Tim Kolb
Forum Replies Created
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Any dynamic linked AE comps need to be rendered as clips and put into the timeline to be included in the project manager “distillation” process.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
1. If you want to encode to ProRes, you have a pretty narrow range of options. A Mac with FCP or an SDI interface and an AJA KiPro.
2. If you have ProRes, PPro on Mac or Windows will run it no problem.
3. If you need to convert TO ProRes…see item 1.
(A conversion utility or anything else on your Mac system can write to ProRes…as long as FCP is installed.)
Complaints?…Adobe is not the “A” company to complain to…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
Yes, whenever you need to build a matte around something that wasn’t shot as a key, that matte needs to be built for each frame…
“Rotoscoping” is the term you’d hear referring to this process.
Premiere Pro’s masking tools aren’t up to this job, but this is the sort of thing that After Effects is created to do.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
[Alex Zvyk] “1. Use high-speed cameras to quantize time better (at shorter intervals), which then will allow for better sync in post. Say, 120fps camera would allow 4 times more accurate sync than a 30fps camera.”
This would be why this is typically done with still cameras and some sort of flash or extremely bright lighting…they can be synced and the bright light helps to capture a shorter exposure, making a less motion-blurred image.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
Ugh…OK, I see.
The issue is this…those images and what “instant” in time they were “taken” is locked in.
Even if you could somehow slide them sub-frame, you can’t change when the camera took the shot…you’ll simply be moving the mismatched instances around. The images are the images at this point…
Even your initial idea about going to a 60 fps timeline would only create two instances of the same frame…with progressive, you don’t even have those two fields to subdivide that you would with interlace.
In theory, it may be possible to take the instances that you want to do the “bullet time” thing and try to Time Remap all the cameras to a very slow speed (like 25%), which will create lots of artificial interim frames, (but if the dancer is in motion, there will be unavoidable frame blur…maybe it could become your ground breaking take on bullet time?) and you might try exporting still frames if you can get the action to be relatively synchronous, and then use the still frames for the bullet time angle slide…
That’s the best I’ve got off the top of my head I’m afraid. Inexpensive cameras are liberators and hand cuffs all at the same time…
I’ll mull it some more…maybe I’ll come up with something smarter…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
Well…I think if the audio is off by less than a frame, your video is as close as it’s going to get without actually genlocking cameras so they image on the exact same clock.
You shot 30…if the clapper is already within the same frame, you’re there. While the subframe audio offset could cause some audible flanging, no human being will notice that sort of a frame clock offset between cameras after you’ve cut the scene.
Pull each audio clips toward a central sync point and edit.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
Well…keep in mind that I didn’t say the best way was to go to Color…I said that DPX files could be handled by PPro in and out, so it actually makes a direct workflow with Color possible…in some ways it’s cleaner than the FCP “dynamic link-ish” workflow with Color.
Color is fine, but even though each application or internal effect has its own little “secret sauce” kinds of features…most all do pretty much the same thing.
Color, Colorista and “big iron” color correction suites have secondary in the same pass as primary, which is helpful.
PPro’s color correctors all have the ability to be deployed as a secondary (as a second effect as you mentyionedand the masking is sophisticated, though there is no oval or rectangle shape mask, which is one of the things I like about Colorista, Iridas, and other dedicated systems.
PPro’s color correction capabilities need a working premise and some more conventional color correction “intuition” built into the interface, but there are more capabilities there than even most PPro users recognize.
However…that said, Colorista’s secondary wheel with the ability to “crowd” and rotate hues individually is something I use all the time…and I still do like to work in SpeedGrade when possible.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
Hold down the ALT key while sliding the audio part of the clip when set to audio units.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
You have a 50 Mbit stream from a DSLR…your drives aren’t the issue. If you can run ProRes HQ (220 Mbit) without an issue, your drives can do three (note) streams of DSLR from a read standpoint.
(note: the extra allowed is because it’s reading three different streams with your DSLR footage as opposed to one stream for ProRes, so even though 50 goes into 200 4X, in the real world 4 streams x50 Mbits is more work than 1 stream x 220 Mbits)
The problem is that your processor is simply not up to the task of decoding multiple H264 HD streams simultaneously. It takes some serious processing power to decode one stream of H264, relative to its data rate (it’s far more processor intense than 50 Mbit XDcamHD 422 for instance, which is MPEG2).
It will not matter what sort of hard drive system you put on a MacBook Pro (or any laptop…this isn’t an anti-Mac thing), you’ll be running out of real time decode capability long before you get four streams…your drives may be capable of that now…your processor is the bottleneck.
Lowering the playback resolution will help somewhat, but H264 formats (DSLR, AVCHD, etc.) don’t drop to partial decode with the visual grace of most other formats.
Premiere Pro CS5 has a lot of capabilities, and being able to edit so many formats natively is definitely a significant feature, but the software doesn’t deliver the power to do the work…like all software, it brings the know-how. The computer still has to deliver the heavy lifting…and H264 is heavy.
The conundrum for Adobe is trying to set some coherent, graduated minimum system requirements in an industry where source material ranges from 4K RAW to uncompressed HD, to MPEG2 and MPEG4…to standard definition DV and even cel phone video in some cases.
It’s not that your MacBook Pro is underpowered to run PPro CS5, it’s that it simply doesn’t have the speed or processing threads to decode four streams of H264. If Adobe publishes a minimum system requirement that says your computer can’t edit H264, then someone who wants to edit something like a narrative with a single stream will think they can’t do that…but of course, you said that one stream runs fine…
Many users will talk about matching the software to the workflow. PPro CS5 does just about every workflow (I’m buzzing through a ProRes source project right now…on my Windows machine), so really the issue for PPro CS5 users is matching the hardware to the workflow…
Bottom line: If stacking 3,4,5 or more streams of H264 DSLR footage is your everyday gig and you need good response…it’s time to go fire-breathing workstation.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
I think at this poimt the system needs to be considered.
It is certainly not really up to the task of video editing in the present sense. I have one system with two of the processors you have with twice the RAM and it is definitely on the bottom end of the spectrumas far as I’m concerned.
CS5 may actually help as Mercury will drop resolution on playback much more aggressively.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,