[Richard Sanchez]

The color shift you’re experiencing is most likely due to the overlay settings. You can adjust those in the control panel, under your display settings. You’ll probably notice, if you’re using a client monitor, that the color shift doesn’t happen there.

As for the delay, you need to set the program to properly remove the pulldown, so under the 24 option, set it to either 2:3:2:3 or 2:3:3:2 depending on which pulldown you were shooting with, and set the A frame to 0:00:00:00 and see if that works.

[Richard Sanchez]

The academic doesn’t come with the bundled software (Sorenson Squeeze, Smart Sound, and DVD It!) which are all great programs and totally worth the cost. Also, I don’t believe you can upgrade academic versions, but that might not be the case, so don’t quote me on that one.

[Richard Sanchez]

One of the trickier things to keep in mind is the PCI bus segmentation (which can be tricky information to get on each motherboard). If you’re custom building your system and you plan to use the mojo, you need it on it’s own PCI bus segment. A lot of motherboard manufacturers will have the firewire port, usb port, and other ports sharing the same bus. If that is the case, your mojo will drop frames like crazy.

I tried to custom build my own system, and in the end, I found it was more cost effecient to buy a refurbed Avid qualified system with very little components and then upgrade from there. I found an XW4300 refurbed for about $500 and then added my own video card and whatnot, and it’s worked great.

[Richard Sanchez]

You can try download the Avid Codec LE package at https://www.avid.com/onlineSupport/supportcontent.asp?productID=0&contentID=3555 and then rendering your footage out as an mov with the Avid DV100 codec. That should import into your Avid system without any problems.

[Richard Sanchez]

Unfortunately, quality loss is inherent with compression and there’s really no way around that, but using Sorenson Squeeze (which should have been bundled with your Avid application) you can get some pretty clean results. If you’re looking to put it up on you tube, compressing it down to 320 x 180 will do you the best. If it’s going up on something different, you can spit it out at a higher resolution but that will increase file size and bandwidth requirement. I usually set it to Sorenson AVC Pro codec on multi pass, and a data rate of about 762 to get some nice clean results.

To get it into Sorenson, use the “Send To” feature under the file tab if your application, then move the cursor to “encoding” and then “sorenson squeeze” or you can do it manually with a quicktime reference file.

Check out the forum for compression techniques, there’s tons of great stuff in there.

[Richard Sanchez]

How’s it going?

Unfortunately, in my experience I’ve never seen Windows Media Player plays back footage that wasn’t square pixels. That said, if you use VLC, which is a free media player, you can manually set the aspect ratio so that you can see how the video was intended to be watched.

As for the DVD, whether or not Windows plays back the file right or not, it was exported as an anamorphic dv avi, all you need should need to do is set the project to 16:9 in your dvd authoring program. That will flag the player to adjust the video for the proper aspect ratio. So it’s possible that you may have set your dvd project for 4:3. If that’s not the case, for whatever reason, your DVD player isn’t adjusting for that, so as said in the other post, there should be an option by using the DVD remote, to adjust the aspect ration.

Hope that helps!

[Richard Sanchez]

I bought a GL2 a couple monthes ago and I absolutely love it. I shoot documentary and live bands most frequently and it does most of what I need it to do, so I’ll just bring out the cons of the camera first. Since I usually shoot in dark clubs, auto focus is never an option since it hates low light, but despite that there is no push auto focus button when in manual mode. The camera does not shoot 24p which would be nice. The camera does not have XLR ins for professional mics (Though you can buy an adapter by Beachtek, which is totally worth it. I bought one, and I love it.) Those three are the major cons that I’ve noticed with the camera. As far as pros goes, it’s a 3 chip camera so it performs very well in low light. It also doesn’t call a lot of attention to itself, like an XL2, which is great if you’re shooting guerilla-style (I.E. without a permit) and it’s size is great for hard to reach angles. I love this camera and probably won’t buy another until I’m ready to move up into HD.

[Richard Sanchez]

How does the picture differ when it compresses to DVD? Does it become very dark? Usually when you go from a higher resolution picture to a lower one, as in your case from HDV to SD DVD, the colors darken.

Once you have your footage in compressor, you’ll want to open your previewer and click on the icon that displays your footage relative to your settings. You’ll then want to adjust the brightness and contrast (be more conservative with this setting) to adjust the tonal range of your picture, and then brighten using gamma correction (this will brighten your mid tones, without adjusting the brightest or darkest areas, so you won’t blow out your picture). Your picture also may have become softened so you can use the Sharpen Edges filter if you want, but be very conservative with this filter because it’s easy to overdo.

This response refers to a situation that may not unnecessarily be your situation, so if it’s something different, let me know.

[Richard Sanchez]

I can’t speak for the Mac version, but the PC version of Cleaner XL 1.5 only compresses flash video with the Wildform Flix codec which doesn’t support alpha channels (I believe). The On2 VP6 codec does, however you’ll need to use Episode (on the mac) Adobe Flash Encoder, or I use Sorenson Squeeze 4.5 (but you’ll need to purchase the VP6 plugin, or the power pack for Squeeze to do this).

Honestly, if you can accomplish what you need in AE, just do that. Your other options will include spending money.

[Richard Sanchez]

This is a bug with Cleaner XL, and you can output in H.264 as long as you do single pass. That’s a bummer, since Multi pass will give you smaller file sizes. What I do in this case is output as a quicktime file, and use a free program called Mpeg Streamclip. That program will convert your uncompressed quicktime file into H.264 with multipass enabled. You won’t have the preprocessing and filter set of Cleaner, but you will have multi passed h.264 mov files.