[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Here’s a free utility which keeps disks active:
https://www.digital-heaven.co.uk/freeware/disksomnia.php

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
My older Sony VX9000E puts the 9 pixel black bars at the edges, but more recent Sony camcorders don’t seem to.

(Its still Photoshop in the UK – that’s a typo in the linked document).

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Here’s an explanation of the digital video 702/720 pixel width situation.
It’s a PAL document, but the principle is the same for NTSC – if the appropriate NTSC pixel aspect-ratio and line number is used in the maths.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/tvbranding/picturesize.shtml

[Paul Dickin]

[Herb Sevush] “…more for iPhone issues than for our concerns, But don’t worry, by then we will all be in a tapeless workflow and the issue will be moot.”
Hi
But the Pentagon will want all those GPS-stamped iPhone movies of the invasion of Iran to be time(code) stamped with something more reliable (ie media managable) than the Start Time + counter offset that QT currently allows….
Hell who knows WHEN Private Ryan switched his friggin’ iPhone camera on….

PS I’m a card carrying member of the ‘give QT VITC (now)’ movement. 🙂

[Paul Dickin]

[walter biscardi] “Adobe is the closest with CS3 and in some ways their package is stronger such as Photoshop and After Effects…”

But in most ways not 🙁
This is an email received by a user failing repeatedly to get help from Adobe as to why Premiere Pro was unusable in a professional edit set-up”
[Adobe Technical Support] Premiere Pro and Encore CS3 were never tested on an Apple 8 core processor system, as that processor was not available to Adobe for testing before the release of the product…
If you need any other Technical assistance, please feel free to contact us again.
Yours sincerely,
Sergio C*******
Adobe Technical Support
Tel: (UK) 020 7365 0735
Tel: (Eire) 01 242 1553
Fax: 0031 20 5820875
Email: englishts@adobe.com

Us Apple pro-apps users could do with some real competition to force Apple’s game – but as far as Adobe is concerned, its not happening 🙁

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Select the full length of the track in the timeline, then in the Modify Menu choose Audio – you can then adjust the Gain of all the selected clips in either 1 or 3dB steps, + or -.
There are keyboard shortcuts to speed the process.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Its a process of eye-matching.
This can be quite efficient if:

a) The source telecine/tapedeck operator can find a recognisable cue point for each reel/roll. Conventionally, this is the start-of-item leader.

b) the DVD-recorder operator always (and only) starts the offline DVD recording by including the reference point (ie leader) in EVERY recording.

c) Detailed notes are logged so all this can be repeated identically at a later date, for the on-line sections to be identified from the timing notes, and matched to the EDL of the off-line edit – which will be referencing from FCP’s internally-generated start-of-item timecodes.

If your Producers were not methodical in this way, then its a guess-eyematch process, which can take months 😉

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Working in PAL, on the off-tape footage, hardly any appreciable loss of quality using FW DV25.

The appreciable differences only show up if:
a) you are colour grading using mattes and masks (or doing green-screen masking), or
b) if you are adding text captions, or composite graphics.

These always look better with a less-compressed format than DV.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Because I do all my own audio myself (so it doesn’t matter if I chop up my audio tracks willy-nilly) I use the razor and crossfades to mark the passages where I want the track level to alter, then use the Modify>Audio +dB or -dB commands – from the keyboard, to take the level up or down as required.

I only resort to using the pen tool on the rubber bands to cope with the very ends of a track if the transition is too complicated for a cross-fade.

It means my project looked at in an EDL/OMF/AAF looks like confetti – but thats not part of my workflow,
The big advantage is that the crossfades are very easily shifted earlier/later on the track if say the voice over or dialogue is altered and the dip-under position changes.

I also use it for GarageBand-created music tracks where I make a full-on version and an underscore version. Putting both, in sync, onto one audio track means I can easily manage the music character-changes just by slipping the crossfade between the two one way or the other.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
To get DV50 out of a J-30 you have to use an SDI link (or Component for a non-SDI deck) and a capture card (or box).
On its own the J-30 only sends DV25 out by FW.

That’s the bad news – the good news is that the J-30’s FW transcoding is the best DV converter there is – but it ought to be at that price 😉
Even more so in 4.2.0 PAL.