[Matthew Laurence]

Ok, I know it’s a LITTLE late to reply to this thread, but I can’t recommend the Adobe Audition Sound Removal tool highly enough… It’s gotten rid of all my thumps and bumps beautifully.

Here’s a quick tutorial
https://helpx.adobe.com/audition/how-to/audition-sound-remover-effect-cc.html

[Matthew Laurence]

I couldn’t hurt to quite everything, open Disk Utility, Repair Permissions on your boot drive, then trash your prefs and restart the machine.

Did you say Mac OS 10.8? Was that a typo, or is there something I’m missing in the Mac OS release cycle?

[Matthew Laurence]

After all of this discussion, here’s another related question for y’all:

What should this position be CALLED? It will likely entail oversight of all things video, but also possibly Flash and other multimedia productions. It will also still be a solo role at first, so “manager” might not be exactly the right title. Oh, and here it needs to have the word “Principal” in it. So – here are some thoughts I’d had so far:

Principal Audio/Video Supervisor (or Producer, or Specialist)
Principal Multimedia Designer (or Supervisor, or Specialist)
Principal PrEditor (I like this one, but we’ll see if it passes corporate muster)
Principal Video Guy
Principal A/V Generalist

Any other ideas? Serious or farcical, doesn’t matter to me, but a few real ones would be good. Thanks!

Matt

[Matthew Laurence]

A CONSIDERED REPLY:

Wow, looks like I got caught in the crossfire of a forum battle that has hopped across topic lines…

FIRST of all, let me thank everyone who has contributed thoughts and ideas to this thread, it’s been very instructive so far, both to figure out what I need to do, and to realize what I am already doing right (and sometimes wrong).

Now… Marv/Andrea, I will agree that Tom/Tom’s post in that other thread came off kind of arrogant and dismissive. However, I agree with Tom overall point that it’s a pretty typically client-thoughtless for someone to come to a pro video forum and ask people who make a living at it to give them a quick tutorial so they can cut the real pros out of the loop. I understand that companies are all about cost cutting and multi-purposing right now, and I think Tom could probably have worded his reply in a more constructive way. But when people want a professional job done, they should use the pros, not directly ask the pros how to do an end run around them.

However, that person DID get constructive ideas from other members of the group, and I actually think having some curmudgeonly voices in the chain can be useful at times. While Tom’s reply was a little flippant, I thought it was pretty restrained compared to some of the flames I’ve seen about similar issues, and it did make his point pretty succinctly.

Now, since this is NOT that same thread, let me just clear up that – while I am probably not at the level of video-related skills as many of the people on this forum – I AM a professional in the field, by dint of the fact that this is what I have been tasked with doing for my company. I actually did have training in it, albeit 20 years ago in college and then several years of volunteer work at a local cable access company (could never turn a buck at it, though, so I fell back on my geeky computer hobby, and that worked out pretty well). I am also trying pretty hard to get myself back up to speed and educate myself: I’ve been to NAB Post Production World for the last two years, I tutorialize myself and read articles and observe other people’s videos whenever I have some down time at work, and I am improving simply because I am using After Effects and Premiere and my little Canon HFS10 and Lowel lighting kit pretty much every day in some combination. You should see the stuff I did a couple of years ago compared to now.

I know that to a certain extent, someone in my position (multimedia/web designer-developer turned video guy) is only a few steps ahead of that client who wants to do it him- or herself. It’s part of that same cost-cutting and expense consolidation. But one of the reasons I was hired into this job was that they knew they wanted to move more in this direction, and I did have existing experience that could be grown as the needs grew. No one else on the team did; when they first got their camera and lights, they blew out the fuses in half the office due to bad power planning, and even then their videos were badly lit with harsh shadows (and not for effect).

But by the same token, for much of the work my company does, they don’t need – and increasingly can’t afford – to pay $100k to a 10-person crew to do a shoot that will only end up as a 640×360 web video in a lesson.

Don’t get me wrong – you often get what you pay for, and we still DO hire those teams when the timeline, complexity or workload call for it. We work with an amazing crew out of NY called JetPak Productions who do a reliably excellent job and give us superb final products that would look great on the big screen. Every single member of that team is presumably far better at what they do than I am.

Part of my learning process has been to go on shoots with them (my post productions skills far outstrip my actual field production knowledge), to see how they audition and interview people; to watch how their gaffers set up lights; how their director gets the most out of his actors; how they simulate multi-camera shots with a single camera and keep consistency; to watch the sound guy and see how he’s got his mics balanced in the mixer, how he holds his boom, how he runs everything to best capture dual-system audio at a high quality.

