[Scott Sheriff]

Big ‘sports lens’ set-ups can give poor results when the plate isn’t set up properly. It usually is more of a back focus problem, or softening in an edge quadrant of the frame.
What your describing sounds a little more like Chromatic Aberration, or borderline lens flare.
Hard to say for sure without being there, or seeing some footage.

Scott Sheriff
Director
SST Digital Media
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com

[Scott Sheriff]

Stars are effected by the f-stop and the size of the source. Point sources with lots of contrast give better stars, and smaller f-stops give a sharper more defined star. Example, shooting into lights will produce stars, but shooting a bright concrete wall lit by the same lights, will not. A large glare type reflection from the surface of the water will not give a star. For that you need a glint from a ripple.
You might try to combine the star filter with a Polarizer to cut down on overall glare.
Or you can add them in post pretty easy.

Scott Sheriff
Director
SST Digital Media
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com

[Scott Sheriff]

“From my limited exposure to this, non-competes are best when they don’t prevent people from making a living, just attempt to limit what they can do for clients you introduced them to. Also agreements are much stronger when based on actual employment, not just a one-time freelance gig.
”

It pays to be careful how you word these things.
Example: Production company tenant that leased space from a broadcast station. To keep employees from migrating back and forth the two business, the owners placed a six month non-compete clause on their employees, saying you couldn’t go to work at the other company without a six month gap.
It got both of them a nice 10K fine from the state labor relations board for violating fair labor practices.
I know this is not the exact situation here, but it shows that you need to be very careful if you are going to dabble in this area. Sometimes there are unintended consequences.

Someone else recommended ‘blacklisting’ the offenders. Once again, this can often come back to haunt you, depending on how you go about it. You can hire (or not) as you see fit. But as soon as you start discussing individuals work ethics with other employers and business owners you are on a slippery slope. As the ’employer’ you almost always have the most to lose in a lawsuit.

Happy clients can’t be poached. Keep them happy, and you should need the legalese.

Scott Sheriff
Director
SST Digital Media
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com

[Scott Sheriff]

Laws are different everywhere, but here is some food for thought.
You can certainly try and have them sign one if that will make you feel better, but good luck enforcing this if you decide to do it and they steal your client anyway. This would be a lengthy process and it would be hard to prove actual damages. The cost of your legal tab will be pretty high, and there is no guaranty of winning. There is always the risk of a countersuit anytime you sue someone, which you could easily loose. Juries are unpredictable and can sometimes do crazy things.
And even if you win, collecting is a whole other issue. There is usually a seven year window to collect, and a lot of states are ‘defendant friendly’ and make this process so difficult it is often impossible to get done in the time allowed. This all assumes the person you win a default against has any assets in the first place. Also, in some states these type of contracts are unenforceable, and could put you at risk by asking an employee to sign one.
And of course while this is going on, you will have to pay all the costs up-front, with the risk that you may never recover the damages or costs. No lawyer will take these on a contingency fee basis.
This sort of thing is best left to corporations with a legal dept. that has time on their hands.
In short there isn’t anything you can do to stop others from poaching your clients, except offer such good service and rates that your client wouldn’t think of going somewhere else.

Scott Sheriff
Director
SST Digital Media
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com

[Scott Sheriff]

“I have a quad core, maxed out box.
Just upgraded to Snow
If Im running FC, and I minimize the project, when I return to the project
I have the program not responding
Project file and media is on an external drive via fire wire 800

This is not a drive issue, Im maxed out with Ram.
I have been editing HD for espn and other networks – box is full blown

Im getting ticked.
Ideas?”

I’m leaning towards bad install of SL, over a hardware (or lack of) problem.
For me the clue is “Just upgraded to Snow”.
Clean install?

If you have done a proper install, perhaps your system isn’t as maxed out as you think.
What do you consider “maxed out” and “full blown”? A quad (quad what?) may be sufficient for HD. But these days a 12 core Mac Pro with 32GB or more of RAM would be more along the lines of ‘maxed out’.
Your actual specs, and codec your editing when this happens might be helpful.

