[Mark Suszko]

What does the contract say?

Personally, I’d give a clone to them, but only charge them for the portable drive and labor time to make the transfer. Or send it to cloud storage with password protection and give them the password.The lawyers are going to make you give it up at some point anyhow.

[Mark Suszko]

Update: Looking in the metadata pane, saw something weird. Look at the frame rate.

How does that happen? And yet, even with these settings the way they are, all the first twelve minutes of captions time out perfectly, matching the video and audio of the master timeline.

Where can I command Premiere to give this set file the right frame rate and duration?

How do I get my proper 28:30 duration on the caption track? Dragging on the end of the track *looks* like it might help, but it changes nothing regarding the actual captions.

[Mark Suszko]

“ if the auto exposure is good at the wider shot, shouldn’t I just open the exposure panel and lock the exposure at that value, and then it will hold for the zoomed shots?”

Maybe…. It will hold… but will it be *right*? The trouble started when your auto-iris kept changing depending on wide or tight shots. I guess you’ll find out at the next performance.

Expose so faces are clear, and not blown-out: everything else will have to fall where it may. And you can bring up mids and darks in post.

That audio recorder could be planted center stage or at the foot of the stage…or on a low mic stand in front somewhere… or, with an appropriate matching cable, you can connect it to the audio control board, if you’re using mics and a mixer. To make things simpler in post, once the audio recorder is started, start the camera and then let it free-run without stopping until the very end of the performance. That will make synching the external audio much easier. Any pauses in the program can be edited out after you synch the tracks.

It sounds like you are progressing well in your pursuit of a better image. Good luck, and let us know how the next one looks (and SOUNDS!)

[Mark Suszko]

“Doctor, it hurts when I do this!”
“Then don’t do that!”

Premiere is what I’m using. Any tips to solving this in Premiere would be appreciated.

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks Greg but have you actually got a tip for fixing this in Premiere?

[Mark Suszko]

Update: imported the video and the .srt file into VLC, everything works as expected, captions exist and time out to the end of the program in VLC.

Which makes me think it’s a Premiere problem and not a problem with how I’m getting my .srt file in the first place.

Somehow, when the. srt file gets into Premiere, it’s getting assigned a 12 minute duration, and nothing I do to it on the timeline brings back the “cut off” second half of my show captions..

[Mark Suszko]

Ideally, you set aperture (iris) and white balance during rehearsal, and leave them that way for the performance. If you don’t have the opportunity to set them in advance that way, you should set the white balance to a default preset for “indoor” (about 3200 degrees Kelvin) and then you’ll have to adjust colors in post production as needed.

Something that will help you in post is to shoot full frame of a white card, just before the show, and use that as a point of comparison when adjusting colors later. Ideally, you’d shoot a color bar chart on location; or what we call a “Macbeth chart” of color chips – that’s a bit more advanced, but really helpful in post for getting colors right. Color bars that are electronically generated in the camera don’t do you any good here: you need to see the colors as they have come thru the lens, under the existing lighting conditions, onto the sensor.

Here’s the thing about shooting theatrical material with a “prosumer” camera. Stage lighting is not “normal” everyday lighting. It’s done not just to light things to be seen, but also for dramatic effects, so if they throw up a lot of red or blue in a scene, that’s intended… but an auto-white, auto-iris camera doesn’t understand that. It’s going to try to un-do the lighting director’s work and “correct” it to make it look like everyday daylight or tungsten. And auto-iris is going to obsess on the brightness level of one , small bright white item in your frame and clamp aperture to that, making everything else around it too dark. Or it will concentrate on a large dark area and over-expose, blowing-out people’s faces. Then what you get looks like junk.

So in these kinds of settings I recommend all-manual settings, and yes, that may mean manually “riding” the iris controls up and down to keep a reasonable level of exposure as you zoom in or out. If your camera has “zebra bars” as a display option in the viewfinder, turn those on and learn how to read them. They will show you where you are in danger of over-exposing.

The most important thing to capture on stage is a clean, well-exposed FACE. Everything else takes second priority to that, because nobody can or will watch blown-out faces. You can bring up the mids and blacks in post, but you can’t restore blown-out detail, so make all your exposure and color decisions while shooting based on making the FACES readable and clear.

This is also another reason why shooting with two or more cameras is so useful: the wide shot and closeup shots can stay fixed at the proper settings for each, without constantly having to ride their iris.

[Mark Suszko]

Will they not work even in VLC? That’s a common “can-opener” for media files.

A more arcane but powerful one is FFMPEG.

Have you tried taking one of the .mov files and re-naming it or it’s file extension?

[Mark Suszko]

I don’t think the app itself is that big, but you may be storing the libraries and raw media and renders in the same folder/partition as the application, and if you always set your projects up to ingest the footage and make an independent copy of it in the library to work from, and keep all your renders in there as well… then yeah, you’re going to eat up space. Fast.

So, I’m not an expert in FCPX, but how I do things is, the library files and raw footage and renders are all kept in a RAID drive, apart from the system drive. When I work on a new job, I create a new library for it. Before that, though, I make a new folder in the RAID drive and transfer the contents of my P2 cards to that folder. If something should then happen with the P2 card or links to it, it won’t affect me. (The only times I seem to have trouble in FCPX are times I have ignored this procedure and worked direct off the cards, go figure).

In the preferences settings for imports, you can choose to work with the files in their current location, ( in my case, on the RAID) or copy those files to the Library. If you copy the files to the library, that’s safe and performance is good, because whatever happens to the media elsewhere, say, on a memory card, you still have it all, and the RAID will run faster and smoother than working directly with the P2 card or SDHC cards… But, you’ve doubled the amount of media in storage.

I think hard on each job about how much I need to have a safety copy of the footage in the library, versus leaving the original files in place and working directly from them. For many of my jobs, the redundancy is not needed after the master has been rendered out and archived.

From time to time I go thru the folders on the RAID and purge old raw footage folders and libraries that are no longer of use, to reclaim drive space. Typically I get back 2 to 3 terrabytes during these “house cleaning” periods.

[Mark Suszko]

Go back to three projectors, use a triple-head-to-go unit to split one master video over the three projectors. Build the video as a comp in AfterEffects to fit the dimensions you need, play it out of the computer to the triple-head…?