[Ron Craig]

I don’t want to appear to be hijacking this thread; I hope this adds value:
Walter, I assume you run your plasmas with component out because you judge that it gives you a truer picture. I have my Panasonic plasma connected both ways — component and HDMI — and I haven’t been sure about which I should use. I tend toward HDMI because I thought that staying in the digital realm was better for accurate color reproduction. I take it you figure it differently?

Thanks.

Ron

[Ron Craig]

I wasn’t being clear. Creating an independent clip does not create new media. It just removes the relationship between that newly independent clip and any other clip in the project that uses the same media. But it retains its relationship to the source media on your drives. To create clips/subclips with actual new media on your drives you need to export and reimport, I believe.

I’m not an expert in Media Manager but I think that is what you want to read up on in the manual.

[Ron Craig]

Just my opinion and workflow but I capture everything. If you have enough drive/array space, why not? I don’t see why working with subclips would be a problem. Again, if you have the drive space make them independent clip, or new media, if you want.

I also use terabyte drives now to archive everything — all original data and all project data. How nice to be able to go back to that archive and find anything you need!

[Ron Craig]

Thanks for the guidance, gentleman. Cloning is underway now.

Best,

Ron

[Ron Craig]

Jeez, I just looked at the pricing for DoStudio. I can believe it’s good software if you say so, Walter, but it’s way too expensive for me as I try to dip my toe into Blu-Ray. No way I can justify that expense yet. Hopefully, in the long run it will be a reasonable business expense for me.

Is there, in fact, a way (i.e. software) that provides a less expensive way to dip a toe into Blu-Ray authoring?

[Ron Craig]

Hi Walter,

I haven’t done any work with HDV yet — all DVCPRO-HD — but I’m going to be getting an HDV project soon. I have a Kona 3 card. How do you capture HDV with your Kona card? There must be a deck that I don’t have that will give you something other than a Firewire out I guess, huh?

Thanks.

[Ron Craig]

Sean, I’m going to hope someone else chimes in because I haven’t done exactly what you’re proposing to do so I can’t give you the best advice. First, though, yes it is possible to downconvert HD files to an SD format that you system can handle. But I’m unable to help much because with what you have on your system I don’t know what your best option is. Do you have Compressor? If so, that should be able to do the job but, depending on how much material you have it could take forever. Then there is the added complication of the Firestore. I love using Firestore but I don’t see how you can use that imported data and manage to keep the metadata (camera start-stop) the Firestore enables when you do a downconversion.

Bottom line: Unless someone else can offer you better advice I would suggest you push to get the original tapes and get them dubbed to Beta or Digibeta 16×9. Or perhaps find someone who is willing to take the Firestore and do and conversion for you. Some post production house no doubt could do that.

I wish I had better advice.

[Ron Craig]

Seeing that Final Cut Express does not support the format that I was given (720/60p)- what are my options to convert it into a usable form?

You have two ways to go: Upgrade your system to handle the video material or downgrade the video material to work in your system.

If this job brings enough profit it might be your opportunity to upgrade your system to FCP with a RAID array, etc. That’s a fair chunk of change but you’ll eventually be glad you spent it if you’re going to be in this business.

Your other option is to have the source material downconverted to a form your system can handle. If you have access to the tapes, one option is to have them dubbed to Beta or Digibeta in 16×9 aspect ratio. Can your system take in those formats? I haven’t used FCE so I don’t know. Bear in mind that the downside of this option is that you’ll be doing your quality loss through a downconversion at the front end, before the edit. Generally, downconversion is something you want to do as a last step in order to maintain all the quality you can through the edit process. But if your final deliverable is a SD DVD I think you’ll still be fine.

[Ron Craig]

I really did check out the links you put in an earlier thread. (I’m not sure it was one of “my” threads but, in any event, I saw them and I didn’t disregard them!)

But this new thread was really about the narrow issue of raw versus whatever the camera “normally” delivers (e.g. high res jpeg). After recently importing some raw images that didn’t look as good in AE without a lot of adjustments, I was wondering whether the in-camera processing might save me some of that trouble without costing me too much in resolution. Your advice NOT to use raw in an earlier thread was what led to this question. Why, I wondered, does bogiesan not prefer raw?

[Ron Craig]

Well, Jon, you have unfortunately told me what I expected to hear: That using still images for time lapse video pulls me inexorably into the huge and strange world of still image processing. It only makes sense, right? So now I will begin the work and study with an initial goal of finding out how much of this work I will need to farm out to an expert! Or whether I can learn enough to get by for my limited needs. If you have any tutorial suggestions, great. I’ll start looking for some things now.

Thanks.

– Ron