[Mike Cohen]

I’m no Dr. Phil but I have an actual bald head! I agree to get seen by a doctor and talk to the police, to hear your options and rights. Years ago I received a threatening letter from a former co-worker. It was a lot of hot air about “knowing me making the Holocaust seem like a good idea” (I am not making this up), but talking to the local State Trooper set my mind at ease.

I will speak to the “clients thinking they can edit video” part of the thread. I often paraphrase Jeff Goldblum’s line from Jurassic Park, “Just because you can clone dinosaurs doesn’t mean you should clone dinosaurs.”

In other words, just because you can buy a laptop and Premiere Elements or iMovie, doesn’t mean you should assume you have the same skills as a pro. Also, and this comes from experience, just because your son/daughter/secretary’s kid has a Mac does not mean you can forgo paying a pro to make your project.

Sure, some of the videos I receive, with the giveaway iMovie titles and iDVD movie theater menu are actually pretty good, but you get the occasional hack job. Sometimes I spend five minutes cleaning up some flash frames or bad edits and don’t say anything to anyone.

One of the most common things I see is short cuts. Not Family Circus style short cuts through the neighbor’s yard, I mean cuts lasting 1-2 seconds. If you are doing an action sequence or even dialogue, a 1-2 second cut may be ok. But if you are demonstrating something, for example surgery, anything less than 3 seconds is just too short. I will occasionally slow down a cut to make it better.

Back in the mid-90’s we received the occasional video with lots of star wipes and Video Toaster effects, but luckily those have mostly disappeared.

Bad audio is another common nuisance of DIY videos. Many people buy one of those headset mics, suitable perhaps for a Skype conversation, but the recorded audio can be distorted, low in volume or full of hiss or electrical interference. Not much you can do about some of that.

The worst is when you need to call someone and say “the audio levels in your video are inadequate” or “the use of the Titanic music in the background is illegal (actual experience).” In many cases, the response is something similar to “uhhh…drrrr..huh?”

Another memorable quote from the past year actually, is “Mike, when you were talking in that meeting about submitting edited video clips, I saw Bob Smith’s eyes glaze over. And Bob is 30 years old.”

In other words, computer savvy does not equal video / multimedia savvy. Sometimes it does, but sometimes it is like saying “I play basketball at the YMCA, so surely I have the same skills as those overpaid NBA players.” Well, maybe that is an exaggeration!

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

Our projects are either products that we develop and sell, or projects that we do for outside clients. In either case, as the others have stated, we all keep a stack of SATA drives on a shelf, so when a project is done, that drive goes on a shelf. I too backup the non-video files of a project to another drive – what are the chances both drives will fail? I guess there is a chance.
For products, we make a DV or DVCPRO master, and also render out an AVI of the completed video, which is stored on the original hard drive, as well as in our library, so we have minimum 2 AVI copies. In the case of a DVD project, the ISO file and the Encore project files are on the project drive, and the DVD duplication master is in a binder. Push comes to shove, you can rebuild a DVD from the VOB files, which I have done in a pinch.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

Mike, welcome to this forum, your insight and experience will be appreciated…wait, I AM Mike, can I welcome myself? Seemed like the thing to do.

Thanks to everyone for the welcome messages, and the gifts. It seems my 42″ LCD TV was never delivered, could someone check the tracking number?

Reports of my “grayness” are highly exaggerated! I do have some hair, it is just not visible from the front 🙂

Glad to be here, thanks to Nick for the official invite, and to everyone else whose writing I have been reading for many moons.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

I think CS3 allows you to chop up video on the timeline, then open each clip and place a subclip in the bin. Why you can’t just drag a clip from the timeline to a bin like in other edit systems I don’t know.
In 2.0 and earlier, you can only make a subclip from video in the bin. So you open the raw DV clip in the bin, set in and out, make a subclip, repeat.
An alternative I have used, is to drag your DV clip to the timeline, chop up into usable clips. Then once done chopping up all your tapes, run the Project Manager, which will trim the project, making a new DV file for each clip on the timeline, and saving this as a new project.

Good luck.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

If you figure out one of these programs, please write a book called “Learning 3D animation software for video editors” and I will buy the first copy.

Try Blender – for one thing it is free, and there are lots of good tutorials online. The Maya Personal Learning edition is a good way to learn that program. There is no free 3DS software.

I learned a program called anim8or, which is a free program, useful for simple animated logos, and it imports 3DS models. Some do not import correctly, but it has provided me with lots of fun using other peoples’ models. As for modeling, you can do a lot with it, and the learning curve is less than for one of the expensive programs used in the industry. That being said, knowing this free program will not get you jobs, but it is a good way to learn the rudimentary concepts of 3D modeling without the time and monetary investment.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

Steven

Thanks for the clarification. Is this a CS3 function? In 2.0 I cannot drag a clip from the source monitor to the project, only back to the sequence.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

if you are new to Premiere, beware some things you are accustomed to may not work.

For example, I used Media 100 for the 6 years prior to switching to Premiere. In Media 100, I would digitize the whole tape and chop it up on the timeline, then drag the clips to a bin, rename and trim them, then get editing.

In premiere you cannot drag anything from the timeline to a bin, so you have a few choices for this type of workflow, both of which I use:

Option 1
Capture a whole tape, drag to the timeline, chop up into usable pieces.
Repeat for each tape.
Use Project manager to create a new project. Each separate clip on the timeline will now appear in your bin, and you can manually rename these in the bin. However when you rename a clip in a bin, it does not rename the AVI files on your hard drive, so beware should you need to find an offline clip, it will not have the same name.
Also, you can rename clips on the timeline, but again, the new names are not reflected in the bin or the hard drive.

Option 2
Capture a whole tape, then open the movie in the editor, set in and out point, and create a subclip, which places a subclip in the bin based upon your in and out. You can do this for a whole tape and populate your bin with subclips. It is probably easier to do it this way, however depending upon your preferred comfortable workflow from your previous application, Option 1 may be a good exercise.

Option 3
The best thing to do is to log your tape and capture only the portions you need. I used to like capturing the whole tape and chopping it up afterwords because I have lots of other non-editing work i can do while tapes are being captured. However you then need to spend time logging the captured video, so the time savings is actually negligible.

Option 4
You can do option 1, that is capture the whole tape and chop it up on the timeline, and then create a separate timeline (sequence in premiere) for each tape. Then when you are editing you just find the clip you need, essentially using timelines in place of bins. I would never do this, however if I have captured some stock footage to fill in the holes in an edit, sometimes I lay these out on a timeline just to trim the clips, then copy and paste them where they are needed. But for more than a dozen or so clips this would be too difficult.

Premiere does not yet let you have multiple bins and sequeences open in separate windows, and there is no keyboard shortcut to toggle between open bins or sequences, so organization is the key.

Back in the tape days we liked to do a paper edit before the online session, either an EDL, or hand written time code notes on a script.

Good luck making your move.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

read Tim Kolb’s new tutorial about HDV workflow. The common understand is that editing native HDV is a bad idea.

[Mike Cohen]

probably will have to transcode to AVI on the PC, but you should test one clip and see how it works, including the final output, whatever format that is, before diving in to the whole project.
Mike

[Mike Cohen]

going back to RAM, can someone explain the supposed 2 gig RAM limitation in XP? For instance if I have a Core 2 Duo, am I limited to 2 gig RAM?

Thanks

Mike