Micah Mcdowell
Forum Replies Created
-
If your talent wearing black is getting keyed out, I’d say that you’ve got some major lighting issues. You want to minimize strong shadows as much as possible. Also, remember that the key doesn’t have to be perfect; if there’s a dark shadow way off to the side (not touching the talent), use a garbage matte to get rid of it instead of compensating with your software. What software are you using, by the way?
A Betacam captured through component should be giving you great results, so I doubt it’s an equipment issue.
-
I find myself almost unconsciously driven to add vignettes to graphics and After Effects comps these days… it’s a super easy way to add focus to the center of a graphical composition that otherwise loses the viewer’s attention.
However, I’m trying to use them as little as I can lately, due to the obvious overuse. For anything with a grungy, retro feel, it certainly fits. Otherwise, it’s just a coverup for poor design.
-
Well, one possibility is that they just don’t know what they’re doing and have something wrong on their end.
Another distant possibility could be something similar to an issue I ran into years ago with out-of-phase audio. We had a certain wireless lav mic hooked to a Canon XL1. Somehow, it would record to both channels of audio on tape in opposite phase. When editing and monitoring in stereo in Premiere, everything sounded fine. However, if you played it back on a mono TV, the audio would disappear because the channels combined would cancel each other out. After we found the problem, I fixed it by applying the Fill Left or Fill Right audio effect to the mic’s audio track, which made both channels in the correct phase.
That’s worth checking into, but it’s a long shot. It would explain why there’s only an issue with a certain mic though.
-
What’s your goal for a “film look”? What camera and format are you shooting with? And as Dave asked, what software are you using?
-
Big difference between the chips are that 2/3″ will have somewhat shallower depth of field at a given aperture, will require different lenses, and 2/3″ generally will have better dynamic range and low light capability than 1/3″, all things being equal.
I’ve been looking into the HPX300 vs. HPX500 as well and it’s an interesting comparison.
The 300 has full raster 2.2 million pixel chips, while the 500 has 620,000 pixel chips; winner HPX300.
The 300 has CMOS chips while the 500 has CCD, which may be a significant for some; winner HPX500.
The 300 is 1/3″ while the 500 is 2/3″ with much larger pixels, winner HPX500.
The 300 shoots to AVC-I while the HPX500 is DVCPro; winner HPX300 depending on your needs.Either one sounds like it’d be a fine camera; maybe you should try them both out?
-
I’m sure you have the Apple Animation codec. Choose Quicktime in Media Encoder and choose Animation in the format options in the Video tab.
As already stated, Animation works GREAT for cross-platform work; it’s also lossless when the quality is set all the way up. The only downfall is somewhat large file size which may or may not be an issue for you.
Photo JPEG should be in the same format options in Quicktime; you should experiment and find which works best for you.
-
Well, you want to have a plan of what you’re going to use before you start tweaking it in After Effects and render it all, but it often works out better the way Alan described.
Another thing to think about in your workflow is the order that things get compressed and re-compressed. For instance, if you’re cutting a project and color correct in a Premiere timeline, and then render and export to AE for other effects, you’re going through an extra generation of compression if you’re using a lossy codec. You’d get better quality if you took the source footage and did both your color correction and effects in AE first, and then cut in Premiere. You want to figure out the workflow with the fewest steps like this, unless you’re going straight to uncompressed video which will give the same quality no matter how many times you export it through, for the most part.
Hopefully this makes sense.
-
If it’s playing on a GL2, it’s most definitely standard (possibly widescreen) DV, and not HDV.
-
I had to edit some wildlife footage shot from a helicopter with an XL-1 once. It looked OK for the most part, but at a couple points it would start to oscillate from the chopper’s vibrations giving a weird effect. A DSLR without stabilization would be MUCH worse, so I’d go for a big camera WITH stabilization if you can swing it.
-
I think you’ll have as many opinions as replies regarding the “best” drives, so you might want to do some Googling for statistics if you want meaningful answers.
My meaningless opinons: I’ve got a RAID of Seagates at home that work great and I have a Hitachi RAID pair in my work system that work great (and they’re 5 years old). I’ve seen some Maxtors fail, and I’ve had others that I couldn’t kill.
If I was going to go buy new ones tomorrow, I’d probably get the Western Digital Caviar Black series since they seem to have a lot of bang for the buck. I’ve used them as system drives in a couple machines with good results.