Richard Martz
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COW Coins
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Premiere Pro Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Just be sure to trash preferences or you’ll have problems. I had the same trouble. Trashed preferences. Magically everything worked. Cool.
Hey is Jason Ruha still with you guys? If so, tell him I said hello.
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I haven’t seen this but it probably looks fantastic. Interesting but although it is expressly intended for HDTV you probably won’t be able to fully appreciate the fact that it is HD. Recent tests done on smaller HDTV monitors have shown that unless the picture passes 36″ in diagonal measure the viewer cannot discriminate between a high quality (but ordinary) NTSC signal and an HDTV signal. So if this is for clients then it is probably a waste of $. However viewing HDTV on location through an SDTV monitor produces considerably less than desirable results. I’m really hopeful that this monitor will give true results on location when shooting HDTV. That is where the real need is and where there is great promise.
I just want to know that what I’m looking at is pretty close to what I will see when I’m back in the edit suite. Nothing can be more disappointing than starting an edit and seeing footage that looks entirely different than what you were looking at in the field. THe big problem is in the black detail. When shooting in HD there is considerably more detail in the blacks than you can see when viewing on a monitor. THis causes people to mistakenly overexpose footage. Remember that when HDTV is overexposed it destroys detail that cannot be returned even with color correction.
Recently we shot on a mountain top in North Georgia when the sun was just coming up. Sun was about 5-10 degrees below the horizon and clouds were just beginnning to be illuminated below us. Beautiful. Weather was cold and clear. We were shooting HDTV – 1080i. It was nearly pitch black when we started. When I got back in the studio we were doing color correction on the footage so I decided to see how much I could push the blacks. I was amazed that areas that seemed perfectly black actually had incredible detail. I was able to push the color correction envelopes so that you could actually make out not only the major details of the landscape but also the details of leaves on trees in what otherwise started as a completely black.
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Under the 1976 copyright act it does recognize the Fair-Use provision in the law. However this is usually limited to news outlets and those who have an interest in reporting on news about the copyrighted work. An example of this might be a news program reporting about a new play that just opened at a local theatre. Their limited coverage featuring actual footage of the play would constitute a fair use. However if they decided to air the play in it’s entirety then they would have to seek (and pay for ) the right to broadcast this material. ANother fair use might be when a university film class is teaching using an example of a copyrighted work (that would probably not be my work mind you). Even then the fair use would be limited to short sections of the film. However if a film student wanted to take a copyrighted piece of music and cut some visuals to the music that is not a Fair Use and the student would have to pay for the use of that music.
In fair use it is understood that you would not substantially use most or all of the compostion (or recording) without geting the permission of the copyright owner. The fact that you are using this for a personal purpose or a non-profit purpose no longer applies. The 1976 copyright act eliminated the “not-for-profit” clause. This meant that every school and non-profit had to begin immediately paying for use of music and that is the way it has been for the last 29 years. Your use or intent is completely irrelevant under the law. The fact that these cases are not prosecuted does not mean that the holder does not have the right to protect the work by electronic means and that is exactly what is going on here. Viva la digital technology.
Having said all that…if you want to use the material for another purpose you can recapture using an analog device and the material will be perfectly usable. Copy your CD using the original dubbed directly to another CD recorder using the analog outputs. Or play it back and capture the recording using the analog outputs of your CD deck connected directly to your computer’s analog (mic) stereo in on your audio card. Today’s electronics are so clean that you’ll hardly notice the difference and even then only on a high quality audio monitor. Recently we were involved in a project where we needed to begin working before the negotiations for the purchase of the music were completed. We simply pulled an analog dub and viola’, we were off working on the project.
But please, pay for the music and copyrighted visuals you use. That is the only way musicians and others have a way of making a living. You’ll feel better knowing you did the right thing.
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HDV is not as big a memory hog as even DV. The DVCPROHD submits much larger file sizes and therefore uses much larger memory. HDV because of it’s “improved” codec actually uses less space than even DVC Pro or DV Cam. I refer to it’s improved Codec because it is a huge compromise a a lot of levels. HDV uses a Long GOP compression scheme. GOP stands for Group of Pictures. The system basically works by looking at a group of frames and then “records” only the differences in those frames. Everything that stays basically the same is not recorded. There is a lot more to the scheme than that but that is kind of the layman’s version. So not unexpectedly HDV may have compression artifacts in scenes where everything is changing. Imagine a scene where the sun is reflecting on water in the late evening and you are shooting only the water. Because water is a fluid medium (duh) nearly everything will be changing in the picture from frame to frame. That is a perfect situation where HDV may have a bit of problem. Shooting a NASCAR race in HDV is not something I recommend.
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WHat is the final product that you are delivering to your client? Tape, DVD?
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Yes you can but I would recommend that you run at least 4 Gb of total memory since that seems to be what everyone in our situations are doing.
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That is exactly what I did and it is working perfectly. So I can’t recommend your chip supplier but I can endorse it in principle.
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You WILL have to add memory sticks in pairs. However you can mix the cards. For example, you can have 2, 1 GB cards and 2, 256 cards and 2, 512 cards and they will work fine. See my other post for information on getting memory cheaper than the price from Apple.
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I am doing the same kind of workflow and I’m currently using 4 GB of RAM. I would prefer to have 8 GB. So I recommend having as much as you can afford. You just want to avoid having your applications slow down. SO the more memory the better. I’ve never heard of having too much memory. I found a cheaper source for memory so I’ve actually loaded up at a cheaper price.
Apple charges $1500 for 4GB 533 DDR2 ECC SDRAM- 4x1GB –
OR
$700 for 4GB 533 DDR2 Non ECC SDRAM- 4x1GBYou can get the same chips at MAXUPGRADES.com for around $500. I’ve been runing this memory chip set for 2 months with no problems so I recommend it.
They sell a 1 GB memory module for $119 so I bought 4 of them. They work great at around 40% off the price from APPLE.
I hope that helps.
BTW – I also installed their SATA drive array in my CPU bay. I purchased one extra 400 GB SATA from Apple and added 3 of 300 GB drives from maxupgrades.com. I striped these as a RAID 0 (zero). THat gave me 1.3 TB of disc memory and more than enough throughput to do DVCPROHD or HDCAM when I need to do a project in a higher quality HD medium. These drives have amazing throughput and I’m really impressed. The cost of the drives, PCX SATA card and mounting hardware was under $700. Also got all the advice I coudl stand and several follow-up calls to be sure I was happy and working well. AMAZING!
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Thanks Walter. I’ll see how this works and if there seem to be compromises I still have enough dough left to purchase a Medea Drive as well.