This is all stuff that any apprentice or intern would be doing and watching as they built their skills to go out into the world and do it themselves, eventually probably taking work from the very crew they worked for; that’s just part of the free-market system. Which has its distinct problems, to be sure, but that type of relationship has been in place since at least feudal times. I just happen to be getting a paycheck as an interactive designer AND video guy as I get this training, for which I count myself amazingly fortunate.

I will never – in this job at least – get to the level of ability of someone in the industry who is dedicated to their one area of skill, who hones that ability to the level of true artistry rather than just a proficiency. I need, by necessity, to try and learn all of it at once. But as my skills build and I try to fill in all the gaps, I also need to be thinking forward to the time when I will, with luck and work, be managing this department, and when I can think bigger picture and bring in people who ARE artists in their craft: a real DP, someone who actually knows lighting design, someone who can prep and hold a boom properly to avoid dialogue dropouts and handling noise (unlike the poor sops I have to deputize on the fly). I’ll probably try to keep the post-production work for myself, since that’s what I enjoy most and do best so far. But the business end of running a video department is still new to me, and that’s why I came to the professionals.

Which brings us to the original point of this thread, and this email. I appreciate all the feedback and information so far, and I hope to see even more as the days go by.

Thank you all!

Matt

[Matthew Laurence]

Interestingly, I checked my Sequence presets, and I have the AVCHD ones… but no RED presets. Have I been bitten? If so, should I uninstall, run the Creative Suite Cleaner, and then reinstall? Or is there an easier way, such as just reinstalling those presets?

[Matthew Laurence]

I know it’s a little late in the game, but I would recommend creating your mezzanine files (transcode files from MTS to more edit-friendly format) using the Cineform NeoScene codec and Adobe Media Encoder. In addition to MTS video compression, the audio is compressed, and that was at the heart of many of my problems. I was having similar issues and converting to Cineform made my workflow a DREAM.

https://www.cineform.com/neoscene/

It is a paid encoder format, but the decoder is freeware so as long as you buy the full codec for conversion, you can work with the footage on any machine (it outputs a Quicktime .MOV).

Bear in mind, by now (May 2011) Adobe has worked a lot of the kinks out of CS5, and you can work with native MTS files with almost the same ease. I still prefer working with the Cineform files, but if I don’t have enough time or space to transcode everything, I can work right out of the gate in Premiere and AE easily. And as CS5.5 comes out I imagine we’ll see some tightening up of things as well.

[Matthew Laurence]

Well, I have a similar issue, but I’m using a fully licensed Master Collection of CS5. I have successfully been working with After Effects and AVCHD files (.MTS, recorded on a Canon HFS-100) with no trouble, importing, working with them on the timeline, you name it. In CS4 I have no problem importing and working with the MTS files from this camera. But in CS5… no luck. There should be no limitations with this, everything is licensed and up to date.

I can’t import them by dragging and dropping, using File > Import, nor the media browser, I get the “unsupported compression type” every time. This is REALLY a problem – can anyone help? Todd, you’re the MAN on this stuff (especially after seeing you in action at NAB)… any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Matthew Laurence]

Ah… see, your mistake was confusing the FOX sets with sets from actual news shows.

[Matthew Laurence]

Hmmm… I’ve been experiencing the same thing, but on a 2010 Mac Pro dual 6-core, 16gb RAM, OS 10.6.6, ATI Radeon HD 5870 (stock), all updates installed. I’ve tried turning off multiprocessing, turning off and removing the OpenGL plug in, rebooting in safe mode and then back into normal mode, trashing the prefs (a while ago). I haven’t taken the time to reinstall either the OS or the CS5 package, but I’ve had the same problems – CS5 is completely unusable.

I’ve gone back to CS4, and while I have had problems with it crashing repeatedly on the simplest of actions (scrubbing the timeline, moving footage, renaming files, etc), turning off multiprocessing has seemed to help, and I’m going to try a different intermediate codec.

But I have yet to hear any satisfactory answers to why so many people seem to have so many problems with CS5. My Photoshop CS5 works fine, unlike many other reporters, but AE is completely useless. Which is a real drag, because some of the new features would make my life a lot easier.

ANY advice would be most appreciated – thanks in advance,

Matt

[Matthew Laurence]

Ugh, I have exactly the same problem, but it’s a lot more insidious with the Mac Magic Mouse, because the concept of “scroll wheel” is pretty much just that – a concept. It’s very clever that they’ve blended it right into the touch-sensitive case and that you can scroll in 2 dimensions, but in applications like this where you can’t disable it for zooming, I end up looking at my comps at about 800% WAY more often than I’d like. If anyone does discover a solution for this with the Magic Mouse, please let me know!

Matt Laurence
Inflexxion
Newton, MA, USA