Scott Sheriff
Director
SST Digital Media
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com

[Scott Sheriff]

We had a really big neon made for the lobby of a station I worked at and had the same issue. The sign company made a smoked plexiglass safety cover for it that was mounted on stand-offs so the ‘glass had about a quarter inch clearance on the tubes. It probably knocked a couple of stops off the brightness.
I don’t think your paint misting idea would hurt the tubes. It might be hard good coverage on the back of the tubes without removing them. If you decide to try it, the paint could be cleaned off (carefully) with ‘goof-off’ and #0000 steel wool and that you use to polish wood if you didn’t like the result. Could be a real pain though.
I think I’d try the plexi cover, since it is pretty easy to work with, and you can get Lexan/Plexi in various amounts of tinting. If you go this route you might need to box in the sides also to further reduce the level.

Scott Sheriff
Director
SST Digital Media
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com

[Scott Sheriff]

Have to agree with Mark.

IMHO
The light leaks fad was old and tired 3 years ago. Hard to believe there is anyone living where there is electricity that hasn’t seen these before. They are more overused than flying in a shot with a DVE was in the 80’s.

Scott Sheriff
Director
SST Digital Media
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com

[Scott Sheriff]

Mike
“I have been able to take my same tape and drop into my older SONY DVCAM deck and capture successfully with firewire on most projects. But that machine has limitations and will not allow HD captures.”

Sony and JVC HDV are two different formats. So even if your older Sony deck was an HDV model, it wouldn’t play your tapes.
The ability to capturing DV is not an effective benchmark of your system for HDV work. All that does is confirm your FW is working.

“Oh, Tape Stock was mentioned: JVC ProHd for HD/DV. We use exclusively.”

OK, but why do you have a Sony deck? Are you saying you have never used Sony tape in either the deck or camera? This is not a flame on Sony. In the past Sony tapes had a lube that was incompatible with JVC/Panasonic/Fuji tape lubes. If that deck (or any other) was used with Sony tape in the past then there is a chance that you have spread that lube to other gear contaminating it. Especially if you clean the tape path infrequently.
And are these tapes are new? Do not reuse DV tapes. I know people do, but they are cheap and not robust like a Betacam or U-Matic tape that can be used over and over.
Do you regularly (and properly) use a JVC cleaning tape on the deck and camera?
Does the person that shoots your material have a habit of taking the deck out of Record and ‘checking’ the tape? This can put unwanted wear at the point on the tape where the re-cue occurs. Also if the process of re-cuing the tape isn’t done properly it can cause TC flutter, or breaks. And of course this is happening at the same point on the tape where you are most likely to try and capture your clip.

“In attemtpting to capture several clips, the BSR usually goes into a Non capture mode after the first clip. Whatever that clips name is slated as, it will contine to capture, almost randomly with all the clips with a numeric code after each clips such as “Dancing Clip” Dancing Clip-1, Dancing Clip -2, etc. overwriting what would have been the original capturing editors dialog.”

It sounds like you are capturing off the tape in a clip by clip style. You didn’t say what your pre-roll is, or if you were using ‘time of day’, or free-running TC.
Free running TC can cause problems on HDV, use at you own risk.
Pre-roll has a lot of influence over the process on HDV due to the GOP structure. And it isn’t a case of more is better. Too much can put you too far back and confuse the capture machine. Too little and the tape is not up to speed.
Actually, capturing on a clip by clip basis is not the way to go. It effectively doubles the wear on the machine per tape captured, and puts much back and forth strain on the tape and transports. It causes many more opportunities for a wrinkle, or to miss a clip due to TC or pre-roll issues.
The best way is to go is capture the entire tape as one clip, in one pass. Just set your IN at the beginning of your material, and your OUT at the end of the tape and capture that clip. (actually don’t even rewind the tape, and get the OUT point first) No matter how you have FCP set up, it will still split this one clip into many at any TC break, or camera start. Then you can screen, and further separate your material into separate clips, and Media Manage the unwanted footage. This not only greatly reduces the amount of head time, and transport use, but it means there is only one pre-roll/capture cycle to go bad.
You didn’t mention how many hours your deck and camera have on them. These machines do not have an infinite lifespan. They also have a major service interval based on the number of hours.

