[Mike Smith]

Yea, monitoring video is always tricky, isn’t it.

I wonder if your flat panel + DVI combination is the problem – I’m not sure if the flat panel/LCD arrangement is ever better than a stop-gap. It seems very hard at present to get a decent HD video monitoring set-up unless you have a high-resolution CRT using HDTV color space, fed with an appropriate HDTV signal. Which, of course, is expensive.

I see you have a good graphics card, so you probably won’t be interested in the Parhelia APVe – which does claim to give HDV out .. I haven’t tried it, and don’t know whether it works well with Vegas, but the specs look good. https://www.matrox.com/mga/workstation/video/news/archive_story/may2005/parhelia_apve.cfm

Have you tried borrowing a hi-def CRT or plasma screen and attaching it to the the component out from your Radeon card ..?

All best.

[Mike Smith]

Sfaik no editing app sends back HDV over firewire. Previewing requires some other arrangement, e.g. via graphics card to 2nd computer monitor or via dedicated hardware like Decklink / Aja.

[Mike Smith]

Hi TOF

Why are you taking this one on – what do you hope to achieve?

Does the film have a script / story to tell which is intriguing, even interesting – something to make it worth your efforts, given the visual problems?

And how long is your finished edit going to be? Delivered in what format?

In your situation, if the project really feels worthwhile completing (even for cash reasons), I might be inclined to cut it fast and tight, no picture correction at all – just tell the story as well as you can, as short as you can. Look for really strong, appropriate music to enhance the mood. And if the shots are poor, don’t hold on to them – cut really quick, repeat shots if you have to, maybe use a music or story rhythm to motivate cuts.

Then when you have it down to length, look for a style / series of visual devices that might get your rubbish pictures off the hook …. shrinking picture to 50% or 25% “boxes” often helps poor source. Can you play with putting up multiple small picture streams ..? It can faster to do that with straight picture “boxes”, but maybe you could make up some soft, curvy (maybe moving) alpha channels and key the footage through them, to give the multi-image effect something extra …

Then maybe do something dramatic and stylish on the picture processing side, so that it seems like your film has a “look”, rather than just an amatuer feel … hmm.

Good luck!

[Mike Smith]

[Mike Smith]

You may have to have another look at the Flash manual. When Flash 8 opens for you, it’s opening to a blank stage. You will find video player components you can drag onto that stage, and set to refer to your flv files; then when you preview or publish your Flash movie, the video will play.

[Mike Smith]

It sounds to me like your immediate need would be to identify what in your imported subtitle files is crashing Encore, and fix that – maybe via Adobe support?

Are the subtitle files in a format Encore reports that it supports? If so, can you open them in Wordpad or something and manually check that they conform to expected format?

It might be a case of some missing punctuation marks or other not-quite-standard output from the suibtitler. At worst, you could put in a few subtitles by hand to get out of this jam, and review your options later under less stress.

On the Avid crashing front, plenty people run Avid Xpress Pro without crashes – I have a colleague who is one of them. He does swear by two gig of RAM though, and was meticulous in meeting the Avid recommended hardware requirement.

Jumping to a new app late and under “crash” pressure seems like a recipe for unhappiness – particularly when Vegas is at the far end of the spectrum from the Avid school of editing, and you may have unresolved hardware issues affecting your system causing Avid Xpress Pro to go down …

Good luck with it.

[Mike Smith]

Hi David,

I just love the Welles quote too. I think it hints at an essence of what film (I’d include visual communications) can be – what it maybe needs to be, if it is to reach, influence, move, perhaps even change people … Hannah Arendt approached a similar idea with her “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

I hesitated on suggesting the Paltrow line: I so agree about how easy it is to trash a good idea / script, and how often it seems to happen. And, somewhere, I’m a little scared on this one. I think a great script is a really useful starting point for any project, and one that my clients sometimes see more as cost and delay than as essential blueprint. So yea – push script and preparation.

Yet sometimes the film has to “take flight” in production – build on what’s in the script and preplanning, and use it as a launch pad for something more extraordinary. I’d hate to see the need for script time turn into a reason to mechanise the production process – “we have the script, now paint in the scenes by numbers.” If it’s a mechanical process, it may be controllable and costable, but will the results be as good as they should be ..?

Mike

[Mike Smith]

I might lean on Orson Welles, with his

“A film is never really any good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”

Or maybe David Oglivie’s

“When I write an ad I don’t want you to tell me you find it creative. I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.”

Or even Gwyneth Paltrow:
“From my experience in film there is no truer adage than, ‘It’s very hard to make a good movie from a bad script’.”

[Mike Smith]

There are a couple programs that might be up your street – RASMOL and its descendant Protein Explorer. They allow DNA sequences to be loaded into a sort-of-3D world, and sort-of animated .. hmm – not slick like AE, but close to the chemistry. They are free to download, cross platform …

More at
https://www.openrasmol.org/

https://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/

[Mike Smith]

Another approach might be to look at re-cutting the scene with a completely different, maybe much faster rhythm – very short cuts, maybe using jump cuts and repeated action to create a stylised feel … and use audio to generate atmosphere.

If the scene uses either fighter’s point of view, maybe that can motivate a switch to exaggerated, blurred, resized footage – scale up to 200%, and ues fast, small, jerky position moves to jerk it all about … hmm