[Mark Suszko]

If the clog happened during recording, there is no data to recover. But let’s not surrender just yet.

Curious, though, that you had the supposed “clog” for that long of a run time; more typically in my experience, such things clear themselves after some minutes, or the camera stops altogether, and 1.5 hours of “clogged” recording seems suspicious. Particularly if the rest of the same tape after that section is fine. I would want to know what else changed there to make that happen. Did the camera give no alert indications of any kind? Like clog or dew warnings?

You have run cleaning tapes thru the camcorder several times, yes?

Are you recording in slow-speed mode, perhaps? Never use the slow-speed recording mode.

Was this Dv tape, or HDV or AVCHD?

Did you stop recording and re-start around the time of the bad recording part? Perhaps a setting got changed or lost during a battery exchange?

Do you ever stop and check play-backs in the field? (I bet you will after this).

Did you change brands of tape during this job? Never do that.

Are you REALLY certain about which format you recorded, vs. the “template” for capture? i.e., NTSC instead of PAL settings? Try it under EVERY setting, even obviously wrong ones, see if anything changes. Try the generic capture template in FCP. Try new easy setups, try trashing sequence icons and creating new ones. Try everything.

Can you take this tape to someone else to try and play or load it? If this is DV tape, See if someone near you has a Panasonic DVCPro deck with the cassette size adapter, and will do a test playback of your tape for you. It is a longshot, but sometimes the Panasonic deck can play back tapes that others can’t. Usually the best playback comes right out of the originating camcorder, due to variables in the tape path, wear of heads and guides, tracking and tape tension, etc.

Let’s leave the computer aside for a moment, remind me again: you play this tape back in the original camera that shot the footage, and what do you see in the camera viewfinder: motion, frozen stills, macro-blocks over stuttering motion, or some combination?

Is the audio there and clear, even if the picture is not?

Cue the tape up to a bad section. Take the tape out of the deck or camera, carefully unlatch the flip-up protective cover and inspect the actual tape surface. See anything remarkable or different from an identical tape you know is good? Like bad oxide, or grease on the tape?

Does that image playback in the camera change or improve during shuttle, pause, forward or reverse? If for example stills are OK, you could play the stills out one frame at a time into another recorder or the computer, and fix the speed later in post. I would do that if I was desperate, and it got the shots back. You should probably make a backup copy of this tape in any case, before you lose any more of it.

One reason I don’t shoot weddings any longer is that I found it very nerve-wracking to trust a once in a lifetime event to just one camcorder, without affordable backup. If I was to do weddings today, even if I could not have a second camera on hand for back-up coverage, I would always run an external hard drive recorder in addition to shooting tape, for just this kind of eventuality. It will happen to anyone if they work in the business long enough. You owe it to the client bride that trusted you, to do whatever it takes to recover that footage, even if you lose money on the deal. Should the worst happen, refund them in full and offer to make them a free montage based on stills by the stills photographer, as part of your making amends.

This is your “Kobayashi Maru test”.

Write back with answers to the above questions. Perhaps someone reading them will see an answer that I don’t.

[Mark Suszko]

Depending on how high you set your standards, yes. Look for example at Channel Storm “Livechannel”. About a grand, last time I looked, it is for the mac computers and notebooks: it will take a firewire and a USB camera at the same time and live-switch with or without effects or transitions beatween them, plus give you lower thirds and (I think) import of powerpoint slides, and streaming. That’s a lot to ask to be done all in software. I was super-excited about it until I came across the limitation of only one firewire camera, the other has to be a crummier USB webcam. “Crummy” being subjective, of course, there is a difference between a 20-dollar eyeball cam and your Cannon, obviously. Then again, I haven’t seen it in a while, maybe they improved it to take multiple FW inputs, or there may be a hack involving using a hub….

I’m pretty sure I saw a PC flavored app like this too, but can’t remember a name now. Might want to try a search of download.com

[Mark Suszko]

If this was caused by a head clog during recording, there is no hope.
You seem to say the problem looks the same while playing the tape on multiple cameras; this tends to confirm the worst-case sceanrio.

Your description of the problem could use more detail.

One guess that would actually be good news is that the tape is fine but you are using wrong import settings.

