Mark Maness
Forum Replies Created
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Mixing monitors, to me, is like mixing drives. You know, like mixing a RAIDed Firewire drives with SATA RAIDed drives for doing video editing. You’re bound to run into trouble sometime. As for the same monitors not matching, that’s something else that has to be dealt with.
All monitors are like computers, no two are exactly the same. And there is no way to get them to match exactly by using the little calibration programs that come with them. Your only option to make them match is a calibrator device. Pantone make one called the “Huey” for less than $90 and it works flawlessly on my PCs. I’m not sure about the Macs but I would have to say that it would work just as well as it does on the PC.
Give that a shot, and I’m sure your color issues will go away.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
Hi Wayne,
I can’t answer all of your questions since we haven’t done this yet ourselves but I can say that you’ll have to uprez the film and I would get a company who has the Teranex boxes installed. You’ve spent all your hard earned money to create this film and you want to enter it into a film festival, I’d want the best quality uprez you can buy, it will make the difference for you. Teranex is in the business to create standards for HiDef video, so they are the standard for uprezzing.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
Ok…. Here’s my question. How about using LiveType or Motion to do your credit roll? They do a much better job since these programs are made specifically for the video world. AfterEffects is a very powerful program but you really need to know how to use it and it still takes some trial and error on a project such as yours.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
I agree with you, Tom. Yeah… I come from those days too. But there are so many folks here who wouldn’t understand the aches and pains we had… but then again… we just traded those for new aches and pains.
And if you have noticed, with all of the technology we have, it still takes about the same amount of time to edit a spot or segment for a show that it did about twenty years ago. Yeah, we can do ten layers of video and awesome graphics now but it kinda makes you think, doesn’t it?
Anyways… I still wouldn’t trade my Mac for all of that stuff we needed to make a program back then.
I started out working for a PBS station in college and they were still using the top load 3/4″ tape machines and their idea of A-B roll was two VO-5800s and you pushed play on both machines then used a Microtime switcher to dissolve or wipe between the two and you had better have someone else with you to work the Shure field mixer to do audio fades. That was our edit suite for my first two years. Any graphics that had to be built was done in our production truck that we used for college football games. There went another generation of tape… Mmmm…. those were the days…. Lots of long long hours and long long days… The box of Tums were you best friend. Wait a minute…. They’re still on my desk… Oh well, some things never change.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
I agree with you, Tom. Yeah… I come from those days too. But there are so many folks here who wouldn’t understand the aches and pains we had… but then again… we just traded those for new aches and pains.
And if you have noticed, with all of the technology we have, it still takes about the same amount of time to edit a spot or segment for a show that it did about twenty years ago. Yeah, we can do ten layers of video and awesome graphics now but it kinda makes you think, doesn’t it?
Anyways… I still wouldn’t trade my Mac for all of that stuff we needed to make a program back then.
I started out working for a PBS station in college and they were still using the top load 3/4″ tape machines and their idea of A-B roll was two VO-5800s and you pushed play on both machines then used a Microtime switcher to dissolve or wipe between the two and you had better have someone else with you to work the Shure field mixer to do audio fades. That was our edit suite for my first two years. Any graphics that had to be built was done in our production truck that we used for college football games. There went another generation of tape… Mmmm…. those were the days…. Lots of long long hours and long long days… The box of Tums were you best friend. Wait a minute…. They’re still on my desk… Oh well, some things never change.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
Everybody is so very right… But after the past year of sorry support, this is definitely a major step forward.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
Something else to consider… Sony finally came out with their plugin to FCP and Mac. Its a great way to ingest video from XDCAM. Check it out.
https://bssc.sel.sony.com/BroadcastandBusiness/markets/10014/xdcamhd_info.shtml
I’m sure you’ll love it, I do!
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HDV and DV are two totally different creatures. HDV is a transport stream of data, not a standard video stream. So that means, if you capture HDV to your system and wish to play it back using FCP without a hardware card, it will have to extremely quickly build that frame of video (decode it) so fast that you would have to have a serious super computer to do just that.
A hardware card has built-in hardware codecs to do just that, the same as the machine. I know you’re probably steaming right now because someone didn’t tell you this on the front end, I’m sure. But HDV is a data format and the computer will have to have some serious processing power to decode and export to firewire at the same time. That’s where the capture come in. AJA and Blackmagic have built-in support for HDV playback. I have an AJA Kona 2 card and if I want to edit in HDV, I have to select an Easy Setup for HDV playback in order to view HDV in realtime. Yeah, I know… it kinda bites!
Most everyone here who uses HDV captures to DVCPRO HD or Uncompressed HD and then works with that to get around the HDV thing. When you do this, life gets so much easier.
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You still need a capture capable of HDV playback. Apple sort of misleads everyone on this topic. FCP (by itself) doesn’t playback HDV except in the Canvas and Viewer windows or using the Desktop Preview. To view it properly, you’ll need a capture card like the Blackmagic series or the AJA Kona series of capture cards.
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Hey Zak,
Good questions… I use the Somy M10U HDV deck connected to an AJA HD10A Component to SDI converter and that is connected to my AJA Kona 2 card as HD-SDI input. I have firewire connected for machine control and audio. I have heard this can have some problems but for me it has worked flawlessly. I use the Kona 2 to downconvert my footage in FCP using the IMX50 codec. A better solution, now, would be to purchase the AJA HD10AVA so that you can connect your machine’s video and audio to be converted to HD-SDI embedded signal. That option wasn’t available to me when I purchased my converter.
This is the best workflow for converting HDV to anything else to use in FCP. Most everybody here uses somthing similar to edit HDV into a codec that is useable like DVCPRO HD. FCP doesn’t do HDV very well at all, so the need to capture into another codec is a real necessity.
If I were in your shoes, I’d ask for an AJA Kona 3 and the AJA HD10AVA to go along with a Sony HVR-M25U HDV machine. The Kona 3 is the best capture card available to the market. It is capable of cross-converting HD video which is real important when you break into HD. My next upgrade will have these.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com