[Mike Smith]

I’d totally agree with Harm on this one: there are thousands of “film looks” – shoot the one you want (Orson Welles’ deep focus anyone, or film noir, or Hollywood romcom, or French New Wave ..?)

Still, though, some people brought up on the NTSC television standard see the characteristic “pull-down” of telecine from 24fps film to (almost) 30fps NTSC video, along with a widescreen aspect ratio, as big factors in a “film look” – something quite alien / mystifying to those of us brought up on PAL.

So if that’s your bag and your market, it might work for you. You could try editing in your source format (monitoring with a video screen capable of displaying 24p – movements need to be a little slower than interlaced video to avoid unfortunate picture effects like tearing or strobing). When you’re done, add 3:2 pull-down and go to NTSC for your DVD output … hope it looks how you want.

Standard DVDs are PAL or NTSC – 25fps or 29.97 fps. Interlaced.

Progressive scan footage in these standards is produced by “freezing” the motion over the two fields of each frame: if it’s done well, this needn’t be at the expense of losing resolution, though often it is.

[Mike Smith]

Also, you may want to be careful to keep the logo white “video legal” if you plan to show it on screens other than your computer. There are tools to help in effects / video / broadcast safe, and in the levels adjustments. I think there was a tutorial on this too.

[Mike Smith]

Firefox of course is a decent alternative browser to whatever you are using. It’s free, open source cross-platform, stable, has some really useful free add-ons if you want them. You could download it to try out from https://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html

[Mike Smith]

For DV and family, yes. Though Matrox is a complication: for their RTX 100 card they used a non-standard version of PAL DV with upper field first. Don’t know about their other cards, but it would probably be worth checking the documentation if you are using PAL.

It was quite reasonable of Redgum to assume anyone posting this question was likley using DV or DVCAM I think, and answer accordingly.

The most likely explanation for UFF / LFF looking the same is viewing on a non-interlaced screen e.g. a computer monitor, LCD or Plasma screen. You’d want to check the stuff on CRT before distributing ; reversed fields look horrible. Another possibility is that you may be editing only material filmed using a progressive scan setting in camera (but you’d know that and have told us, right!). A third possible – and I don’t use Quicktime a lot – there are reports that Quicktime discards fields and interlacing on playback in QT player – I don’t know if this is true, and doubt you are viewing that way if using Matrox card …

Otherwise, if it doesn’t matter / show up to you and your viewers, then it’s no problem. If you want to send stuff to others for, say, DVD playback, it might be good to be confident that your stuff meets normal standards and will play back on most setups …

[Mike Smith]

For all PAL formats except DV, you will want upper field first.

[Mike Smith]

Is this an older installation with a missing dongle ..?

[Mike Smith]

As, after a fashion, do CC light Burst / CC Light Rays, which come included foc with the Pro version. You might want ot have a duplicate text layer, precompose the text layers first, though.

[Mike Smith]

Always a mistake to risk a fixed for for an unknown client for an unspecified amount of work.

If you do that, you have to manage the project for the budget – tell the client what s/he can or can’t have for the money.

It should have set alarm bells ringing about the type of client that they went for the asymmetric / favors them deal YOU eat overs but THEY benefit if it goes under?

Trying to “fix” how a speaker delivers is completely open-ended and absolutely NOT in the “let’s cover the talk and patch it together” quote coverage.

I’d agree with the “talk to them now” suggestion – but if you get nowhere, try to learn from it. At the “get the job” stage it’s tempting to over-promise – but if you do, that’s your time and money and store you’re giving away …!

[Mike Smith]

There is a free, open-source science-oriented molecular visualisation tool called RASMOL, which is well suited to rendering (differing styles of representation of) molecules including DNA molecules in 3D, and which will allow you to animate these. It may take you a few hours to get to grips with, but the results can be good – I’ve used this in high in work for a pharmaceutical multinational.

If the DNA fragment you want is generic – any bit will do – that’s great: if you need specific genes, there are ways to find DNA sequences in public databases and load those into RASMOL – but I had the drug company researchers to help out with that.

Checking the links today, I see that there’s a later spin-off called CHIME that might be worth a look too.
https://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/

[Mike Smith]

You don’t say what Matrox board, what type of footage you are working with.

If you have a Matrox RTX 100 and are using PAL, Matrox has an unusual handling of DV with interlacing – upper field first. Default DV interlacing in PAL is lower field first – is AE interpreting this correctly ..?

If this is the case, you may want either to set up your AE composition to match the unusual PAL DV footage (upper field first), or (less good) get AE to interpret the footage as upper field first, and then on rendering output make sure you also select upper field first …

All best