[Niklas Wikman]

Shane, the guy who know just about everyting about editing… (both the techno stuff and the creative stuff… :-))

Sorry for confusing the formats – you are surely right about the smaller camera shooting AVCHD. I don’t have the camera at hand and can check. But yes, it does record on SD card.

I’m glad to hear that both HD formats will have the same field order. (I understand that FCP has a function of auto-adding the Shift field filter, making the added clip getting the same field order as the timeline setting.)

I will set the timeline to ProRes422 by just let a clip from the SD card set the parameters (or would ProRes422 LT be good enough, given DVCProHD on the other side) and then just start editing.

Again Shane – thanks!

[Niklas Wikman]

We are into educational/documentary field, so no need for slo-mo and such things. But sure, we’d like to pan/zoom without the image jumping all around… I guess you just have to get used to it, but I’m sure we’re missing a few settings on the camera, perhaps making the movements a little smoother….

I’m happy to try/use any additional steps, in order to get this project to look the best it can, on both web and DVD.

Obviously, we have to re-consider whether or not staying with HD or simply going back to SD. This is because all our own projects (i.e not for a client) will be on both DVD and web.

For the MPEG-2 encoding I use BitVice. The tests I’ve done with our current footage looked OK, but I still have to burn a disc and look on an old 4:3 CRT TV…
(yup, we do have one at the office, among all the flat screens… :-))

[Niklas Wikman]

We did some test with the different HD formats we have on our HPX500.

25P was stuttery and looked no good, compared to 25i (that we shot before).

Perhaps we missed other settings (film cam or video cam?) but here we are now.

I can only try to reduce the damage and try to decide what settings to use for the next project….

[Niklas Wikman]

Daniel,

Uh-oh, not a good thing to hear with hours of footage in the project…

Not sure it’ll be DVD, clients want web files.

If we want to shoot HD for both web and PAL DVD with our HPX500, we would have to go for 1080i then?

[Niklas Wikman]

Now – you won’t believe this…

It looks like QuickTime player crops off my video…???

Found a post in a forum that suggested opening the movie in QT 7. And sure, now the movie properties are 1280×720…

Can I trust QT7 that my movie really is 1280×720@50P ? Or is there any other Mac software that can display stream info?

[Niklas Wikman]

My question was if there’s a “better” codec than 422?

Should I go for HQ?

Since I shoot progressive, I just un-tick the “interlaced input” in BV, and uses some amount of Purifier (it will improve the downscaling, according to the BitVice author). Then I guess I don’t have to worry about field order.

The HPX500 uses DVCProHD, but there’s no such setting in FCP7?

I figure I have to transcode (in Log and Transfer) to the codec chosen. ProRes or any other?

[Niklas Wikman]

Shane,

As always, you’re right on spot. Sure there’s no really need for archiving on tape since we shoot P2. I guess I’m still in those days where we shot on BetacamSP, captured using the Sony DSR-45P and ended up on DVCAM tapes. The deck still works (as does our UVW-1800P) so I thought I could just put things on tape as well.

The LTO is quite expensive. Having used LaCie disks and later 2,5″ disks with enclosures from OWC (that caused us a lot of trouble) we now shifted to use RAID-1 enclosures. Sure, they are big (and noisy) but when you’re finished you have two disk to put on the self.

Put them back and spin them up every six month, and I believe you’re quite safe.

But I’ll look into the LTO option. Do you have any suggestions on hardware/software?

[Niklas Wikman]

Hi Dave,

The problem is that neither I (nor the client) knows what they need.
As I wrote, they need master files (self-contained) in order to somewhere in the future transcode to any web format they have chosen.

Today they use Flash. Tomorrow… they don’t know.

Since my footage is DV50 (PAL SD shot on a HPX500) I reckon that going higher than that is of no use. However, I want to make sure they can READ the master file. My guess is that they are all on PC.

One of the good things with QT is that it has support for merely every format from the beginning of QT.

But what about the PC world, then? I’m thinking of going either PNG or M-JPEG A, as well. (I have a 500 GB hard drive that holds 31 GB of the DV50 master clips…)

[Niklas Wikman]

Hi David,

Every time I launch FCP and have changed the project disk, I set the scratch disk to the root folder of the project disk.

In FCP, the root of the disk is set for the following items:

Video capture
Audio capture
Audio render
Video Render

My project disks are mostly formatted as Mac OS Extended, non-journaled.

When using the disk and rendering, I do see the render files, located in /Audio render files/project name and /Render files/project name

Sometime, when moving a disk from one computer to another, FCP complains about missing render files. Then I check, and the render folders are there, but they are empty. Not sure why this happens.

But mostly, the render files are there, but when doing a search/locate, FCP seems to be looking for other file names than the existing render files.

What can I do further to solve this?

[Niklas Wikman]

I have all the “items” set to the (root) disk.

The media files never gets lost, only the render files.