[Mark Suszko]

Build it once in Motion (pretty simple, the tracker does all the work) and you can export it into FCPX and save it to re-use any time with new material to fill the screen.

[Mark Suszko]

Are you sure you have enough system memory freed up to handle the rendering? That’s where this kind of problem happens to me; when my available system memory or the media drive I’m rendering to are too crowded.

[Mark Suszko]

Good overview.

Might want to find-and-replace on one word; changing “empathize” to “emphasize”.

[Mark Suszko]

I find I learn better if the shortcuts are directly on the keys. I was fortunate to spec a logic keyboard for my FCP setup. but there’s no money here to do that again for the second edit setup in my suite where I’m going to be toggling back between FCPX and Prem, so for me a skin I can pop on or off is what I think works best for my way of learning. Stickers are too semi-permanent as well, so not doing that.

[Mark Suszko]

I would keep to standard mapping. The nine dollar one has my attention because I’m a thrifty bastard. Has someone here used the cheaper one and do they have an opinion on those? If it’s a durability issue, I’m hoping I’ll learn the keys before the skin wears out.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m sure you’re right, Oliver. And probably part of the success you see can be attributed to better practices and better setups. Our guys are all self-taught on Abobe, and our budgets, low. The gear is not cutting-edge. My observations of the crashes are anecdotal and not scientific. There are too many possible explanations for it and it’s unproductive for me to go chase down exactly what all the factors are, much less convince the guys to adopt any fixes.

Nevertheless, it’s a less than pleasant user experience from my POV. When or if I have fully migrated over to Prem Pro, I’ll be working to make my system as stable as possible, and adjust my own practices to suit. I’ll be looking for tips on that in days to come.

[Mark Suszko]

Perhaps this is only anecdotal, but, the guy in the suite next door runs Premiere pro on a recent MacPro tower and he’s experiencing a lot of crashes every day. Is five or six a lot? Seems like a lot to me. I run FCPX on a 6-year-old iMac pro and it’s very stable. Not that it -never- crashes, but I get a crash maybe once every three days, which recovers in about a minute, and he’s crashing hourly. He’s not doing anything super-complex or challenging either. A lot of his crashes also end up with corrupted files at some point. There’s too many variables involved to make a definitive judgement on his suite; it could be non-Adobe-related hardware issues, it could be he’s not using best practices, could be a lot of things.

I will agree with the argument that Adobe promised more innovative features were coming to Prem Pro as a “benefit” of the subscription model. You look at some of their annual development events, where they sow some of what their lab’s been working on, and they are demonstrating tools in the compositing and effects arena that are jaw-dropping. But I’ve been waiting to see some of those “almost ready for distro” features for like 2 years now, and maybe I missed the announcement, but they haven’t appeared in AE or PPRo yet.

I can’t afford to be too iconoclastic in this argument; I have to learn prem pro, as management policy decisions are forcing the shop to convert to it from FCPX, whether I like it or not. I will say from a personal perspective, I find Prem Pro more buggy, and more unnecessarily complex, and less “fun”, than my user experience with FCPX. I’m definitely having to waste more time thinking about the tool and how to drive it, than using it to do the job, and thinking about the creative decisions of the job.

[Mark Suszko]

Look at it as a creative opportunity.

I wish I knew what kind of music this was…

Here are off the top of my head, some cheap ideas…

A big space like that, one thing I might try is, let it go dark as you can stand, then put lights on dollies, or anything that rolls, and spin them, and maybe the camera, around the band for multiple takes. Get a smoke machine, put your spotlight on a shopping cart and “scan” the light across the band, back and forth, like a laser beam effect.

See if they have a couple forklifts or man-lifts, place two of them on opposite sides of the band, string your own overhead light(s) between those. Use translucent plastic shower curtains from the dollar store and make a huge diffusion panel from it, blast cheap worklights thru it.

Post-Chrtistmas light sale: get tons of xmas light strings and sling a web of them above the band and/or all over the floor randomly. Get hella bokeh out of it if done right.

Bring in a bunch of cars and/or trucks in a semi-circle around and behind the band, with their headlights and parking flashers on. (Bring jumper cables in case the shoot goes long.) On the camera side of the circle, you get big, yet cheap sheets of foil-clad insulation foam from the home improvement store, they make massive soft reflectors to front-fill using bounce from those same headlights.

Whatever you do, my advice is to kill the existing overheads and then light as creatively as you can afford.

[Mark Suszko]

Apply your “private Ryan” effects in post, and set the shutter to deal with the banding first.

The other thing I would say is., there’s another way to solve this problem… kill ALL the overhead lights, if you can. Then light with the instruments you have. The overheads, artistically speaking, add nothing, and you’re fighting them the entire time. Some places like this keep a light or two on with no way to turn them off. I’d still rather have that, than the entire ceiling lit up. I didn’t notice where this hangar is and if it’s in cold-weather country, but can you work with daylight coming thru the open hangar doors as your primary source?

Are the planes going to be in there for the shoot? Can you turn on their strobes and nav lights?

Is this shoot meant to be limbo?

[Mark Suszko]

Evil or not, color or not: it gets billed the same.. 🙂