Randy Lee
Forum Replies Created
-
I agree that the Broadcast safe, or Color Correct 3-way, or whichever filter you use to bring levels down, should be the last one rendered, just to be safe. Nesting is a good way to accomplish this.
I wonder, though, what would happen if it were the first one applied (with the others off, and bring your levels down to 95% or so), then you added the rest after. Does this problem still pop up? It seems like in Final Cut if there is anything going on besides just a clip with no effects or filters, or anything on the tracks above it, the levels shown are always wrong until you render, so you’re best off correcting the plain clip, then adding graphics, effects, and the rest. Then if you need to color correct again at the end for colors, but not legal levels, feel free. I’m not sure that this would work, but it might.
Does anybody with more experience make it a point to work this way? Would this work? I’ve always wondered, because working around the scopes being wrong has always been a bit of a pain. Not a major problem, but something that should really be fixed. (Apple, you hear that? Professionals want a professional app. Thats why we’re not using Imovie.)
-
Just to double-check, you did shoot them Pal, correct? You’re not trying to digitize NTSC tapes as Pal? I’ve never tried it and don’t have a mini-dv deck hooked up right now to try it out on, but I would assume that it would look distorted and jumpy if you had shot them NTSC and were trying to capture wrong. Humor me and try an NTSC setup.
-
Ah, yes, the infamous option key snapping issue. We’re still running 6.02 where I work (we try to update all 3 systems at the same time for compatibility reasons, and never mid-project, so sometimes it takes a while before we can update them all), and every time Option is hit, it turns snapping on, no matter what you were pressing option for. This is the exact opposite of the problem it sounds like you’re having, though, so it could be that this is of absolutely no help to you 🙂
Best of luck, but best bet is most likely to back everything up and update to the latest and greatest flavor of Final Cut and Quicktime.
-
That’s sort of what I was afraid of. The company I’m with bought the cheapest player they could find, although supposedly it has the latest firmware update as of the beginning of June. The only other place I could go to check them out was Best Buy and similar stores. Those didn’t work, but they did play in a PS3, and I don’t know of anyone else with another BluRay player to test them out in. Here in the midwest, though, not many people have BluRay players anyway, and most of the people with them are most likely not going to know how to update the firmware, so until (if?) they ship ready to play BD-Rs out of the box, we’re sort of caught between a rock and a hard place. “Yes, of course we can give you an HD copy. You just won’t be able to play it without jumping through some hoops…”
On a side note, is there any particular reason that you use Encore instead of DVDIT Pro? Convenience? Other issues? We’ve got a copy laying around, and if that would be less buggy than Encore, it would be worth installing it somewhere and learning it.
-
Actually, I created a Blu-Ray disc recently (My first, and what an experience!) and didn’t have any problems forcing the selection of the buttons. (It was easier than the old Sonic software on an OS 9 machine that we use for the rest of our DVDs. If you’d like, I can double check from work tomorrow and give you a step-by-step on how I did it.) Encore was, as Walter says, better than DVDSP in some ways, and much worse in others. I would advise testing a video with menus out before it comes down to the paying job with deadlines, so you know what you’re getting into and what you’ll need to watch for.
The biggest issue I ran into was that for some reason, it would never build a complete project if I just tried to build. I had to file > save as [new project name], and then it would build fine every time, if I didn’t change anything. The minute something gets changed, it wouldn’t build anymore.
The other huge issue that I ran into was that our discs will play in a PS3, but we tried it out in every Blu-Ray player at the local Best Buy, and another player that we bought (with the most recent firmware update), and the PS3 is the only thing that we could play anything back.
At the end of the day, though, it was amazing seeing our footage played back in its full HD glory. Its worth learning the needlessly difficult workflow just for that.
-
Another option, if you don’t have access to another program to work with the photos, is to go into your sequence settings in the sequence you’re working in (Open the sequence, then hit cmd-0), go to the render control tab, and turn the Frame Rate and / or Resolution down. It won’t stop the need for rendering, but it will give you a lower res render, which, while not looking as good for the editing process, will go a LOT quicker while you’re working. Then just return to this and turn them back up once everything is done.
Or a quick search of the COW will show other best practices and better programs.
-
I agree completely that Compressor / DVD SP isn’t completely on par with professional grade products. A decent hardware encoder or a better software encoder (I believe several were mentioned, otherwise a quick search of the cow will yield great results) will beat them out every time. Personally, where I’m at, we’ve only touched Compressor/ DVD SP in an emergency, and other than that we use use a hardware encoder for everything. It just plain looks better in the end.
If you are working with those, though, definitely have Compressor do your conversion, not DVD SP. I hear quite a few of the Pros saying that you should shoot for around 6.5 CBR for the best quality.
Also, check out the preferences in DVD SP. You can tell it to either encode in the background, or encode on build. So if you are taking it to a post house, simply set it to encode on build and you won’t have it sucking up valuable processor cycles while you’re working.
Best of luck to you, and let us know what you end up doing in the end to get the best final product.
-
Show duplicate frames will only work if you re-use the shots though, right? It won’t show you in the browser whether or not it has already been used. It really wouldn’t do much good if you were searching through your footage, trying to find that one other really nice shot that you haven’t used yet.
Since I normally don’t end up using labels for much else, our shots come pretty well organized in bins, I just hit cmd-a in the timeline (or select all the clips that I want to keep track of, if there is more in the timeline than you need to do this to), then apply a label, using cmd-option and a number 2 through 6. (1 goes back to the default no label). This doesn’t show you if you’ve used a shot more than once, but it will show you what you have and haven’t used, and since there are multiple colors, you can always get a little more creative in using it for your organization. Scene 1 is red, 2 is blue, and so on.
-
We’re running 10.4.11 where I’m at, and went with the 5.1 NDD drivers also. I would definitely double-check AJA.com to be sure you’ve got the correct driver. Also, when we first installed, we did it from a separate Administrator account, and ran into quite a few issues with the account used for editing. Capturing issues, viewing on an external monitor, editing to tape, you name it. We had to uninstall the drivers and re-install from the account used for editing. The strange thing is that having done this, both accounts now work fine.
It might be worth playing around with different accounts if you continue to have issues.
-
Yes, we have it set up correctly, and we ran quite a few tests when we picked up 3 Final Cut suites here, and decided to do all the up- and down-converting with the XDCam decks, because they just look better than the results that we can get any other way. We even had a FCP Certified Trainer in, who looked over our workflow and agreed that the PDW-F70 just plain does a better job.
As for SD versions on tape… it just works better for our workflow. We produce several shows that air regionally, and each airs 3 times, with new commercials inserted each time. None of the stations in the Midwest here take HD masters, so we ship out new Beta SP and DVC Pro tapes every week to 15+ stations. Keeping an SD master works much better. For our workflow, anyway, not everyone is doing the same sort of work or has the same needs.
Regardless, I’m not satisfied with the result that we get using anything in the Final Cut Studio 2 suite to do the down-conversion. If it works for others, thats great, but its just not as clear as the footage we shot, and not as clear as using the right hardware to do the conversion. If anyone knows any software that can do a better job, I’m not sure we would implement it here, but I would definitely be interested in learning about it. That seems to be half the job in this industry, learning about all the new toys that are always coming out 😉