Michael Alberts
Forum Replies Created
-
I’ll second the recommendation for Media Batch Pro. It’s fantastic. We’ve been using it from its inception. Fantastic tool and keeps getting better. They’re very responsive to feature requests. In your case, you have a very efficient workflow. In your case you might be well served by it’s Flash player with timecode. The producer can then add notes directly on the video playback itself. You can check out that feature at http://www.mediabatch.com. They have some demo movies that show this feature.
Many of my clients are local (Los Angeles) however I almost never see them in the edit room. Traffic and all, it just takes too long. Most of our work is posted to our Media Batch page on our web server and clients view it there. We also have many clients in New York and across the country. It’s become quite normal for this type of review and approval process.You might be surprised at how long it takes to upload 10-15 minutes of DV material. Depending on your clients upload speed it may take 12-14 hours. You may want to try a high bitrate h.264 at 720×480 to see if you can maintain picture quality and reduce file size. See if the trade off size vs. speed is worth it.
Good luck.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
I’m with Walter. You will get a cleaner downconvert if you let the hardware do the heavy lifting for you. Just downconvert from 720 to 525 in the hardware as you output to tape. This is typically how we deliver all our 720 shows. We downcovert to 525 Digi and also crossconvert to 1080 at the same time. This is all done in realtime in the Kona 3 card.
As for adding the BS filter and outputting through a legalizer, I would probably just use the legalizer. He have the Harris SD/HD box and it works great. I’m not sure I would clamp it with the filter and have the box add clamping in addition to that. The box has a very smooth roll-off and you’ll get great results.Do the BM cards do 720 to SD downconvert in hardware, or is it done in software? Like Walter, we only use AJA cards, so I’m not sure about the answer.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
What is the sync source for your deck and your edit system? If the deck’s clock isn’t receiving the same sync as the edit system the clock will drift and give you that type of problem.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
Sad but true. We’ve had to spend MANY thousands of dollars on re-captioning of material that only needed a small fix. We typically deliver final HDCAM masters for shows that go to the caption house and then to the network. If they request a fix for one reason or another that means we have to redo the $700 HDCAM caption process. Networks almost always find something they want fixed, yet require the show to be captioned before they’ll accept it.
If FCP were able to do this one simple thing it would have saved us an additional $6000 on the last series of shows we produced. FC”Pro” has been missing this “pro” feature for way too long.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
I’ve purchased four Avid systems over the past 15 years. They all exist as Avid Meridien 9000’s now. Does Avid EVER send me anything? No. I don’t matter to them. We’ll see if this “new” Avid changes anything.
Our Avid days are long behind us. We find FCP to be more intuitive and versatile than any of our Avid’s ever were. While we were doing 10 bit uncompressed and compressed HD on FCP five years ago it was just a promise from Avid. We plan on letting our Meridiens die a slow and painful death on the rental market.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
$400 a day for a DigiBeta!!! Yikes. We never rent ours for more than $300/day now, but that’s a Los Angeles rate. On another note, it would be good practice if you monitor the output of the Digibeta while doing your ETT. This was you can ensure you’re getting exactly what you want. In addition, I’ve been told by AJA, and have confirmed with testing, that you should offset your audio by 1 frame. The downconvert and cross-convert delays the picture by one frame. You can do a simple beep test to confirm this. Just place a 2 pop in both the pic/sound and output with ETT doing the downconvert. Then play it back or even capture it to see if the pic/sound line up in the timeline.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
They guy at the dub house is a MORON!!! I’m being as polite as I can on a public forum. There is nothing wrong with FCP. Everything you are trying to achieve is relatively simple. You’ll need to give us a few more details. What codec are you working in? Where is your source footage from? What type of QT file are you exporting for the dub house? What is your workflow?
FCP is a full featured professional editing system used to offline and online hundreds of hours of daily network and cable programming. Don’t let a biased individual at a “dub” house tell you anything different. You just need to learn how to use the tools properly.Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
I don’t remember that menu item ever being available from the timeline by Control clicking. By right clicking in the timeline you’re essentially clicking on an individual clip and sending that one clip to the application of your choice. You would have to select all in order to send the entire timeline to a specific app. However, the option to send to Color is not one of the options by control clicking in the timeline. It’s possible that FCP6 and Color were rushed out the door without that option being programmed into the Control click of the timeline.
It’s actually more intuitive to send the entire timeline to a specific app, including Color, by selecting File/Send To in my opinion. But for uniformity sake you might want to send the suggestion to Apple/FCP.Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
Thanks for the info Barry. I found the link earlier for the Panasonic download of the AVC-Intra codec. I installed it and headed over to Birns & Sawyer where we are renting the camera. I did a camera test and work flow test with my MacBook Pro. All worked great. I took that same footage back to my office and did the transcode on my 8 core MacPro. It doesn’t take that long for the transcode into ProRes on the MacPro.
The footage looks fantastic, even under the fluorescents in the camera prep room! I wonder if we’ll see a Raylight plug-in anytime soon for AVC-Intra like we get with the MXF from the HVX-200? I really don’t mind the transcode time and working in ProRes works for us. Besides, this entire shoot is on a green screen stage and the compositors would need the footage in some other format other than AVC-Intra anyways. All the compositors have ProRes on their systems so shouldn’t be a problem there either.Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
[Nate Stephens] “Is the AVC codec full 422 color space.. I thought it was 421, similar to Sony Xdcam… “
The AVC-Intra codec is full raster 1920×1080 10 bit, 4:2:2. In theory you should be able to pull a much better key off AVC-Intra material as opposed to the more compressed DVCProHD.
You can read the white paper on AVC-Intra here:
https://www.serv.com.ua/img/zstored/File/AVC_Intra_White_Paper_Ver_1_3.pdfMichael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net