[Tim Kolb]

I have had good experiences with AJA tech support, but I do think that sometimes companies have policies for everything except how to conduct yourself if you’re the “new guy”.

It doesn’t sound like Jay encountered a very seasoned member of the team over there, and everyone has to start someplace, but I have found that lots of companies never address how someone should respond if they don’t know the answer to something. Letting a tech support customer know that you need to call them back on an issue to “clarify something” or because you want to “do some digging” or whatever you need to say to get off the phone and acquire an answer you don’t have, leaves the customer with a far better feeling than “I’ll be damned, I don’t know what the does either…”.

It’s the marketing side of tech support…and it just seems to get overlooked sometimes.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Yes…i know that Sony doesn’t recommend I use anything I didn’t buy from them and I accept this method as a bit of a compromise.

However, I’ve shot almost all the footage I’ve acquired since buying the camera on SDHC and it works just fine for a lot of my work, and when it doesn’t I accept the liability for it as a compromise.

I’ve been around the block a time or two and I get that SxS is the recommended format…and I’m not whining about the performance, or asking why SDHC doesn’t work like SxS…they’re basically disposable.

…just checking in with those who use SDHC on what their experiences have been.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Ugh…I knew I need a glasses upgrade, but wow, did I scan that message too fast. Sorry…most days I can distinguish a “P” from a “D”.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[Jeff Brown] “I thought HD was able to use full-gamut RGB. Time for a refresher look at some SMPTE docs, I guess!”

Well…that’s another issue. SMPTE C is actually a subset of NTSC. Rec 709 is actually a bit wider (a very small amount) than SMPTE C, but does fall inside of full NTSC in a couple areas…

Lots of people with lots of time on their hands I think…

Also, even many RGB colorspaces can’t contain the complete video colorspace. There are certain colors that can only exist in one or the other, which explains why converting is a problem and converting back is a nightmare.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I’d echo Jeff’s comments.

What happens when these various color ranges and definitions are converting is typically not well disclosed. In a computer, the material can be handled as color difference (video component…Y’PrPb or Y’, R-Y’, B’-Y for analog or Y’CbCr for digital) within the program itself, but a computer displays RGB.

The issue with broadcast safe filters is that they sometimes aren’t really ‘scaling’ anything. They’re often the chroma or luma version of hedge trimmers. Particularly in the case of reds and yellows, the quickest way to make visual mud or reds or visual…uh, greenish brownish stuff of yellows is to apply a broadcast safe filter.

I use levels quite a lot for simple, quick color correction. I also use Colorista a fair amount. I also have SpeedGrade for a stand alone color correction application. In all cases, I depend on an external scope to really tell me where the signal is. The software scopes can tell you what levels are in the file, but if you’re headed to tape, that conversion by your video card could be having some effect, intended or not, on your footage and the software scopes won’t know this because your video output is downstream from them.

If you’re going out to standard definition tape (lots of spots still shipped out on BetaSP in lots of markets yet…), used NTSC (standard def) scopes aren’t terribly expensive, or hard to come by, though I’d try to buy a used scope from somewhere that buys stuff from auctions, etc. and goes through them and verifies proper operation.

If you are not going out to tape and you have to output a file and you’re dependent on software scopes…you have to know a couple things. First, those full range RGB values can usually be scaled by whomever is taking them to tape. Many video IO cards (AJA, BlackMagic, Matrox) take care of the scaling, including -scaling- the luma range so that 0 black is at 7.5 where appropriate.

Second, when you’re making your final adjustments, look for luma overshoot on the waveform monitor and chroma oversaturation on the vestorscope. Many people know that video levels in excess of 100 on a waveform monitor are bad and you need to stay below that. You may even notice that the software hard-cuts luma levels there so you might be able to save some detail by backing that off somewhat. On color, you can put color bars on the timeline and call up a vestorscope and note that each color should be hitting a target zone around the vectorscope. The two scales you read on a vectorscope are

1.) The distance from the center of the scope indicates saturation…the further the signature is from the center, the more saturated it is…the outer ring is the absolute danger zone, but not every color has the same saturation tolerance as you’ll notice that each color target is not equidistant from the center point. I typically try to never push a given color beyond it’s relevant target box, even if it is still inside the ring.

2.) The ‘clock’ position around the display indicates the specific hue (sometimes called ‘phase’ by us old analog-trained guys) the color information is showing. You can see on the targets that there is a target for R=Red, B=Blue, and G=green…then you’ll notice that the secondary colors in between them also have targets, Y=Yellow, Cy=Cyan, Mg=Magenta.

