[Tim Kolb]

All I’d add is that I also do some AE work on my Dell M90 laptop, XP Pro SP3…2GB RAM, dual core.

It’s not fast, though working on it is assisted by the Mobile Quadro FX 2500 display card I have in it.

All the work I do is HD. On certain days when I want to go home, I take the work along and do it. I probably wouldn’t want to try to make a complete living on it, but AE doesn’t need synchronous response like Premiere Pro or an NLE application does. You can pooch through it if you need to. Dave has the requests hitting him fast with yesterday deadlines in broadcast television…he can’t be under-powered and get his work done.

I’d recommend breaking your 30 second deal into 4 or 5 comps so you can focus on small bits at a time if at all possible.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

…are there drivers that are holdouts from 64 bit Vista?

I wonder if there is something in there that likes Vista (or is simply made for Vista) and doesn’t like W7?

The Matrox has Windows 7 drivers, correct?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I’d have to echo the assertion that LA or NY aren’t the easiest markets to move into to find jobs in our field, contrary to the general notion that “all the big projects” are there…the production industry is becoming more diversified.

Projects are moving to Canada…you may not realize the major Studio presence in Wilmington, North Carolina…the options are spread out a bit more.

The other issue is just what sort of work you want to do. The corporate sector of the industry (training videos, sales videos, product videos for tradeshows, etc.) can often involve high end work and can also be -a bit- more stable than the entertainment industry.

Feature entertainment work now happens on a number of levels and sometimes starting on small independent projects (as long as you’re starving anyway) can offer a bit more experience with things outside of carrying coffee and running out to pick up prescription medication for the line producer’s Chihuahua (that is a true event BTW).

Even many of us with 20+ years experience in the industry aren’t doing well right now… Sometimes finding a job out of the industry and biding your time are necessary steps.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

You can choose to have a column that identifies video and/or audio clips that are on a timeline…but it doesn’t indicate trims, just which media clips are on the timeline. With longer clips that are cut up, it will tell you how many separate times it appears.

…but the trims within the clip is something else entirely. i don’t know if there is a way to do that. I don’t know of one personally.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[Rafael Amador] “Where there is a lot of B&W detail, the frequency of the Y channel some time gets close to the frequency of the Color Subcarrier. The filters read that Luma as Chroma,producing these ever changing colors.
Is not a fault of the camera, but of how the NTSC and PAL system have been designed.
That’s call “moire” and there is nothing to do avoid it.
I guess that you can tweak the detail to avoid it, but probably will kill the picture.”

Well…aliasing happens in many instances and from many sources and NTSC color isn’t the sole cause…subcarrier moire is one…though in HD, there is no analog color subcarrier.

If you have any high frequency detail that is above 50% of the max sensor spatial resolution, aliasing will happen. Nyquist tells us that you need to sample at 2X the max frequency you wish to faithfully reproduce. This is the reason why the low pass filter on any electronic camera should be cutting out detail above 50% of the max sensor resolution, but there are still situations where aliasing can happen.

Turn up the detail on your video cam and find out…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I’d echo Rafael here…

This sound like a camera issue. If you role to SxS, does the footage look the same?

If the SxS footage looks good, I’d say you have a mismatch between your camera record settings and the Nano’s settings…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Hmmm… several issues here.

“Interline twitter”…I’ll assume we’re referring to what engineers would refer to ‘aliasing’ or ‘mosaic’ which would occur on clothing with a fine herring bone pattern where it looks as if the cloth is crawling off the person…and is most common in interlace signals.

If you are shooting 30p, I’m not certain how you would produce this artifact…at least to the extent you would see it in interlaced mode. The monitor you use to view your video has an impact on what you see vs what you actually have…not to mention that on many NLEs, the viewing window (panel, canvas, whatever) will usually scale the actual pixel size to fit within the interface and this will also produce some interesting artifacts that aren’t actually in the file.

Your HDV gear (if it’s Sony) is likely dropping to one field if you are choosing progressive mode, effectively halving the vertical resolution (to 540 vs 1080), softening high frequency artifacts far more than an EX1 would, which is shooting full resolution vertically (1080), not to mention 33% more resolution horizontally (1440 vs 1920).

As far as panning goes…with progressive scan, you will never have the same smooth motion as you would with interlace. This is the reason why cinematographers have very specific speeds that they know they can pan with any given lense…they have to adjust their technique to reduce “judder”.

100 Mbit I frame vs 35 Mbit Long GOP… I’m an advocate for the Convergent Design product line as much as anyone. There is no question that the Flash XDR and the Flash Nano are really well thought-out devices and that 100 Mbit I frame is very good quality.

However…there are a few caveats here.

1. Temporal compression is typically AT LEAST 2.5 times as efficient as I-frame only codecs, all other compression traits being equal. This being the case, 100 Mbit I-frame MPEG would carry about the same image quality as 40 Mbit long GOP. Again, this is assuming all else is equal. So going to 100 Mbit I-frame likely won’t grab the advantage over 35 Mbit Long GOP that one would assume by judging on the raw numbers… (100 Mbit Long GOP 4:2:2 is an obvious jump however).

2. However…XD(EX)cam is 35 Mbit 4:2:0 whereas the Nano records 4:2:2 at data rates above 35 Mbits, so you have denser color difference subsampling. Advantage for quality goes to the Nano on this point…

3. BUT…whether this would resolve the fine pattern noise issue is in question in my mind. The camera’s low pass filter system combined with it’s detail circuitry is where the rubber hits the road here…and the Nano and the camera have equal recorded luma resolution…1920×1080. I don’t think the fine pattern noise will be affected by the recording system in this case quite frankly.

I’d say the Nano is a very sound investment…but I think that the nature of the visual issues you are referring to lead me to believe that there is more to this story and that without some other alteration in how you are using the camera or you are viewing the footage, I’d be surprised if switching to the Nano -alone- would solve the problem.

…I will say that my conclusions are based on what I believe you are describing. If I’m misinterpreting your comments, feel free to clarify.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Good advice all around in this thread.

Blu Ray discs, like standard DVDs, are formatted to correspond with -video- formats…for video playback. 1024×768 isn’t a video format, so it would require cropping or scaling…and scaling is an absolute no-no for computer interface captures as the readability will simply be trashed.

When you were converting to QuickTime, you likely were creating a file with a codec like ‘animation’ which is an extremely inefficient codec relative to Techsmith for screen captures.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[Pat McGowan] “I meant something smaller than a breadbox Tim…..maybe more in the pack of smokes size range?”

Oh, I see…

I have no knowledge of what AJA has planned in a TeenieKiPro sense…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[Pat McGowan] “it would seem that AJA is on the verge of releasing a 10 bit field recorder (aren’t they?)”

they have…it’s called the KiPro

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,