[Mark Smith]

If you can turn off “knee’ in your picture profile , that would be best. The knee shouldn’t affect moving white from 50 IRE up 2 stops but not being familiar with your camera i say this as a word of caution. If you do this exercise and see what the optical/sensor path thinks 2 stop is in terms of level change, then you can duplicate that inside your NLE and with grading controls and have a direct comaprison of results. Happy to be of service,

[Mark Smith]

Pushing in film is basically using gain in digital. THe results of pushing or using gain either add film grain in film or noise in digital. In film choosing to ‘push’ could be a creative choice – like wanting a grainier look over all- adding texture to the image or it could be a practical choice, to compensate for lack of light for adequate exposure.
If you have an object in your frame that is for instance some papers on a table that reads 50 ire on the wfm and you add some gain so that the papers read 70 ire that might be about 2 stops. What gets tricky judging ‘stops’ in the digital world is that there is also manipulations that can be done to gamma curves that make the judgement of stops more difficult. Shoot a test with your camera. Using the picture profile you shoot with normally, shoot a white card at 50 ire, then open the lens 2 stops from your 50 ire setting and record the same card. Bring footage into NLE and check out what the IRE difference is between the 2 exposures. THat will at the very least give you what the camera& lens combo in use thinks 2 stops is. Be forwarned that camera picture profiles can distort results especally ones with strong knee curves at the top of the exposure range ( canon eos profile – I’m looking at you) so choose a flatter profile if possible .

[Mark Smith]

My experience with Panasonic P2 cameras as connected devices for downloading has been mixed. Its been some years, since I have used them, that said, they always worked for me as a card reader that I could connect to my computer and download a card. They were USB 2 and slow but reliable. If you can find a dedicated reader either TB or USB 3 that would be my first choice for handling media of this type. These would be much faster/ more efficient in every respect, the issue is price. The Panasonic readers were always pricey which is one reason I moved away from proprietary readers and media. The other side of the coin is that Panasonic P2 media has been rock solid – I have P2 cards that are 11 years old that still are reliable and work just fine.

Make sure you have the latest drivers for P2 media and the latest Panasonic codec plug in stalled and you should be good to go.

[Mark Smith]

What is the source of your drone footage? I work with DJI inspire Mp4 all the time without issue and don’t transcode.

[Mark Smith]

I’m a DP and I do some editing, and color correcting. I’ve color corrected with the color board, with Color Finale and now Chromatic in FCPX . I can make all of them work for me, but some work better than others.
What is missing for me in the color board is a control more granular than ‘Low Mid High” when targeting areas to correct. Either Chromatic or Color Finale will display a graph where I can grab the line graphing Luma or a color and give it a tug in a direction up or down along that line. The color board is more general with the low-mid -high choices and I feel like I am more limited in correction capability than with either of the other plug ins. I can get close to a result I want with the color board, and in many case even nail it, however with the added granularity of the other tools, in sticky situations, I can really go the full distance.

[Mark Smith]

Inspire 1 here. I use this aircraft for commercial and personal projects, and have a part 107 license. FCPX works well with the files I get out of the X3 or X5 camera, whether those files 4k or HD.

[Mark Smith]

You might also along with Ram consider Duet, the app that can turn an ipad into a second screen for you macbook+ FCPX set up. While the app doesn’t make the screens bigger, having a second screen running on an ipad does help me in a pinch.

[Mark Smith]

Load up the ram. the more the merrier. My quad core i7 mac mini with 16 gigs did pretty well with 1080, 720 shouldn’t be an issue. Even my 2012 13″ macbook with 16 GB ram handles 1080 pretty easily. YOu can also switch to proxy media if you get in a multicam situation or need to deal with weightier media.

[Mark Smith]

I’ll take a stab at this :

In the browser, list view, copy time code, start/end from the fields in the browser and paste into google doc?

If you have keywords or favorites applied to clips, timecode copied from the browser would reflect those ranges…

also If you have Producer’s Best Friend app, you can export lists clips used in a sequence or browser to an excel spreadsheet and can select what info you want exported. This might be your magic bullet which would take advantage of the logging, tagging, keywording work done organizing a library and then pushing it out in an organized way to a format you could then filter/import into a google doc.

[Mark Smith]

I beta test for one company that makes products frequently used in the overall workflow of Digital media production. I do catch some bugs and send them alerts, however I know from one of their programmers that I am one of their few beta testers that gives them good feedback on a couple of their products. I have seen more than a few suggestions i have submitted incorporated into their software over the years.
I am not paid , however I always have the latest versions of their software gratis and some of the apps are not cheap. In a few extraordinary cases one of their programmers has bailed me out of an awful jam by whipping out a custom version of an app that solved a particularly sensitive problem I had run into .