[Mark Suszko]

Stylz, bad footage and continuity errors are very realistic, learning on only perfect footage would not make you as strong an editor. I’m glad to hear the program is still out there, do you know how much it costs?

[Mark Suszko]

Well, there’s always eentering it at regional contests, or screening it at a local MCA meeting…

[Mark Suszko]

Repeat after me, in a low gravelly voice…

“In a world…”

😉

[Mark Suszko]

Some time ago, Roger Ebert developed a product for teaching editing technique in colleges. I believe it was called “The Heist”, or something like that. It consistes of multicamera, time code windowed footage of a staged bank robbery. You used to be able to get it in almost any video format. The idea was a professional director and camera crew shot all the coverage and closeups for you, you had to put the sequences together, and there were many, many ways to do that.

I don’t know if that product is still out there, but it might be worth looking into.

Failing that, if it’s practice you want, contact a local drama group and see what they could perform for you that you could shoot in a similar way.

[Mark Suszko]

I think you’re hosed, between the DV and the shutter action, you might be trying to key one field’s worth of image info in each of those motion frames. For the frames that are not working, You will need to hand-rotoscope those. You can export a frame movie into Photoshop, or use a paint program or compositor (hopefully with a wacom tablet and pen) to draw sharper mattes around the hand and finger, etc.

In DV, keying off green tends to work a little better than blue, as you have more luminance info with green. One other trick you might try is to do a luma key instead of a chrmakey, or combine the matte generated in luma over the chroma matte. Anything to avoid the tedious hand-roto work;-)

[Mark Suszko]

Try looking it up in IMDB.com

[Mark Suszko]

I would add the Ultimatte web site is often the first place for beginners to look up info on chromakeying.

[Mark Suszko]

B&H comes to mind first.

[Mark Suszko]

Wet or dry, it makes a difference. Use a wet system if you can. If you have the right kind of cleaning sticks (q-tips are NG), you can go inside and clean off things like the guides and pinch rollers manually. We do this typically with very pure isopropyl alcohol on our larger decks. In the bad old days, freon was the weapon of choice, but the isoprop should be ok… If you’re afriad of doing more harm than good, take it into a shop and have them professionally clean it, plus check the alignment of the tape path.

And never mix brands of tape again… if using someone else’s camcorder, run a wet cleaning tape thru it first, just on general principle.

[Mark Suszko]

Maybe you cleaned the heads, but you may not have cleaned the whole tape path, the rollers, etc. Did you use a cleaning cassette, or the old chemwipe sticks method?