edits a final product. With power comes responsibility.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

OK, I’m using old and mouldy software so your settings are vastly different, but your export should be “maximum color depth,” else some clipping of the color space may occur. Also remember, TIFF allows for compression (including JPEG type) so you want to send this puppy out uncompressed.

Photoshop is probably the culprit here.

Photoshop needs to be set for sRGB color space as I outlined in my earlier post. If you have Photoshop (as many of my prepress friends do) set to work in CMYK color space, you are pretty much guaranteed to have problems with video import and export through Photoshop.

CS4 may have color space offerings that I do not have.

I am using Premiere Pro 1.5 and Photoshop CS2 on a 5-year-old Dell XPS 600 that, in its day, was a good system. While I suppose I can install CS4, I know Premiere Pro will not work well with that system and Photoshop CS4 will not run in 64-bit or take advantage of a graphics co-processor because of my dated system. So, until our budget allows an upgrade, we’re pretty much sitting pat.

Working in other editing applications and “washing” something through Photoshop for me has always been a breeze and the trick was to make sure I was set to proper video/film color space in Photoshop and not compress the output of the still image(s) in any way. There’s a really cool filter for Photoshop that allows you to make an image look like a Wall Street Journal “woodcut” print and I used Photoshop extensively to do that with a masked image of a person for a spot I cut about two years back (to the rave review of the client) and then recomposited that as a dissolve in and out of the effect in my editor. I was cutting the Alpha in Photoshop (for both the woodcut and the color moving image) and using Photoshop as if it were a processing engine for my editor and it worked without a hiccough. But color space management was crucial.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Vince, when you have material that cannot be exported without rendering, the rendering engine uses all cores.

I have a tendency to do a fair amount of complexity on occasion on my timeline, which does need to be rendered before output.

As to whether or not FCP can play out multiple streams, that tends to be an issue of whether or not your hard drive array can keep up. If you have a slow array, you may need to render to avoid dropped frames. Apple doesn’t control your entire system like Avid does, so there are lots of “unknowns” in individual systems. Some are:

• What kind of card are you using for I/O? AJA? Blackmagic? etc.
• How is your array configured?
• What are you working in, SD or HD?
• How many simultaneous video streams are you trying to work with?
• Which Mac are you using for your work? Core2Duo? Single Quad Core? Dual Quad Core?

The way Avid configures systems (and pretty much guarantees results) is that they purchase fully-blown and tested CPUs, they only use their own proprietary I/O stuff (with the exception of their DS systems, which are now on AJA), they allow you only to use their arrrays and servers and they tightly control all equipment used. Add a third-party server or array and Avid will refuse to support your system.

And Premiere Pro is a lot like FCP in that respect. Adobe has no idea what kind of a system you’re using. There are certain standard systems that they can recommend but they’re not Avid. They cannot force anything on you.

Look at your timeline. If you have a green bar over all of it, you should be good to export and that goes for Avid, FCP and Premiere Pro. The way you get that green bar is by processing your stuff, which creates a render cache file that you’re reading from for those sections that had to be rendered. A render cache is one video stream.

If your system “thinks” it can play back something, it will place a green bar over that area. When I do graphics in After Effects, I export a full-resolution video file. If I import that into Premiere Pro, which is set to the DV (compressed) codec, I get a red bar over that section. Now, even though I have rendered it in AE to output it for Premiere, Premiere still wants to render it.

Output to tape should be from a timeline with a green bar.

If I do a project in Final Cut Pro and I work in Color or Motion, I’ll have to render the result in Final Cut. An 8-core system will render really, really fast because it’s using as many cores as are free. It won’t play back to tape without a render though.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Can you do an Export to Tape? If you can, you should be able to set your system up, through a VCR, to a monitor as I described. You should know I’m using Premiere Pro 1.5 and not CS3 or CS4 (which is what most people here are using) but I cannot imagine that Adobe would have changed monitoring options much.

If you cannot output to tape, you have a fairly serious problem with your computer (but then, one wonders if you would be able to import from tape if you could not output to tape).

I don’t particularly like the idea of using another computer monitor output to monitor video. Computer monitors are notorious for not giving you a good idea of what your video will look like on a real television once you’re all done with it, as their gamuts are not the same and there is a tendency for you to see your work as if it were always progressive (even though your final output may be interlaced).

