[Pete Burger]

Again: There is only one person in the universe, that can anser this question. And that is you! You decide what you like and if it looks good to you, then it’s right. (It’s a different story, if you work for a client. Then he or she decides what’s right 😉 )

The sharpness filter works by darkening dark edges and brightening bright edges. If you look closely at a “sharpened” picture you’ll see some kind of fringing around areas with high contrast.

Raising contrast by using a contrast filter darkens or brightens areas, so it doesn’t do the same thing.

Play around with some footage and (for testing purposes) overdo each and every filter that you want to use, so you can see clearly what exactly does this filter do and what exactly is affected by the filter.

You have to see it for yourself and you have to get a feel for, what will happen, if I apply this or that filter or which combinations work, or don’t work. This is something that can’t be told. You have to see it for yourself.

[Pete Burger]

[Trip Nixon] “Does the premiere built in tool “sharpen” do the same thing.”

With sharpness you raise kind of the “local contrast”. Results in a fringing or ringing effect if overdone. Same thing with “unsharp mask”, but you have more control over what exactly is being sharpened and how much.

[Pete Burger]

What picture style do you use, Trip?

With the canon cameras you can assign a “personal” style to the “user settings”.

There are quite a bunch of “flat” styles around like “superflat” oder “marvels cinegamma” and they are quite nice to work with in some cases.
I personally prefer the “marvel” styles over “superflat”. But those styles are hard to grade imho, so I tend do shoot with the built-in “faithful” style with reduced contrast, sharpness and saturation settings (just like you described it).

If needed at all (I don’t think it is needed in _all_ cases for _all_ kinds of footage), I do sharpening in post with the “unsharp mask” filter.

I described my approach using the “unsharp mask” filer in this thread: https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/280/5615

But just as Noah wrote, the only person who can decide, whether sharpening in post is neccessary and how much sharpening to do, is you!

Hope this helps!

[Pete Burger]

Bill, that’s a great idea! Disk-images. Very simple, but effective.
Thanks a lot for bringing that up!

[Pete Burger]

All metadata (shutter, iso, lens, aperture, …) of your clips are stored in the .thm files. You can read them with any exif-viewer that accepts .thm files.

hth

[Pete Burger]

Thanks, Brent!

Seems to be the time to update…

[Pete Burger]

Maybe find someone how has access to a windows machine. Had no problem copying the .fir file with windows and updating the firmware.

[Pete Burger]

Never used Vegas myself before (although it came for free with my camera), so like Dave said, ask in the Vegas forum. Maybe someone there can help.

All the best!

[Pete Burger]

Actually all 24p DVDs are 23,976 as well, so this shouldn’t be an issue. What software are you working with?

[Pete Burger]

For PAL DVDs it maybe would have been better to shoot 25p rather than 24p.

There seems to be a way to create a 24p DVD:

https://www.dvinfo.net/forum/techniques-independent-production/60115-24p-dvd.html

Or you could create a NTSC DVD by performing a 3:2 pull-down to 29,97 which is a common thing.

Another way is to do a PAL speedup to 25p and pitch the audio down accordingly, which is quite common as well.

There is a rather good article on wikipedia. It covers all the basics. You maybe want to take a look:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24p

Hope this helps.