I’m sure that I’m making it sound as if HDV is fragile. It is.
The tape is small, the head is small in diameter, the transport is small. It records in a compressed format that any one missing frame in a group of 6 (JVC) or 15 (Sony) wipes out all the frames from that group, and usually the following group.
I see people all the time treat HDV gear like it is Beta. Lots of shuttling, reusing tapes, knocking it around, use in dirty environs, etc.
There is a price to pay for HDV’s compact camera size, low cost, compact cassette, and low storage space requirement. That price is that it should be handled much more carefully to get the best results.

“I use a KONA LH card for capture.
I always use a Firestore now, which eliminates most of these issues, but I still periodically must go back to tape if the Firestore didn’t get programmed correctly. We also shoot both.

We used FCP 6.06, Mac G5, 8 Gb Ram. 2.7 dual processors, etc, with SATA 2 TB Drive for capture.2”

I didn’t see what OS version your running. Have you done your Pro-Aps update? How about the OS? Have you updated the card driver?
I use a Mac Pro that has it’s own FW port, and don’t have any issues, but you might have update/driver issues.
HDV is processor intensive, and your on a G5. When capturing are you trying to do other work?
How full is your capture drive? Once they get 3/4 full performance decreases.
Are you trying to capture to your system drive? I hope not.

“Not sure if you thought I was flaming JVC because I am not. I am merely frustrating with the deck as it is not peforming as it should. I have contacted JVC 2 times about this problem and they insist that there is nothing wrong with my machine rather in my set up.”

No, but I thought another poster was flaming based on “what he heard”.
As far as the deck not performing, again I ask how many hours your deck and camera have on them.
It could be the camera, the tape, your workflow, your computer, the deck, or a combination.
And what did JVC say was wrong with your set-up?

I’m not sure if any of this actually applies in your situation, but once you eliminate all the possible causes, whatever is left is probably the problem(s).

Scott Sheriff
Director
SST Digital Media
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com

[Scott Sheriff]

Jeffrey
“I’ve heard that there are continual problems with JVC HDV decks (I have a DV3000 – some problems, but does work with DV footage).”

That is anecdotal evidence of a non-existent problem, and is just flaming a product you don’t use or own. It would be better to stick with facts when posting a work-around for a ‘know issue’ based on YOUR experience.

I have both the above mentioned JVC products, and have no problems with either one.
As I said in responding to the original poster on this thread, there is a lot of user caused errors that are being written off as bad gear. There is a major lack of information in the workflow, materials, troubleshooting steps, etc in the original thread, and know way to be sure that is indeed an equipment failure. Just because someone badmouths a piece of gear, is not a conclusive fact that said gear is faulty.

Scott Sheriff
Director
SST Digital Media
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com

[Scott Sheriff]

“I have just about given up on capturing anything more than by using “capture now” on the BSR-50 Deck using a JVC GY-HD110 camera. More than 2 clips and the machine just won’t read time code any continually throws errors at me. Slowing down work time considerably. I had the problems initially with anything that was HD content, now regular Firewire SD content throws the machine into spasms. And of course with capture “NOW” anything with a timecode break renders rigor mortis into the captures.

Any suggestions on how to cure this evil?”

I wish you would include some specifics as to your platform, workflow, and what exactly is the problem.
IMHO 99% of HDV problems are ‘pilot error’, of some type. That would include not understanding the nature of HDV GOP, unrealistic expectations, etc.
It would be nice to know what tape stock you are using, once again I’m pointing out that if you expect help, details of exactly what has been done are essential.
Have you tried searching this forum? These type of issues and potential solutions have been covered ad nauseam.
I have both the 110U and BR-50, and have had no problems whatsoever capturing HDV via FW in the last 4 years.

Scott Sheriff
Director
SST Digital Media
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com