Scott Shucher
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After Effects Coin
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COW Coins
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You can’t improve video quality that looks like VHS. Garbage in = Garbage out. Now if you want to take HDCam footage and make it look like VHS quality, that’s pretty easy.
Adobe.com has many great tutorials on it’s “Adobe.com” website. Follow the links to Adobe TV.
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Check out http://www.thefoundry.co.uk
You can download a 14 day demo to try it out, or buy it.
I did an A/B comparison using Keylight between FCP and After Effects with no discernible difference in the quality of the key. The settings are nearly identical in both versions. (Although AE will give you some other compositing options that are part of AE)
MacPro 3.2ghz 8 core, 4 Gbyte RAM, FCP 6.0.5, OS X.5.6
QT7.5.5, Kona3 (v6.1), Atto FC41-ES, 8TB Custom RAID-striped RAID 3.
NVidia Geoforce 8800GT -
A good person to talk to about FCP systems and installations in Finer Associates out of Boston. He’s an Apple and AJA authorized dealer, and does installs (high and low end) up and down the east coast. He knows his stuff pretty well, and his prices are pretty good. He’ll do a whole turnkey set up if you need, including furniture/racks. Ask for Steve, he’s a technical guy and will not try to sell you anything you don’t really need.
His site: https://www.finerassociates.com/index.html
MacPro 3.2ghz 8 core, 4 Gbyte RAM, FCP 6.0.5, OS X.5.6
QT7.5.5, Kona3 (v6.1), Atto FC41-ES, 8TB Custom RAID-striped RAID 3.
NVidia Geoforce 8800GT -
Just curious, Chris, if you tried the same key in AE and compared them?
MacPro 3.2ghz 8 core, 4 Gbyte RAM, FCP 6.0.5, OS X.5.6
QT7.5.5, Kona3 (v6.1), Atto FC41-ES, 8TB Custom RAID-striped RAID 3.
NVidia Geoforce 8800GT -
I spent time in a newsroom environment that had Newscutters and InterPlay. There is no easy or logical way to tie the systems together other than converting sequences with Automatic Duck, and re-capturing.
You could also export and import QuickTime files as both platforms recognize QuickTime, but the Avid will need to convert the QuickTime to MXF. After working on an Avid Newscutter for a year and a half, I was very happy to get back into the FCP camp full time.MacPro 3.2ghz 8 core, 4 Gbyte RAM, FCP 6.0.5, OS X.5.6
QT7.5.5, Kona3 (v6.1), Atto FC41-ES, 8TB Custom RAID-striped RAID 3.
NVidia Geoforce 8800GT -
Keylight in FCP works just like any filter. Just drag it onto the clip, use the eye dropper to pick a color(green or blue), then fine tune. The fine tuning(I assume is similar to AE) includes screen gain and balance, alpha bias and despill bias, nine adjustments for screen matte. There are also crops, source crops, edge and foreground color correction, tuning adjustments, and inside masks .There is a view menu to see 11 different options. It rendered very quickly, and stability was never an issue. I noticed on several occasions with a lot of adjustments to the filter, the viewr took a beat to “build” the composite frame, but it was no different than waiting for a sapphire filter to composite.
After playing around trying many of the adjustments, I found the best results were to just let the software do the work. Pic the color with the picker, then a slight screen gain adjustment, a modest amount of despill, and that’s all I needed for a great looking key. Especially around a tennis racquet, where all the strings keyed through nicely even though the racquet was moving through the green screen. (I was worried about that). I even got some nice natural shadows to key through. Out of the eight shots I keyed, only one needed any special treatment beyond basic adjustments. Overall I was quite happy with the $250 plug-in filter.
That $1,500 plug-in must be the Ultimatte. I’ve used the hardware version, but not the software plug-in.
MacPro 3.2ghz 8 core, 4 Gbyte RAM, FCP 6.0.5, OS X.5.6
QT7.5.5, Kona3 (v6.1), Atto FC41-ES, 8TB Custom RAID-striped RAID 3.
NVidia Geoforce 8800GT -
So no mention anymore of RAID 3. Is the faster write speed of the RAID 5 that much of an advantage that I should think about re-formatting my RAID 3 drive. With a write speed of 360mb/sec in Raid 3, that certainly seems like enough.
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That’s the first I’ve heard about needing 8 gigs of RAM to keep the MacPro 8-core happy with a Kona 3.
I’ll be firing up a new system this weekend with 4 gigs of RAM and a Kona 3. Most of my work is FCP, with Motion sometimes running at the same time.
Anyone else running the MacPro 8 core with a K3 on only 4 gigs O’ RAM seeing issues???
G5 2.5ghz DP, 2.5Gbyte RAM, FCP 6.0.2, OSX.4.11
QT7.3, Kona2 (v4.0) w/Kbox, Atto UL3D, Medea RTRX640, Huge MV 1.8Tbyte, Radeon 9800XT -
I don’t have an answer for you on “why Kona doesn’t have a 720p30 preset”, but I do have a word of caution.
I recently worked with Varicam footage shot at 720p30, and like you, the only way I could get the footage input and play out through a Kona2 was to capture with a preset of 720p59.94. This setting gave me dupilcate frames, but the footage played out cleanly through the Kona 2.
After capturing, I discovered an intermittent issue where some clips discarded the duplicate frames during the capture. In other words the video clip was half the original captured length, while the audio in the clip captured at normal length. As a result, what I got was a clip whose visual speed was doubled until the halfway point of the clip. The video capture then went black, while the audio continued to capture at normal speed.
So, for example, I’d capture a 10 minute clip with audio and video. Upon loading the captured clip I discovered the video would run at 2 times normal speed, then at 5 minutes into the clip the video would go to black, while the audio portion of the clip continued to play on until the normal end of the clip. This did not happen to every clip, and it did not seem to happen if I used “capture now”
I was capturing via firewire, and I never tried to capture via HD-SDI to see if the results were any different. At some point we just had to move forward with the project, so I never got a chance to try to figure out the capture issue with 720p30.
Bottom line, check your clips carefully after capture.
G5 2.5ghz DP, 2.5Gbyte RAM, FCP 6.0.2, OSX.4.11
QT7.3, Kona2 (v4.0) w/Kbox, Atto UL3D, Medea RTRX640, Huge MV 1.8Tbyte, Radeon 9800XT -
That makes perfect sense! Thanks Shane.
Happy Holidays,
Scott