Robb Harriss
Forum Replies Created
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You can go forward, but not backward. I just went through the process of going from FCS2 to FCS3 biting my nails because I was going into the finish/conform of our current major project, on deadline yet! No wonder I haven’t been sleeping well. But it was just perfect. Not a single issue with the project open in FCP7. I then felt comfortable putting FCS3 on all our systems. It’s helped in a lot of spots, nothing huge but all the small things added/changed have been good.
Now the back story is this: I’ve been carrying this project back and forth to home on an external raid. this is so I can do some work at home. This isn’t all the footage, but a copy of what’s on the Mac Pro at the office. I just made a mirror copy that I could carry around. It takes a little doing, making sure that all the folders involved are mirrored. I’ve been using Chrono Sync to do that. In that way I make a change here or there and it’s reflected on the other machine and I can work without issue. This means making sure that things like the waveform files and “render” files are matched. And ChronoSync will match up the deletions from one side to the other as well. So what I did was install FCS3 on the laptop first. Tested the show, and then installed FCS3 on the tower(s). The other interesting sidebar is the fact that the laptop has Snow Leopard running on it and the tower is still waiting for that upgrade.
It’s all good.
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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Mine is “sorta” the same, though primary output is to web faux HD at 1280×720, and SD DVD. I just made the files necessary for a Blue-Ray. Did it yesterday remotely at the office while working at home, so I haven’t even seen the finished files yet. We’re having a showing with the production partner at the science museum in St. Louis next month and want to make a splash, hence the BR. It should be interesting.
the “film look” thing always gets me on my soapbox? What exactly does that mean? (And that’s after some 30 years of listening to the answers.) You mean some sort of frame stutter? You mean generational loss from multiple conversions between formats? Or maybe working from negative to positive to negative to positive again?
Film “look” is really about lighting, composition, use of the frame and the way you tell a story. Single camera has always been the standard for “film-style” shooting. Compose, light, shoot and then move to another angle. Work on the actor’s performance. Now to an awful lot of people it means shooting at 24fps, so when it’s played back on 25, 30, 50 or 60 fps it has a pull-down added to it. Strange, when you see a film in a theater (one still projecting at 24fps) there’s no pull-down artifact. How dare they sell tickets to a film without a film “look?”
Anyway, yeah, what does that mean? Try playing with Color to get a grade that’s more interesting than flat video. Control your lighting so you don’t get infinite depth of field, and yes, it is possible. And tell the story as if it really has something to say!
Ok, I’ll put away the soapbox now.We capture off the HDCam deck (I think it’s a 500) out HDSDI port into the KONA card HDSDI in port. Been using ProRes Hq. for final. Just got into the Prores Proxy which is working out wonderfully. We used to create out own HD proxy format, and that would cause real issues in final reload/conform. I don’t have any real need for full 8 or 10 bit uncompressed. We’re not doing any green screen or other effects work. ProRes looks great and the people buying our programs aren’t setup to deal with higher level distribution anyway. Though I wish I’d had the 10bit for some of the features I’ve cut.
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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Hope your tape, or drive, doesn’t fail. 🙂
same can be said of any technology. The BEST solution is redundancy. That’s one of the major benefits of shooting on tape or film. Your camera originals are the ultimate backup. I spent years on digital non-linear systems that had no backup other than the EDLs we’d save. In those days it was much faster to just reload from the videotapes than using the tape backups my competitors on Avid used. What took them a day or so (lost revenue) took me a couple of hours.
As I said we abandoned DLT for DVD replication about 5 years ago. We had lots of issues with the DLT tapes, interchange issues, random failures with no logical error messages. Switching to a disc required a lot of dancing with the replication vendors, but we got it done, even internationally in about a dozen countries. DVD studio Pro is all setup to do it. We only had one issue and that was in China when they went to replicate one of our shows. There was some difference in the flags put on the DVD by DSP. Turns out they were using really old software that had to be updated.
I like hard drive (I really should say “hard drives”) because of speed and accuracy. Our shows never really go into the vault. There always some small change years later. We just redid a Danish version first completed in 2003. Hard drives let me archive the new version in just a few seconds, since only the new changed data is added to the hard drive. Using other methods I have to start all over. Some times that was 10 or 12 hours of waiting, and then for a second copy? Ow.
But again, it’s not about the media, tape, file, disc or drive. It’s about redundancy. That’s partly why my vault room is full. And the current challenge is moving stuff offsite for yet another level of security. Another whole set of headaches.Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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Wow, DLT? really? We dropped it years ago as slow, expensive, unreliable and did I say SLOOOW?
Just using external hard drives now. Or for DVD replication a master disc.
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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outboard xml editor? I should try one of those that’s around. Hmmm
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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this happens, or used to happen, a lot to us because older footage was 4×3 Digibeta. It was a WS model and I turned on the 16:9 when I started with the company, so there was a lot of mixed footage even in SD. When we switched to HDCAM about 7 years ago the problem only got worse.
I just try to determine what the majority of my footage is going to be, and what the output/distribution format is. Nowadays it’s almost always 16:9 DVD and then Web formats of various flavors up to 1280×720, all of which we consider low resolution. In this case the 4:3 footage is reframed and enlarge to fill the 16:9 frame. A fair amount of work goes into grading the footage to diminish the visual differences. In the few projects where the 4:3 is dominant I’ll reload the HD footage using 4:3 center coming out of the HD deck. Both work well. No, we’re not doing HD-DVD or BlueRay for external consumption. Our customers aren’t setup to deal with it.Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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no problems here playing prores 422 hs 1080i off either the mac pro or the laptop (using an external firewire raid). Original footage HDCam
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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I like using the 23-in Mac Cinema display, and at home I have a 23-in Samsung, which doesn’t have color that’s as good. I use the latter only for editing and not finishing or in the grading process.
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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strange as it seems I’ve used LogMeIn.com to get onto an otherwise locked up machine. But I have it running in the background all the time. It lets me access the machine remotely, check/setup/restart renders. When FCP has locked up on occasion I was able to log in from the laptop sitting right next to the Mac pro and get at the commands. Unfortunately, it won’t work in this case if it’s not already installed and running.
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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Try “normalize”
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.