[Rich Rubasch]

I have found that desk height is the most important thing for proper ergonomics. Desk too high, wrist is at too steep an angle and the wrist will fatigue. Desk too low same issue. Once I worked two days on a desk that the mouse was too high and my wrist was killing me. Back at the office I noticed that my wrist was fine, and that the desk height was a little lower. Also the right chair is a factor. And monitor height.

I would say if you’re not ditching your mouse, work with desk height (those slide out keyboard drawers can solve it) your chair and your monitor height.

I used a table too in the old days of the dual 4 x 3 CRT monitors for many years, but now with the widescreen monitors I find I have too much width to easily navigate the cursor across that span with a tablet. Tried it twice and even have one of the widescreen tablets. No go.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

I stumbled upon this. Does this look like a workflow that could work in my situation, except that it was shot on the HPX 900?

In Final Cut Pro, Log and Capture your clips shot as 1080p24 from the HV20 using the Easy Setup named “HDV, 29.97, HDV – 1080i60 FireWire Basic”.
In Compressor, choose Add File and navigate to the capture scratch folder for the clips you captured and open them all.
Select the first clip in the batch.
Choose the setting named “Apple ProRes 422 for Progressive material” (found in Settings tab > Apple > Other Workflows > Advanced Format Conversions > Apple Codecs), and drag it onto the first clip.
Double-click the setting on the first clip to highlight the Inspector window.
In Inspector > Encoder Settings > Video Settings, change the framerate to Custom, and enter 23.976.
In Inspector > Frame Controls, enable Frame Controls and make the following settings:
Set Frame Controls to On
Set Deinterlace to Reverse Telecine
Click Save As to save this setting with a name such as “HV20 HDV 24p to ProRes 24p”.
Add this new Custom setting to all your clips and submit the batch.
The resulting clips will be 24p and can be edited in a 24p sequence in Final Cut Pro with no interlacing or cadence issues.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

You could check with other service providers in your area. Market area is key. We are a smaller market with smaller budgets and we charge $80 for encoding of any kind. This includes the time to set up and encode. With presets and a decently fast computer a 5-15 minute video would fall within the hour. Shorter videos might only bill 1/2 hour.

But that’s our area and you might want to charge a setup fee, which we don’t. My setup is usually plugging in their drive to my computer.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Ahhh…the old tape labeling. Actually the yellow tape denotes the length if recording DVCPro. And the RED tapes show the length when recording DVCProHD. It is the same tape, so we all use the yellow stock and it is the most common. But the marking on the tape itself is not correct for HD.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Do you have any video houses in your area that could take a full rez H264 and convert it to a nice WMV file? If not, you should find one, assuming you aren’t going to buy a PC to do this kind of encoding. We do this all the time for several clients and we don’t charge much to do it. at $80/hour for encoding we can do a lot in a half hour. Many times we have the files to them in a couple hours and it only costs them about $40.

Most of the exchanges are done via FTP.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Completely opposite experience with toast 9 here. Had a 12 minute 1080i DVCProHD clip and simply exported a Ref clip. Dragged it into Toast and turned off menus so it was a pop and play. Encoded it and burned it to a DVD-R disc and it looked spectacular. One stop shopping. Surely did not look like the original footage, but at a trade show from 15 feet away it looks way better than an anamorphic DVD and I can use DVD-R discs and a $99 piece of software.

Perfect? No. But certainly works and again, delivers way better quality than anamorphic DVDs.

I had no skipping issues etc. No blocks. No worries.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

What slot is your Kona card in? What slot is the RAID card in? Did you ever run the PCI expansion slot utility on that machine?

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

We still import all our P2 footage and output to a DVCProHD tape. This “old fashioned” tape method has worked for as long as I’ve been in the business, and since we have seen many many hard drive and tape formats change over the years, we still have Beta SP. My guess is we will have DVCPro HD for a while as well.

But we also use 500 and 750 gig bar drives that we install in a $12 tray and use in our removable SATA bay. Fast, easily restored, searchable etc.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Basically I need the footage to play back in sync and without the horrible field judder we were seeing. It was clearly recorded 1080i 24p on an HDX-500 but FCP flagged the clips on import as 1080p 30 and they played back horribly. Something was clearly wrong. they were obviously running at 24p with a pulldown, but the fields were very screwed up. We simply wanted to get them onto a DVCPro HD tape so we could then digitize them back into a DVCPro HD 720p project. But we could not get them to play correctly.

Only after we made a custom sequence at 1080i 29.97, NOT 30p and matching our playback and control panel settings did we get a locked in playback and we are now making a timecode matched tape.

This will be a source for our 720p project and we’ll let the Kona do the conversion on the way back in.

We are also making the tape for the producer, and we usually output all our P2 and XDCAM footage to tape with matching timecode as well as backing up the files.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Ok…Update. When we applied the Remove Pulldown the audio got way out of sync. So we backtracked and investigated changing our sequence settings and playback settings and control panel settings.

We changed the codec of the sequence setting to 1080i DVCProHD and then changed the Control Panel to 1080i 29.97 and then we changed the playback to 1080i 29.97, and voila! With the plugin off and the clip playing alone it played back perfectly.

So it was a matter of ignoring how the clip was flagged (as someone suggested here) and playing with sequence/playback and control panel settings until we hit the right combo.

Absolutely nutty.

And we’ll probably never see this one again!

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media