[Mike Cohen]

I think Cory has explained everything nicely. If using CFL for lighting, be sure you know the color temperature, especially if you will be mixing with tungsten.

I bought a softlight a few years ago designed to work with incandescent or CFL. With the 100W CFL (something like 42W in CFL land) the output was pretty dismal.

I have seen on B+H some lights using 3 to 5 CFL bulbs – presumably the light output is ok from that. You do have the issue of safely transporting multiple CFL bulbs and spares in your light kit. And should a bulb break beware there is mercury in those. If you are in a public office building or school it is a real problem because it becomes a haz mat cleanup – schools have been evacuated for tiny amounts of mercury.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

Good luck Josh. Assume your boss has read this entire thread.

Mike Cohen

Medical Education / Multimedia Producer

[Mike Cohen]

“Actually, making a video is not like anything else…it is making a video, which is why you have come to us. We know how to make videos. Let us walk you through the process, answer your questions define the deliverables and do a great job for you.”

That’s what I say anyway.

Although I do have a craving for an omelet pizza, which I will eat in my car while building a house.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

I recently did a job for someone who proposed the job this way:

“I want to do a fun video for an internal event. What if we send Flip cams to our sales force and have them get some talking heads, and then you edit it together along with some interviews we do here.”

I replied:

“The Flip is a decent camera for birthday parties and really informal use. If we shoot some of the interviews, the Flip stuff will look bad in comparison. If you just go with the Flip video – the image quality is pretty good but the sound may be low quality, not to mention the hand held shakiness, when projected, might make people nauseous.”

He agreed with this feedback – notice I did not completely disregard the Flip because it is in fact good for some uses, and you want to give your clients some credit for their ideas.

So we wound up shooting all the interviews in HDV – only one without a tripod – and everyone is happy.

In the end, it would have been the same amount of editing however it was shot – although the Flip might have necessitated some stabilization and audio cleanup.

Actually, we recently did some editing of a surgical procedure shot with eithr a Flip, a point and shoot non-SLR still camera, or both. By the third case, the resident was getting good and had some creative shots.

There is a time and purpose for everything.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

[Abraham Chaffin] “this connection will allow you to post to Facebook and Twitter seamlessly as you post to the COW”

That’s great – now my Aunt Mildred will be able to follow my posts on the Adobe Encore forum.

Just kidding – Mildred dabbles is DVD authoring between her book club and knitting.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

We use Premiere – so do millions of other people and businesses.

I stand by my motto “use whatever tool is right for the job” and avoid being overly critical of competing tools because you will likely use them in the future, or work closely with someone who does.

I used Media 100 for 5 years, and now Premiere since version 5.0 first on the Mac using the Media 100 hardware, then 6.5 on the PC up to CS4 now. It took some getting used to Premiere which originally was pretty hokey. As the CS versions have evolved it has gotten much more elegant, and now works like a hardware based NLE worked in the past.

I believe that some of the problems people have had with Premiere over the years, myself included, had to do with using PC computers vs Macs which have always been more stable.

Now with 64 bit Windows 7, the stability is much closer to a Mac (for those using Premiere on a Mac disregard this part), and you are only limited by your hardware configuration.

Do i subscribe to the Premiere vs FCP vs AVID vs Edius vs Vegas arguments? No – you can’t expect every piece of software to have the same features. It’s not like comparing brands of Guitar or Washing machine since those products all do the same function and are required to have most of the same basic components. But Guitars and Washing machines also have special features. you could imagine the conversations on the Creative COW equivalent of the home appliances world:

Why does Maytag make such an inferior product? I mean, I did a focus group at the National Association of Washing Up Liquid Manufacturers, and it seems that Whirlpool and Samsung machines have a Super Grass Stain removal setting. Why does Maytag refuse to add this industry standard setting? They will never make inroads to the Professional world of washing in my opinion with such an inferior product.

See where I am going? It is Betamax vs VHS all over again.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

As a follow-up – the Blu-ray ISO image burned to a DVD-R plays beautifully in a Blu-Ray player.

Hoping to upgrade to CS5 before the year is up – but otherwise Encore CS4 has been pretty stable (started with Encore 1.0 back in the day).

Thanks again.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

Measure twice, cut once. I followed Jeff Bellune’s advice from my posting on this subject back in April, which concurs with similar postings on the Adobe forums, to update the roxio drivers which Windows 7 somehow messes up. Now everything seems to work normally.

Thanks Jeff (delayed) and Danny for your support.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

Danny

I have actually tried both m2v and h.264 out of Premiere, using Adobe Media Encoder – neither format will actually import into Encore without taking down the system. A SD 720×480 m2v goes into Encore without incident.

So now I have exported an uncompressed MOV out of Premiere which imports into Encore in a heartbeat and plays no problem.

However I have now noticed that even if I set the project type to Blu-Ray when making a new Encore project, if I click on “Build”, it shows that the format is DVD, not Blu-Ray. Changing it to Blu-Ray again freezes the system.

I got excited because Encore seemed to transcode my MOV and build an ISO, only to realize it had transcoded to SD.

Weird.

Thanks for the feedback.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

Update – I can import an MOV file (1440×1080 uncompressed 8bit) into an Encore Blu-ray project without crashing. Seems only Blu-Ray compatible formats cause a Blu-ray project to crash, which is to be expected 😉

Seems to be transcoding ok – I guess the answer is – let Encore transcode.

Mike