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks, I’ll look at the link, soon as you put it up:-)

As far as RAID 0, I got burned with that one time when one drive in the set failed and irretrieveably took out 6 month’s worth of work, and swore “never again”. So I’ll take a performance hit as long as I have the reliability.

Post that link, please, I can’t wait to read it.

[Mark Suszko]

Machine stats;

Surprise surprise, I was told it was a quad-core, it’s actually an octo-core Intel Xeon with 32 Gigs of 800mhz DDR2fb-DINM ram

Nvidia FX 5600 video card into 2 Cinema Displays, spanned.

Aja IO

G-Max 1.14 TB external RAID with a 3.0 gigabit transfer speed.

O.S. 10.5.5, darwin 9.5.0

FCP 6.0.4

I call it home.

I get it that DVCPro 25 is not going to improve any, being edited in a DVCPro 50 space, it certainly won’t hurt it, and I also grok that the wider color space in “50” is going to be better for graphics and chromakeying. So I’m going to give that a try for the next month or two, see how it “handles”. I’m still willing to be schooled further by anybody with some suggestions on tweaking the system to maximize render-free high-quality fast editing. I’m probably not putting my autosaves in the proper place and don’t have a clean and proper placement of project files and folders in the directory structure, I think everything is defaulting to my scratch drive, I’m kind of a slob that way. Happily, I think I can purge the directory and storage this week and start fresh and “proper” again, so like I said, any advice along those lines for improving the efficiency and keeping it “neat”, I gratefully accept for consideration and implementation.

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks for the great responses so far. Dave, I’m away from the office till the morning, I’ll get all the system stats and post them then, but for the moment, it is a 2-month old quad core with the IO taking up a firewire connection and an external terrabyte of raid space. Well, half a tb, to be honest, since the array is striped for redundancy. I’ll run system profiler and give you a better idea in the AM.

Meanwhile, if you wanted the best realtime performance in general, while working with DVCpro25 footage, and without sacrificing quality, what flavor of preset would youall prefer? I understand ProRes is especially efficient on drive space, but if I do everything in ProRes am I giving up something else? And which Pro Res, there are a lot to pick from.

Final output is almost always going to be back out SDI to a DVC Pro25 master, plus some h.264 encodes for web and perhaps a DVD burn in DVDSP.

Appreciate any and all suggestions and advice.

[Mark Suszko]

[Bryce Leverich] ” It’s very vague as to what the “competition” is. Also there is a clause that states any ideas I come up with, or product that I design immediately becomes the property of the company. So it’s a non-compete as well as a “work-for-hire” agreement. Meaning that any and all project files and raw graphics I use, immediately become property of the company.

I really do not plan on competing with them, or selling the product that I shoot. I just have a hard time signing something like this. Seems like it takes the “free” outta “freelance”.”

Sad to see that, Bryce. Something must be really messed up if they feel like they need to put that in writing, where people in a better working relationship would just leave those things as assumed or not an issue in the first place. This reads like the moves of people that have been burned or expect to be burned, likely because people that burn others expect the same treatment.

Not a lawyer, but if you are telling us the whole story and the wording is right, I can’t imagine a sane judge that would do anything with that agreement but wipe his nose with it. If you come up with a quirky piece of tradecraft like a stylish kind of alpha wipe, that’s not really new, and creative ideas like that are generally not patentable, or how would Hollywood ever function?

Agree to sign the funny paper if they pay in full at signing, then do what you were going to do anyway, which I’m sure would be only the honorable thing. Then they would have to sue if they thought you broke the deal later. For them to come after you on that flimsy basis is going to cost them a lot of money to prove. If they are this tight over six grand, I’m guessing a lawsuit they can’t possibly win is just a bluff on their part. So call and raise. This whole thing may just be a grinder’s smoke and mirrors trick to avoid paying for as long as possible. I’m being pretty bold with YOUR money, but I say play them back and Color-Up.

