[Steven Ludlow]

First–I should say that the greenscreen wasn’t THAT poorly lit…there were a couple of spots that were hotter than I would have liked, but it was usable. But, yes…I started with our Ultimatte AdvantEdge, and–after unsuccessfully toying with it for a couple of hours–I gave up and went back to VKEY, which I hadn’t used in a long time. Incidentally, I was several versions out of date, but I emailed their support and they provided me a custom link for downloading the free update and I was off and running. (I really cannot say enough about customer response and treatment.) After five minutes of messing with it, I had a perfect key. On top of that, it rendered SIGNIFICANTLY faster than AdvantEdge.

All of this, by the way, is not to disparage AdvantEdge. It’s an advanced keying tool, but if I have a complaint, it’s that it’s SO complex with inadequate documentation to really get the most out of it. It would probably be great for someone more skilled and knowledgeable than I.

I had just read some threads recently on keying plug-ins, and I’d been meaning to put my $.02 in on VKEY2.

There’s a free trial download, so I’d just recommend you do your own quick tests.

Steven

[Steven Ludlow]

Open the jar…

[Steven Ludlow]

I would think the easiest way would be to split it into two files…a top half and a bottom half.

[Steven Ludlow]

Thanks to all for your input. We’ve been hashing this out over the past few days.

I could have done a better job of describing the requirements of this project at the outset, but to clarify a few things:

1) Time lapse, generally speaking, is not an option. We are capturing the entirety of a massive manufacturing operating that takes 12 days to complete. The purpose is to track the movements of the various teams involved and study the order and manner in which different teams/individuals accomplish tasks. The goal is to ultimately lean out the process and improve the quality of the product. Teams of people will be poring over this footage like it’s the Zapruder film. (Now…I say time lapse is GENERALLY not an option, because I still think recording every other second cuts our footage in half, but won’t miss any critical movements either. And…we may do that.)

2) We’re in-house corporate…saying “no” isn’t an option. We do educate our clients, but sometimes the objective can’t be compromised, and it’s easier to throw more money at the project than it is to simplify it.

3) HD is not cricitcal. We wanted HD because, if we’re buying equipment, we don’t want to invest in SD technology. What we buy for this process study could easily be put to use in a variety of other more glossy Marketing capacities. And…even though we deliver in SD almost exclusively now, shooting a wide shot in HD still gives us the option of going tighter in post if they want more detail. (Which is likely…because they anticipate more uses for this footage than just process mapping.) This, however, was obviously the first criterion to be sacrificed.

So…

Our original plan was to mount 4 HDD cameras (more than likely, the Sony HDR SR-11), capture in SD for THIS project, and offload all 4 cameras at the end of each day’s shift.

But…logistically, this proved too time-intensive — hours each day just offloading, then figuring out how to deliver that volume of footage to the client without many MORE hours of encoding. (Not to mention, the requirements eventually increased to 10-hour days and 6 cameras).

We eventually threw a little more money at it and are purchasing a system typically used for security purposes. It’s a DVR that will record at 720×480 and utilizes MPEG-4 compression. It can handle 4 cameras at 30fps, or–in our case–6 cameras at 20fps. It’s fully programmable, and the proprietary viewer will make navigating the footage in the end very easy. We can also convert to QT for import into FCP, should we need to edit further. Once set up, all we have to do is go dump footage to external drives every couple of days. The cameras are 1/4″ single chip, but the quality will be sufficient for this project.

Given the intensive use of video in Lean Manufacturing (and other like process-improvement methods), I post all of this in some detail hoping it may help someone else in a similar situation. Or…maybe someone will see a better way.

If there’s a way to cross-reference this in the Corporate Video forum, it might be better served there.

Thanks to all for input, and don’t hesitate to provide feedback.

Steven

[Steven Ludlow]

Believe me…I’ve already pursued that option with the end customer. I tried to talk them into just recording every OTHER second — they don’t miss anything, and the footage drops to 190 hours. But…no.

I’m not editing it in the end…so it’s neither here nor there. I’ve just got to figure out how to efficiently capture it.

[Steven Ludlow]

I think iTunes is a cumbersome way to convert files…particularly in how you designate where the converted files will go.

There is a great little freebie out there called “Max”, found at http://www.sbooth.org that is extremely fast at batch converting wav files to aif. Great tool.

Steven

[Steven Ludlow]

At what point does RAM cease to offer additional benefit to encoding with Compressor? I mean…if money’s no object, will 32GB of RAM be substantially faster than 16GB?

[Steven Ludlow]

Brilliant! Yes…there was a background layer (though it was empty) that, when deleted, fixed the file. Makes sense…but wouldn’t have occurred to me.

Thanks so much.

Steven