Most vectorscopes also have a line right around 10:30-11 O’clock which is rarely explained. Sometimes it’s a leftover “I” axis indicator (There was a way of handling color that Quantel developed one time where it actually rotated the phase axes on NTSC material to increase color clarity and the two axes were called “I” and “Q”…but I digress…), but the intended purpose on many scopes is to be a skin tone reference. Believe it or not, all the races of the world have what is a very small range of actual skin hue…the saturation is different of course, but while there is a little deviation, most human skin tone when represented accurately should exist in a very narrow pocket on the vectorscope.

You might say that you wouldn’t need a vectorscope to see skin tone that was out of whack, but keep in mind that over the years professionals have had to always question whether their eyes were telling them the truth…mostly because analog monitors could drift over time, or somebody could decide to arbitrarily adjust a monitor and sabotage it’s accuracy. A vectorscope (and waveform monitor) that was properly adjusted couldn’t lie.

Even though we aren’t in quite the situation with our digital displays these days, two different displays could still easily show us two different interpretations when fed the same image. Our display card could have some settings that affect how that image is presented to the display…or our video in/out card could affect the image as it passes through.

With HD, we’re now even more constricted as many people don’t realize that even though we gained all these pixels, Rec 709 colorspace (HD) is actually more constricted than Rec 609 colorspace, giving us even less dynamic range in saturation and luminance.

Long post…sorry. Hopefully something in there is useful for you.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I think there was a time when it was helpful for people to keep the product lines straight to have the two different names…Xena was PC and Kona was Mac. It probably helped customers to delineate the product line more than anything else back when all this came about. The existence of cross-platform operations and workflows (as well as the need for them) was certainly not common at that point.

Now that Adobe supports both computer platforms, I think the concept of Xena drivers running on a Kona card on a Mac probably got confusing for everyone.

This has to be a streamlined way of dealing with the product line for all of us…customers, system builders…and not least of all, AJA themselves. I think it’s probably a solid move all around.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[Brent Critchfield] “you have to set recording modes to SP and the camera will output HDV over the firewire connection”

I have an EX1 so it might be different…if you set to ‘SD recording’ wouldn’t it be outputting DV? HDV would still be hi def…

Not a challenge, but a question…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Turning auto-save off is always an option.

I for one, don’t trust myself not to get tied up in what I’m doing and forget to manual save…

The process should simply not interrupt normal operations. It’s not something that Adobe hasn’t heard.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[Ross Tokach] “I love adobe and its products, I just feel like they are trying to push the ram envelope a little too much.”

In my opinion, Adobe’s software is usually ideally suited for system capabilities about 8 months hence… 🙂

Seriously though…RED material is certainly hefty to handle, but RAM is definitely helpful. Are you on a 32 bit or 64 bit OS?

Auto save timing and priority continues to be absurdly poorly implemented in Premiere Pro…stopping playback (or anything else) to auto save is ridiculous, but I’ve never crashed during its occurence.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Client comes calling with tape some plant guys shot on a consumer DV camera after determining we were too expensive to shoot it…a decade ago probably…4:3 SD days.

One of my staff videographer/editors sitting in the chair, fires up the tape…

Editor: “Um…this is all shot sideways…vertical.”

Client: “It looked right when he was shooting it, I was standing right there.”

Editor: “You were looking at a monitor?”

Client: “Yes…on the camcorder…”

Editor: “OK, but was the camcorder on its side?”

Client: (a bit indignant)”Well of course, as you can see the machine is very vertical…it was either very small or cut off if we shot it horizontally…haven’t you ever shot a portrait?”

Editor: “Well, yes…I understand, but the image needs to be rotated and we’ll either have to have black bars left and right as we shrink it down, or we’ll cut it off to fill the screen from left to right…we have the same limitations as you saw when you were looking at the shot…”

Client: (now more indignant) “You mean to tell me that with all this stuff in this edit suite that you charge this much for, that you can’t just make this work? What exactly do you guys get paid for?”

Editor (now exasperated)”I’m sorry, you’re right…(grabs the 14″ Sony program monitor I just bought and flops it on its side)…”just let all your potential customers know they have to tip their televisions on their side to watch the video.”

…I am trying to moderate the situation and I am pursing my lips so hard to keep from laughing that I probably wouldn’t have offended the customer any more if I’d just guffawed out loud…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,