[Mark Suszko]

Probably won’t work but will look worse because macrovision already messes with the stability of the signal to do the anti-piracy protection you’re trying to evade, and this just gets worse the more analog devices you put into the chain. There is no time base corrector in the HVX200 that you can control, AFAIK. A TBC, proc-amp, and genlock is what a pro might use to ingest a VHS into an editing system. That’s still expensive stuff. The cheap answer is to play it in the dark on someone’s large flat-screen TV, or play a DVd of the movie off a laptop, and DV tape it off the screen using manual iris control. .

Your problem is easily solved by throwing money at it: for around $200 you can get either a Dv camcorder that has composite or s-video inputs, which would accept your VHS playback and convert to DV. The you’d ingest the DV tape to FCP in a normal manner thru firewire cable. Or you could get a Canopus ADVC-100 or better, on ebay or the like, and these do cross-conversion pretty well. I could not afford both, so I went with a nice little JVC consumer camcorder, the gr-df450u, to use as a deck, a Dv pass-thru converter, and oh yes, to shoot video with:-) This particular model won out because it also has a mic input, which the comparable -priced Panasonic did not. I’m surprised the HVX didn’t work out for you though.

By the way, you’re explanation of your “right” to use this footage use is flawed: ownership of a copy of the movie gives you no right to do what you’re doing, several court cases have ruled as much. A guy was re-editing movies for a Christian market, removing the swears and any “questionable” scenes, and charging money for it. His excuse was that each customer bought a legit copy of the movie and simply brought it to him to “modify”. Well the court didn’t buy it First, because the guy was taking money to modify copyrighted footage without permission of the copyright owner. Second, the excuse didn’t hold up because the DVD or VHS the customer brought was not itself modified by the editing process: a copy of it was. That boils down to piracy, plus bad editing.

While you have every right to do what this guy did in the privacy of your own home for your own fun and that of your family, you can’t have money change hands over any part of this prank usage or you’re technically in violation. I’m always interested in discussions about copyrights, because one of the reasons for having them is to protect an artist’s work from being “vandalized” in such a way without their consent. I think it’s little different than adding arms to the Venus De Milo statue. We can argue all day about what is “art”, but the courts have it laid out. If somebody can’t handle the the standard movie house cut of “Blazing Saddles”, then perhaps they should just forget about watching it, because believe me, the WGNTV family friendly cut of it is a crime… it certainly bears little resemblance to the original.

Since this is just you making a party video for a friend and not putting it up on the net, don’t sweat it, but when you have some free time, you might want to look up the “fair use” rules to get a better understanding of how and when they apply. Particularly the section on “parody”. Remember fair use is not a license to do anything you want, it’s an excuse to be forgiven and avoid a punishment after being found guilty, because the usage served a recognized public good. Better not to have to rely on it for that reason.

[Mark Suszko]

Are both fields of the bad frames messed up, or can you borrow a field before or after to cover the bad bit? Digital Heaven sells an inexpensive plug-in used for repairing single-frame video glitches or dropouts that perhaps might work on this kind of thing. You’d have to go check out their demo video to see if I’m right or just blowing bubbles in my jar.

[Mark Suszko]

Maybe, you don’t need to sweat the beta’s framing; you have a separate cropping option or two in your web compression settings and within the extra settings in compressor and quicktime pro. So I’d worry about treating it at the end stage, I think. Which is perhaps good news? Why not mess with those and render out ten seconds worth to test it?

[Mark Suszko]

You can see its still going to be there, but here’s the thing: my view is, a single blur applied over the whole area is way more distracting than using composite mode/luma key cropped to just work on that zone, and just tinting the characters black or to whatever color surrounds them, or to the glass effect. Limiting the repair to just the actual white pixels preserves the little bits of clean video all around the letters and numbers, and it breaks it up more than a bar or wipe box would.

[Mark Suszko]

. Trolls dispatched, pic uploaded.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m having trouble being patient while using dial-up for this from home… also, this sample still is not done in FCP, just some cheap freeware image editor, but it should give a little bit of an idea of how keying the white letters will lead to more of a glass letter look. You could also just key them individually to the nearest correct color pixel as well, you still get the type there but less noticeable.. one more try to upload this tonight, my daughter is antsy to get back on Runescape (grin).

[Mark Suszko]

https://i1.creativecow.net/u-upload.php#

[Mark Suszko]

let’s try that again

[Mark Suszko]

So, if the upload works, here’s a picture of the fame already shown, all I did here was gaussian blur one copy of it on the bottom layer, copy-paste a clean layer above it, and punched a luma key thru it, using a kids’ photoshop knockoff I have here at home, to illustrate roughly what you can do in the technique described earlier. An alternate version is to mask or wipe the blur over the section.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

a RAID is a random array of independent disks, think a matched set of identical drives in a box, outside of your computer. The video and audio live on them so your computer’s “c” drive or system drive can just handle normal housekeeping duties. By sharing the video over multiple drives, you get much higher speed and reliability, the computer sees the stack as just one drive.

You don’t necessarily need a RAID if all you are editing is Dv, but an external firewire hard drive for that, turning at least 7200 RPM, would tend to be way better for use with a laptop or tower. Even just a single drive, long as it frees up your system drive to do its business undisturbed by constant calls to seek and play and write video to and from the same disk as the operating system.