[Steve Crow]

My gut reaction is that your mics need to be powered independently of the Zoom H4N. For instance, my wireless mics are AA battery powered as is my shotgun mic.

[Steve Crow]

Thanks forthe hint on auto renders and yes I do indeed have many sequences open most of the time

I still don’t understand what is happening with my first issue however – while the counter seems “stuck” at some percentage point the job itself is actually finished – so wierd

[Steve Crow]

I think these solutions that rely on the top of the camera hot shoe as the base mounting point to make the entire rig very top heavy and unstable – I should say I haven’t ever tried one I am just speaking from how I would anticipate it feeling in my hand.

[Steve Crow]

Built-into what? Are you talking about iMovie?

Would what you are talking about work with a reference movie?

[Steve Crow]

Hi Phil,

Well yes I tried that as my first option but after many many hours of exporting I ended up with a 440GB video file which was simply too large for my system to handle.

I also do as you do in so far as conducting tests, oh by the way the export out of FCP to make a full resolution reference video was an hour and a half, not one hour, then compressor took another hour 45 or so to export out a MPEG4 – combining those two time periods comes out to a lot less than 21 hours so I am pretty happy.

I ended up importing the MPEG-4 out of compressor into Mpeg Streamclip because I didn’t drag the correct H.264 configuration file over into the compressor window when I first created the file. The file itself played and looked fine but my eventual destination is Vimeo and they really like the H.264 codec so it’s worth the other hour or so to do a pass with Streamclip.

All the best and thanks for replying!

[Steve Crow]

Thanks again, I will read this now

[Steve Crow]

I don’t know if this is the same thing but I aborted the Final Cut export that wanting to take 21 hours and instead did a full rez output as a reference movie – this is going to take about an hour.

THEN I read could take my reference movie into Mpeg Streamclip and export my Web ready version from there – don’t yet know, of course, how long that will take.

I have only used compressor a couple of times because I generally find it very confusing but I understand that compressor accepts reference movies as well – the QTMaster thing you mentioned – is that a separate application from Compressor or….? I just have 2 cores but I assumed Compressor would automatically use both of them, not so?

THANKS FOR YOUR INPUT, VERY MUCH APPRECIATED!

[Steve Crow]

A new alternative is using an iPad or iphone to remotely control your DSLR camera even in video mode, here’s one company with just such a product:

https://www.ononesoftware.com/products/dslr-camera-remote/

The only issue there might be is if focus is one of the controllable elements, not sure

[Steve Crow]

I use a solution I put together from a company called Bracket1…you can see a video of how I put it all together at

https://vimeo.com/13697265

Basically there’s a short curved “arm” with a cold shoe attachment – and I slide the Zoom into that using a small rotating connector that allows me to position the Zoom so that I can see the screen clearly.

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[Steve Crow]

I’m not sure there is a direct relationship:

Frame Rate: the number of frames that make up one second of the video – traditionally set a 24

Shutter Speed: how fast the shutter on the camera physically opens and closes – 1/50th of a second for a 24fps frame rate

Both contribute to the “film look” but in different ways – one is just more tied directly to the camera and the other is more of an editing/software kind of issue.

Perhaps you are thinking of the 180 degree rule that says your shutter speed should be twice that of the frame rate – that ratio best emulates the operating characteristics of traditional movie film cameras. You can deviate from this rule to give you either a more staccato or softer/blended look to the video.