[Nick Price]

HI renee,
basically, dont ever use use the startup drive to capture media. Buy yourself a smaller 100-250Gb drive for your startup and save the 640gb for your media. Should all work fine.

Hope that helps
Nick

[Nick Price]

Or you can press alt+d.
Best wishes
nick

[Nick Price]

Hi Mark,
try using the lyric shadow highlight plugin. Its free and does a really good job of bringing up shadows. You need to play with the saturation in 3wayCC at the same time too.
good luck
nick

[Nick Price]

Hi there,
i always prefer a mixer to hand, mainly for doing what it is designed to do. mix several sources without rewiring. How else can you listen to your Digi deck, Dvcam, deck computer output, sound/video card output, mic input, DVD player, VHS player, etc…
Obviously also useful to control speaker volume.

best wishes
nick

[Nick Price]

Thanks for your comments Micheal although i have to say that you dont clear things up very much. This was a practical question that had a simple answer really.

Delivering to broadcasters require certain limitations. If thats what they require then turing it down is what you have to do. As a jobbing editor who frequently has to deliver mastered audio for broadcasts, and non broadcast dvds, often without the always useful dubbing mixer, you have to have practical knowledge of what to do in these circumstances.

Saying it isnt the job of FCP editors to adjust final music masters is ridiculous. An editor mixes the sound as best he can. If that means turning the music down so it doesnt go over the specified -10 then so be it. Quality loss wont come into it anyway cos you will only hear that if you turn the music back up again.

Sorry for the VU/dbfs mistake. that what comes if you try and do too many things at work at once!
Hope Isobel can glean useful info from something here.
Nick

[Nick Price]

Hi all,
lots of great knowledge flying around here, but the simple fact is that for broadcast (or even dvd production if you are being careful) audio levels should stay between levels determined by the channel, which usually are between 4 to 6 on a PPM, and -18 to -10 on a vu meter, like FCPs. And music should generally sit around 5 on a PPM, no more than -12 on a VU meter. So just turn it down. There wont be any quality loss(!). That is the editors job (or the dubbing mixers if you have one).

So rather than go on about how accurate FCP meters are, calibrate them with an external tone source and a PPM, and then use the meters in FCP. For what its worth i find the FCP meters extremely accurate. I don’t really care if they aren’t accurate at the high end cos you should never be delivering audio that high for broadcast, unless you want it rejected.

If the music is mixed right then turning down is fine.
best wishes
nick

[Nick Price]

Hi John,
it played fine on my machine. And it looked great. It is re-encoded as a flash movie for the shooting people website, but that doesnt seem to have affected the quality. It will all depend on the viewers internet connection spped

best
nick

[Nick Price]

Hi Joshua,
You can also use the 4 point or eight point garbarge matte to add to a duplicated clip placed a layer above the current clip. Use the points to mask the bit you want to bring down a little and then apply filters to do so, usually the ‘3way CCorrector’. Use the feather and smoth sliders to smoth out the mask effect
best wishes
nick

[Nick Price]

Hi Rafael,
i use a different setting in QT to alter the look of 16:9 squashed. Rather than selecting the video track, in the properties menu, select the one above (usually its the name of the QT movie). Then under the presentation tab tick ‘conform apaeture to’. that usually does it for me and doesnt affect FCP.

hope that makes sense. thanks
nick

[Nick Price]

sorry to ask but have you trashed preferences?

nick