[Mark Suszko]

I think I’m thinking along similar lines to Tim. I’m wondering, if we/they/you have the technical terms right, and we’re really talking about a non-compete versus a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). You don’t say what the “product” is, so let me suggest a fake example of a real-estate get-rich-quick kind of video. You should have little problem signing an NDA which only promises you don’t give away the magician’s trick, so to speak, that is, that you wouldn’t tell anybody what the “secret method” is, becuase that’s what the infomercial is selling: sign up for the course, get the special kit, blah blah blah.

You as a video editor are not in the real estate investment business, so the NDA could be a non-issue. If it is a non-compete, again, what is the agreement’s definition? Does it mean, in my example, you agree not to make get-rich quick promos for anybody else in the county for 2 years? Or that you yourself won’t dabble in that biz, knowing the “secrets”? The contract may not be as limiting as you fear, if that’s the case.

The musician Thomas Dolby was in legal wrangles with the famed noise-reduction inventor Ray Dolby over the name usage. The musician joked about the final agreement: “He promises not to make pop music records, I promise not to sell noise-reduction technology”.

If it’s that kind of non-compete, it’s a non-issue, sign it and cash the check immediately. Then find other clients. If they are actually telling you you need their permission to cut anything for anyone, well, you lost that client right there. You look like you have a strong case for small claims, just know that while I think it’s worth it, it doesn’t resolve as fast as Judge Judy and that process can take a long time and use up hours you’d rather spend working and making money. So do try all the diplomatic channels first, including going over that guy’s head to some other boss. If you go ahead and sue, add in your court costs as well, for the extra trouble they put you through.

Finally, as a freelancer, never hand over the final anything until all the money is in your hand. That is usually your only leverage.

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve used older versions of Poser and this is one good cheap way to generate a lot of various body silhouettes in a hurry, add a canned movement file to the models and offset them a little bit and it could work pretty well to generate crowds or single bodies. It is probably what I would try first in your place.

Poser can also render just the solid black shapes in 2-d, ready to composite. There is a great community of Poser users online to help you and provide those motion captured moves. You might also find some at Turbosquid, which has free and payware models, textures, and other goodies for many different platforms including Poser. Beware when browsing the user groups that some of the Poser people can be a little on the kinky side in how they use their models.

Your problem with Poser will be that without a premade file for the motions, if you don’t know what you’re doing, your dancer is going to emulate the “Elaine” character’s dance moves in the famous Seinfeld episode.

I have not dabbled in Poser for a year or two, but here’s an idea that might help, it’s called “poor man’s mo-cap”. Shoot yourself or anybody willing against a high contrast background, a bedsheet or wall will do, doesn’t need to be a clean luma or green screen. Put some duct tape on your wrists, elbows, shoulders, knees, ankles, and belt buckle. Do your dance moves and shoot it on a locked-down wide shot that shows the full body. Import that footage into Poser as a background, I forget if it can handle an AVI or MOV or if it has to be a still image sequence or what, but just play along for now, figure that part later or RTFM.

Now just match the poser model’s joints to what the taped joints in your sample movie do/where they are, every ten frames or so. Once keyframed, delete and burn the incriminating and embarrassing background, set the render to silhouette, import the render to FCP or Motion for compositing. If you can’t find a way to make the render as silhouette, render it as 2-d against white within Poser and reverse-key it in Apple Motion later or in FCP using blending modes.

Don’t forget that the camera in Poser is animateable independent of the model’s own actions, try a nice half-circle dolly move with the virtual camera in an alternate render.

This is just one way, there are sure to be others. Good luck, would like to see a link to the finished version of your project and your description of your eventual solution.

[Mark Suszko]

My suggestions based on things I have and wish I had.

Zaxwerkes stand-alone for mac, lets you do some basic 3- d animations without the heavy learning curve. This is more powerful if you have the vector creation/export capability of Adobe Illustrator, but you can get along without that. Allows the look of the canned Jumpback animations with the customizability you want.

flip4mac WMV converter, pro version

I have Sonicfire and love it, but be sure to buy a few extra packs of songs for it. This is a good alternative to stacktraxx.

MS Powerpoint for mac ( I have to do lots of slide imports for clients, this helps tremendously)

VESA-compliant pantograph support arms for my dual cinema displays, to keep them at the right ergonomic height and distance while freeing up console table space.

Wacom tablet, if you don’t already have one. Wunderbar for working in Photoshop.