Martti Ekstrand
Forum Replies Created
-
Hi, I use AE CS3 on MacPro with OSX 10.5.2, QT 7.4.1 and Decklink HD Extreme and it doesn’t have more issues than any previous setups I’ve used. QT 7.4 introduced problems in OSX with renders going over 10 minutes in real time but that seems to be fixed with the 7.4.1 upgrade. Over a lunch break I set up an hour long render with Fractal Noise and it came through uninterrupted. I edit with FCP and don’t have Premiere so can’t give any info on how it works on OSX. If you make a small .avi file, like 5-10 mb big and post it somewhere I can download it and try to open it in AE later this week, am a bit swamped in work for the moment.
cheers
-
To save yourself time and energy I suggest you let the editor do at least a rough cut first before you start to work on the fx. That will give some extra frames to play with at head and tail and if he/she makes any changes that makes any clip longer you can always go back and add to that. Also don’t hold your work back from editing, hand over fx sequences roughly done and then start tweaking and fine tuning individual shots. The director and editor might (or rather will always) see things differently once they see a rough version of the fx and re-edit. Lather, rinse and repeat until deadline has passed 🙂
cheers
-
I made a bootable SuperDuper clone of my system drive to external hard disk 2 weeks ago and then upgraded the whole system to all latest versions including QT7.4.1 and the Leopard Graphics Update and so far I have had no use of the clone, IE; everything seems to work alright and I haven’t run into any problems. I’m using FCP 6.0.2 and AE 8.0.2 with BlackMagicDesign DecklinkHD Extreme on a MacPro.
As a free-lancer who can’t afford the luxury of having a production system totally off the internet and a secondary system only for web surfing this was very relieving as there are some pretty bad security holes in QT previous to 7.4 that can be exploited on web pages to gain control of a visitor’s computer.
cheers
-
Hehe, you have no reasons to worry. When I was guest teaching editing in a high school all that was available was a vhs-to-vhs pre-edit system with greenish-fuzzy monitors and what you have is a BETTER set-up than the pro edit suite we went to when finalizing a few of the projects. This was some years ago of course …
Take some movie DVDs you like the look of and adjust the settings on the monitor and compare with greyscale and colour bars. That should give a good baseline for your students colour correction work. Just make sure they understand not to fiddle with the monitor once you made a setting. Good luck and have fun!
cheers
-
Well, I cloned my entire system drive for backup with SuperDuper and upgraded to 10.5.2, QT 7.4.1 and the Leopard Graphic Update yesterday. So far all things seem to work, can capture and view in FCP and have a preview in AE to my PAL monitor. Sound input through the Decklink card to other applications than FCP disappeared but running the AudioMIDI utility and setting the input there instead of the simple system sound panel fixed that.
I’ve yet to get a reply on my support ticket though so it’s good to hear you got a answer from BMD that all seems to be in order. If I run into any trouble I will report here.
cheers
-
That sounds good but as far as I understand the drivers for Decklink and Multibridge are different and I’m bit wary from past experiences with upgrades to taking a chance. I’ve put in a support request at their site and will await a reply.
cheers
-
[Dave LaRonde] “The only thing that’s really new in 7.4.1 is that you ran now rent movies on iTunes.”
I agree that the DRM system for rentals introduced in 7.4 is crap both from a pro or a consumer view but this statement is simply untrue. 7.4 and 7.4.1 also plugs a lorry sized security hole in QuickTime streaming which a proof-of-concept of was shown here on january 10th:
https://www.milw0rm.org/exploits/4885
So anybody (like me) is still staying with QT 7.3.1 or older surf with caution and don’t open QT streams casually. I’m waiting for Blackmagic to approve or publish new drivers for QT 7.4.1 and once that’s out I’ll update in a blink of an eye.
cheers
-
[Alison Francis] “Do you know about this effect?”
Yup, it’s a in-camera composite trick conceived in a time where not even optical printers was a option. Georges Méliès did it in the 1902 special effects extravaganza ‘A Trip to the Moon’. These days you might as well add it in post-production instead unless you really want to do hard-core old-school VFX. Citizen Kane is one film full of very advanced set-ups using that method.
cheers
-
This is mostly neither a editing/compositing application or camera problem but more a model design/making issue. Generally if you want models to appear photo realistic in ‘close quarter’ settings (ie; humans won’t look out of place in the scene) you cannot go below 1:10 scale but it still makes for lot of careful and time consuming model construction. Not to mention space consuming. HO model railroad scale (1:87) will never look good for anything but distant backgrounds, think Blade Runner cityscapes or LotR size castles. Water/fire/smoke really don’t scale well below 1:4 btw. Once the models are properly built you still have to light them just as well as a live action set or better and you need lots of light as well to make the depth-of-field match what it would look like in full scale.
A good resource for learning about model making for film are the coffee-table books from Industrial Light & Magic and also old issues of Cinefex from 80s / 90s. Also get some making-of books about Aardman movies like Chicken Run or Wallace & Gromit.
Back issues of Cinefex can be found at https://www.cinefex.com, Chicken Run is covered in great detail in issue 82 and The Corpses Bride has a nice little article in #104. The LotR issues are also worth getting as they utilized a lot of ‘bigatures’ in tandem with CGI.
This may seem daunting but remember that Nick Park started the first W&G film ‘A Grand Day Out’ as a uni project and in a later stage Aardman got involved in finishing the film.
cheers
-
[tony lee] “is this what you do and others guy been doing.”
Actually I mostly work with motion graphics so after I edit in FCP I export my cuts to QuickTime with animation codec and use those files in After Effects where I nearly always do so much colour correction that I never noticed any gamma shifts. Or possibly the animation codec doesn’t exhibit that bug.
I agree that it needs to be fixed, just tried to offer an alternative to add the filter to each and every clip manually.
cheers