[Randy Lee]

I think that the big difference between individuals shipping gear and it getting shipped from the manufacturer is that we tend to ship a case with our gear, whereas the manufacturer tends to ship quite a few boxes with the case and gear inside. When you have boxes and boxes coming down the conveyer belt, you treat them ok. When you have this weird-shaped (compared to everything else) package coming, you throw it around, it doesn’t stack well, so it falls or gets tossed around until you can find somewhere to put it, and it generally gets mistreated.

Half the kids working there sit outside smoking pot in their cars until they go in to work, and in a small market, Madison WI, we lost around 4 to 5 people a week minimum, and half of the people that started never showed up for their second day. And everyone I talked to said UPS was even worse. So maybe most people don’t have problems, and some packages are ok, but I wouldn’t want to trust my camera to people with the sort of attitude that they had there.

Those pickup shots are always the trouble-makers, aren’t they? But it’s definitely worth it to make sure the camera goes safely, both because it makes everything run a little more smoothly, and because… who wants to go through showing up and finding a broken camera? Or even if its not this time, the extra wear and tear from being treated poorly in transit will eventually catch up with it.

[Randy Lee]

I agree completely. You want a dub house to do it. A terranex will do a much, much better job than any software solution that you might find. It’ll cost you, but that should just be passed on to the client and you’re good to go. If there isn’t much in the way of movement (especially side to side), Compressor, a Nattress Plug-in, or Cinema Tools can do a fair job, but none of them are great, and a quick forum search will get you everything you need on them.

Best of luck.

[Randy Lee]

Oh, man. Having worked at Fedex, and worked with quite a few UPS people there, I would never send anything important or expensive that way. Especially if you’re counting on it using it on the other end. Its usually not an issue, but the way packages get treated en route definitely isn’t how I would like to see my equipment treated. “Special” packages such as camera cases were probably the most mistreated. Plus there’s always the possibility of it getting lost or not arriving on time.

A few hundred for a new bag should be something that you could roll into expenses for a job, and could (and should!) be recouped without a second thought. If you’re trying to make sure you’re not going to have any issues on the other end, you should either keep your gear with you, or rent when you get there. That’s my 2 cents, anyway.

[Randy Lee]

Oh, man. I would take timecode and maybe some audio meters and the like when laying off to tape over this any day. I can handle some ‘i’s and ‘o’s in my descriptions, since normally i’m given bins from Avid MediaLog anyway. But it is what it is, the key is to learn to work with what we’ve got. And what we’ve got is something that can definitely be worked with, if you’ve got the patience and open a couple of books first. I’m hoping for some huge changes come Snow Leopard, but who knows… right now they’re just one more for the rumor mill.

[Randy Lee]

I just worked with a Canon camera this weekend, and you need to sit down and make sure that you’ve got every setting correct before you start plugging things in. With Final Cut off, and no firewire cable plugged into the camera, switch it to VCR mode, so you can watch the tape with the controls on the camera. Then go into the menu, make sure that you’re not set to down-convert to DV. Get out of the menu. Shut the camera off, plug in the firewire cable to both the camera and computer, and turn the camera back to VCR mode. Open up Final Cut, and go to Easy Setups > HDV > 1080P24 Firewire Basic. (this should be the correct setup, but it really depends on how you shot. Cmd-8 to open up the log and capture window, and you should be good to go.

I had to digitize from the Canon camera with Firewire Basic, but when laying back to tape, it wanted a standard firewire, not basic, but this could be because I laid back NTSC DV material.

If this doesn’t work for you, post back and we can see where we have to go from there.

[Randy Lee]

I would back up anything that you need and is working off of the hard-drive first, then format to Mac OS Extended. Should we all go through the Journaled vs Unjournaled discussion again? Do a quick Cow search to see which one you want. Its a pretty quick and painless process, and then your drive will work flawlessly. It won’t, however, be able to be hooked up to a Windows machine without some help (such as macdrive, https://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/ ) like it can right now. If you don’t have time to format or space to save your files while you do it, you would probably be ok exporting a reference file (as long as all the media is going to stay put for now) or a self-contained quicktime, like you’ve been doing, to somewhere on your system hard-drive.

Let us know if you have any more issues or need some help.

[Randy Lee]

Well, while we’re waiting on the article on DoF adaptors… can I laugh while suggesting Rotoscoping? Its been done before… but it is very, very sub-optimal. Other than that, I think your options have pretty well been laid out here. Cameras with larger chips, a better piece of glass, open the iris all the way, DoF adaptors, being farther away, and the scrim, which was a new one to me.

Let us know if you need more details or explanations on any, or a quick search of the COW or a Google search should give you the rest of what you need.

[Randy Lee]

Not that its a universal solution by any means, but could you set your autosave to save frequently, then cut your sequence up into say, 10 sequences, each containing 6 minutes or so of footage, by copy-pasting. Leave those sequences open, but not your main one, then in user preferences, turn on auto-render for all open timelines. I believe that it renders each one separately, so it whatever it gets through before crashing would get saved.

Or would it? If the system is rendering, will it still auto-save the parts that are rendered in the background? I would have to test it, and don’t have time at the moment. This method might also help if it is a RAM issue, and your system is crashing from not enough RAM. (Speaking of which, you’ve been through the usual threads on not enough RAM, wrong combinations, etc… right?)

If this method works, you could then just copy-paste all those rendered sections back into one main sequence, and they would show up rendered there and you would be good to go.

Let us know what you come up with, and if anyone knows if this would work, chime in. I’ve got too much to get done today and not enough time, but I’ll see if I can come up with anything else later.

[Randy Lee]

Does it look ok if you just export a self-contained quicktime out of Final Cut? Export > Quicktime Movie, NOT quicktime conversion. If it does, do you really have any reason to go to Mpeg 2 to be able to play it through the VGA cable? As a mac person, I feel horrible saying this, but I’ve never done that with a mac, only with a PC, and on a pc you don’t need to use an mpeg 2, you can play WMV’s or QT’s just fine through VGA. If you could play the quicktime, that would save you an important level of compression.

Also, what settings are you using for your Mpeg 2? If your video is under 90 minutes, try a 7.0 mb/s CBR with motion estimate > Best and see how it looks. The settings you use in compressor can make a huge difference in your final DVD.

Are you using the correct easy setup when you bring in your footage? (Did you have to render when initially putting footage in the timeline?)

If you have the time, try duplicating your final sequence, then opening up the new one, hitting cmd-0, and changing the compressor settings to DV50, then rendering the entire sequence. If you don’t have to render a clip after changing timeline settings, Final Cut won’t render it into the new codec. You can force everything to render by selecting your timeline, hitting cmd-a, then doing something that doesn’t conflict with filters you’ve used and that is easily undone, such as modify > composite mode > pick one, then immediately going back to modify > composite mode > normal. (Or anything similar, don’t do this if you’re using composite modes unless you want to re-do them). Render, and everything will be in DV50. Export a quicktime of that and see how it looks.

Thats all I have time for at the moment, there are more things that could be tried, but I need to get back to work. DV is DV. Its never as good as better shooting formats. But we can try to keep it as workable as it gets.

Best of luck to you.

[Randy Lee]

Another excellent book, which I’ve heard highly recommended time and time again, is Film Directing: Shot by Shot by Steven Katz. It covers everything from story-boarding to blocking, angles and lenses, and more. The book goes through quite a variety of situations, all well diagramed, to explain the line and how it could be used. I believe there were 10 examples of completely different situations for shooting 2 people talking, and that is before it even gets into situations with more people involved. It is easy for a beginner to understand, but can really help you get in depth, too.