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

OK Translation (Traduccion)

Hi, friends. I have a problem when I export HDV to a tape.

Transcode to HDV is perfect (I am assuming his files play back just fine on his computer).
When I record to tape, the result is that there are ten-frame cuts or jumps in audio and video. I have made many copies on many diffrernt tapes but this keeps happening. The jumps are not always in the same place on the tape. In a 60-minute tape there can be 3 or 4 of these jumps.

I have checked cables and checked my recorders and other equipment and this keeps happening.

Project settings:

HDV 1440×1080, 25 fps, 48000Hz, 5.1
Video format: m2v.

Thank you!

Alfonso, yo he traducido lo que Usted escribio. Que version de Adobe Premiere Pro use Ud? Y que typo de sistema (computadora) use?

-Mark

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Actually, what you have done here is just run into the wonderful Colorspace Wall. OOF!

Here is what you need to do:

Do an export and as you do that, export the frame as Millions of Colors (not Plus). Use TIFF and no compression to export. When you import into Photoshop, you want to make sure you are using Photoshop’s sRGB or NTSC RGB color space. That way, Photoshop won’t be changing the color space to something designed for CMYK prepress on the way in and then causing you to need to color-correct the keyed overlay when you get it back in to Premiere Pro.

Photoshop’s color space settings are under Edit>Color Settings in Windows.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

You may be able to get some of the detail (that which was not totally clipped) by changing the gamma.

Here’s my rule o’ thumb:

80 units is white (after all, you can see specular highlights on a white thing, so they would have to be more than 80.) Bright white is 90.

Tell Laughing Boy there to not show up in a white shirt. Ever. Yes, I know cameras today have lots of latitude but one needs to expose for skin, not shirt and you still ought to be able to see the buttons. His shirt will make him look bad. Cream looks like white and a nice blue will make him look better.

Then double-check your camera’s exposure level. One cannot fix everything in post.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Vince wrote:

As far as I know, FCP doesn’t take advantage of multi-processing yet…

Final Cut has taken advantage of multiple processors since the days of the Power PC G4-450 systems with dual processors about 9 years ago.

Today’s Final Cut 7 takes full advantage of Apple’s Grand Central Dispatch in Snow Leopard and may move to complete 64-bit process in version 8.

What you do have problems with are the plugins. Many of those will only use one processor core. Not too long ago I tried to do some compositing with Toon-It and they were just on the cusp of releasing a version that would work in multiple cores.

I think Apple’s current low-end has two cores and a 64-bit capable processor. I have their current high-end (Dual Quad Nehalem just shy of 3GHz). Haven’t run the latest FCS on it but that will be coming shortly. Then we’ll see if I need more than 8G of system RAM.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

William, I’m doing this all of the time.

AE can natively import your entire Premiere Pro sequence. If you wish to save out several short sequences (for effects), build them first in Premiere Pro and get your sound correct. Once you have that together, import that sequence into AE. AE will let you import the project and then pick the sequence.

That will create an AE composition with all of the necessary files imported. You’ll also have audio that you will be able to scrub through and “preview” in AE if you need to time certain effects to sound or beat.

When you are finished compositing, simply make a movie (sans sound) in After Effects and import that into Premiere Pro. I, then, create a new video layer on top of the layers I have in Premiere Pro with the AE material, but you can outright replace if that is what you want to do. Your sound will remain where it is, as you didn’t export sound from AE (Premiere’s better for setting up your audio anyway).

If you double-click on the AE composition in Premiere Pro, you can open up AE to re-edit the material (though having both applications open at the same time may cause some systems with not enough RAM to become really slow).

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Buck, on my copy of Premiere Pro, there is a little circle with a triangle on the Monitor display on the “record” side. Click or that and you will get a menu that includes Playback Settings. This is also how you can get Premiere Pro to display a waveform or vector, which, if you open a reference monitor you can gang with your timeline. I don’t like color correction or level correction without scopes.

Anyway, you can select Firewire as the device to play on and if your notebook has a firewire port, you can hook that up to a VCR and take the video and audio out of that VCR for an external monitor. Some cameras will let you do that (hook up to an external monitor), as well.

Additionally, for those who do not have VCRs lying around or whose cameras don’t do monitor playback, I currently use a TVOne DV-1394 Pro SDI Signal converter that works very well. It will convert into SDI, balanced and unbalanced audio, regular video and Y/C video from firewire.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?