Rich Rubasch
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Forum Replies Created
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Or use Levelator.
Couldn’t let Walter have the last word.
: )
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media -
Absolutely…My recipe was to apply Levelator only to the mono voice tracks of interviews. Along the way we lost sight of the original poster. He claimed to be an amatuer FCP editor and needed a simple solution for normalizing some tracks. Wow, does Levelator fit that bill!
However, when we get DVCAM and Betacam tapes with interviews from across the country with different record levels, different amplitude of voice, and different frequencies of voices, we have found the Levelator to be a sweet little tool to quickly and painlessly get a real solid level on what are otherwise very uneven levels on the interview tracks. We do not use levelator on mixed tracks.
And the fact that our audio post house has used Levelatored tracks without complaint and to great success and in most cases spending less time getting all the voice tracks leveled, this tool has proven its worth to our corporate clients who love workflow solutions just like this one.
Nothing we do is broadcast, as is probably the case with our original poster, but everything we do is of the highest quality and I will stand by it….as will our audio house. (check our site)
Don’t like this little gem of an app that is free and does what it does (to voice tracks) very well? Then leave it be….but I’ll bet it’s just the ticket for our amateur editor!
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media -
Wow, why not encode for BluRay and upconvert the SD material? Seems a shame to take HD, downconvert to MPEG2 and then re-upconvert to HD.
Shame.
Get Toast 9 and bring all of your movies there and burn a Blu Ray disc onto standard DVD-R media. Buy a $299 Blu Ray player and show it via HDMI off that player. I guarantee everyone will be impressed, and you will have used a $199 program and a 25¢ disc to pull it off.
Works for us.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media -
My point about sending our levelatored audio to the audio post houses is that they have not rejected the gain adjustments and minimal compression that levelator applies. It has passed muster with them so it is good enough for us. We mix most of our audio in house so the one trip out to levelator has been a real time saver and an extremely useful tool in the post audio we do in house (80%). And since most of our work starts with interviews shot by different cameras at different levels and noise floors, levelator is a lifesaver getting all these levels straight before we mix in the music and effects.
The audio post houses can still add their special recipe’s to the final mix as they do normally with or without our without our levelatored track, and that is my point.
It’s that good.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media -
Honestly. get your interview/narrator clips pretty close in FCP with simple gain adjustments. Male/Female, whispers and big gun voices all. Export your track without music as a mono Aiff clip. Open Levelator and drag the clip you exported onto the splash screen. There are no settings. It outputs a leveled and normalized and lightly compressed perfect version of your vo tracsk. We send this levelated track with our music and EFX to the audio house for sweetening and they love us for getting the voices right.
Levelator is free and you will use it. Over and over, forever. Like MPEG Streamclip it is a valuable asset and addition to your arsenal. You will look like a genius with those vo tracks that are all over the place in levels.
The key to this little app is to get your levels at a decent level in FCP, don’t add any compression in FCP and add some EQ if you think it helps the voice….then send it to Levelator.
This is one slick little, simple, unbreakable, FREE app.
Get it.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media -
Rip a clip thru compressor using the advanced format conversion preset and then compare it to the source XDCAM clip in FCP on a good external monitor. You won’t see much difference.
We do it all the time.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media -
Or how about 1920 x 1080. Seems overkill but I bet they would work for both sequences and if by chance in 6 months they want to have a full HD version on Blu Ray, you are ready!
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media -
Hmm…can’t do this with firewire, but with a Kona card and a Horita timecode transcoder you can send the remote cable to the Horita box along with a video source for sync and have the Kona control panel read the source timecode. The Horita box takes the timecode from the source clip and sends that out a timecode cable. Send that cable to your deck’s TC input and crash record.
We do this all the time to make masters to our Panasonic 1200a which cannot Edit to tape. Set up the Horita and send the timeocde to the deck along with the video and it writes the timecode from the sequence. Perfect timecode matched dubs every time. I believe you can set the Kona control panel to read the source clip’s timecode and send that out the remote cable to the Horita box.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media -
Same problem here too. I thought we had a DVCPro50 workflow that was solid, but I’m not sure. My question: What is Adobe’s role in getting this fixed? Should AE be updated to work natively in YUV color space, since most of what it does originates in YUV? Surely Apple is the core of Quicktime and the management of codecs, but how about apps that use QT as a wrapper? What is their responsibility?
So you have Apple, AJA, and Adobe. And it seems this is in the most basic sense, a math problem.
In my opinion, AE has to be updated to natively work with any particular codec and retain it’s gamma and color balance. I think Quantel is one of the big guys who figured out how to work natively in YUV. I know that the AVID codecs allow you to flag a clip with either RGB or YUV space. Seems to work pretty good.
It is my opinion that we have had Quicktime and Codecs for more than 15 years or so and we still haven’t bullet-proofed it. Why is it taking so long?
Color shifts are one of those things that make you feel like you are editing on a toy, and to a client it makes you look like you don’t know what you are doing. My earlier thread about scaling HD footage in an SD sequence is another one of those things.
Big question…..will Apple engage this dialog and actually seek a proper solution?
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media -
In your original post you said the videos preload before the client sees them, but the problem playback in the first 10 seconds indicates that there is a load problem. Is the buffering set for a particular duration of time or the entire clip?
Could make the buffer time longer.
I agree that frame size is a critical component of smooth playback. Ask the client to preview some smaller frame sizes and see how small they will go, then slim down your bitrate in small bites until it plays smooth for them. You are really at the bottom end of the bitrate scale however.
My DSL connection at my home always chokes on flash videos. I am getting about 175 kbps download here at the end of the DSL line in my home. They are telling me it is a 512 kbps service!
Good luck,
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media