[Todd Terry]

Mark is right… any of the popular DoF converters will work with that camera.

Low end woud be the Brevis35 or Letus35, probably coming in at a grand or a litte more.

Midrange would be the M2 from RedrockMicro, a couple of grand or a little more would get you a fully rigged out system.

Top of the line would be the P+S Technik Mini35. It’s the king, looks great and works flawlessly… but it comes with a price. You’re looking at around $11,000+ for a Mini35.

And don’t forget to budget in for lenses. A set of real cine primes can cost several times as much as the converter itself… even a top-end one like the P+S Technik. A good option for budget shooters is to get two lens mounts for your converter, a PL mount and something like a Nikon or Canon mount. That way you can use inexpensive SLR lenses for day-to-day use, and rent PL mount motion picture lenses as needed for more mission-critical projects.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

[Tim Kolb] “… then do you only allow your clients to use their finished video for a year?”

Yes, often times, we do. Or 18 months. Or two years. Or 13 weeks. It varies.

One of the things to keep in mind that while a producer or production company may own and retain the rights to a production, often times that is not all inclusive… and the production contains elements that the producer does not hold lifelong rights to.

Two of the most prominent of those elements are music rights, and acting performances.

If we produce a broadcast commercial (which is our chief stock in trade), chances are the music track is specifically paid for and licensed for that particuar production. If we were to provide all of our source materials for that production to a client, and they were to take all of that to another production company for another cut and re-use the music track, they would be in violation of the specific secured rights to that track.

Likewise, talent that appears in our spots (especially represented and/or union talent) are hired for a specific production for a specific market and usage for a specific period of time. It’s hard for clients (who come from very different worlds) to understand that although we could hand them a raw tape, that doesn’t necessarily mean they own the rights to use what’s on them. It’s impractical to hand a stack of agents’ and union paperwork to a client and explain to them that “Talent A” was a buyout but “Talent B” is usable for any production but only for 13 weeks and that “Talent C” is available for a year but only in such-and-such market and that the voiceover guy can’t be used again at all because he has subsequently signed an exclusive agreement with a competing client…. and so on and so on. Clients just don’t think that way, understand it, or be expected to comply.

That is one reason that we retain ownership of all matierials, including raw footage… and clients’ contracts plainly state that (as well as limitations on their final production, if any… such as air life).

Of course if a client did use some of those materials improperly, technically it would be them in violation, not me… but I guarantee you it would come back to bite me. We have very good relationships with the agents, union reps, and talent that we have worked hard to cultivate… and we do not want to jeopardize those.

In 12 years we have never had a client question that policy… knock on wood.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Thanks Alex…

I will give that a try.

Yes I can capture via composite, Svid, component, firewire, or HD-SDI. As I said I usually go HD-SDI. In the future I will try your suggestion with component… unfortunately at this point a lot of footage has already been captured.

I’ll give it a go….

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Thanks Alex, I will give your re-linking method a try.

Yeah, I know time-codes are pretty dodgy on HDV, but I’m not doing any batch capturing so that’s not really a big deal right now.

My files are HDV mpegs because I’m capturing as HDV via firewire within a 10-bit Uncompressed HD 1080p 23.97 project, so that’s how they come in. I do not like working within an HDV project, I just use HDV clips within an uncompressed HD project. Most of what we do are broadcast commercials, and in that case I will capture as Matrox uncompressed avi files via HD-SDI, but this is a very long project so I was trying to save a few TB’s of drive space by capturing as HDV instead. Any masters or pieces that I render for inclusion (I call them “sub Avis”) are always made as 10-bit uncompressed, so the only HDV video is the original acquisition. It all works fine and looks great with the exception of the link-breaking issue.

I’ll play with it some when back in studio on Monday…

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

All the media is in the same exact folder. I usually make a folder within the main project folder called “Captures” and that’s where all the video is.

For example in that one folder might be take01.mpeg, take02.mpeg, etc., usually sequentially numbered like that. In the particular project I’m working on now, they might be multiple takes from the same scene…. so they were all captured exactly the same at the same time from the same tape. Yet on the timeline after reopening the project some paths will be lost. If they have had filters applied or whatever so that they had required rendering, when I “link media” to restore the paths, the previews return intact, so I guess it could be worse… still it’s a huge pain in the rump.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Hi Alex….

Good thought, but sadly that’s not the case. All the video lives on an external 3TB eSata RAID… the video is never moved and the drive letter never changes.

More evidence that’s not the problem: when it loses the paths, usually not all of the paths to all of the clips are lost… usually most of them, but not all. One clip might be fine and still linked, yet it’s right adjacent to another clip that has lost its path… even though the same source files are together in the same captures folder where they always were.

It’s puzzling…

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Actually, I rather like the look of the void… but I’m a fan of limbo environments.

I think the look is actually pretty darn good, especially considering it’s lit with just little PAR cans.

My biggest suggestion would be to move your instruments a bit so that everyone is not so evenly lit… maybe instead of straight on, the keys are hitting them at more of an acute angle… give a shadowed side and some nice modeling.

If you have enough instruments, give everyone a good backlight, perhaps maybe not straight back but at an opposite angle of your key. Here would be an opportunity to use some colored gels to liven things up.

Good job…

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

No offense taken, Chris…

You are right, it depends on the system and the configuration. I didn’t like my Aja XENA system, too much… I ditched it for the Matrox AXIO which I love… works flawlessly and is lighting fast.

I must say though that I was a HUGE fan of the Canopus/Premiere combination. We had two systems, worked great, crashless, fast.

In fact, if Canopus hadn’t gotten out of bed with Adobe I’d probably still be using Canopus. But we like Premiere so much that when Canopus ditched Premiere for Edius, we ditched Canopus.

Again, I think it has to do with proper configuration, because I don’t generally get that lucky.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Steel pipe is the norm… but if you know it is only going to support relatively lightweight instruments you don’t have to go that route.

Electrical conduit will work nicely.

One trip to Home Depot, and it’s dirt cheap. Look at what they have and judge what size will work best for you. Probably 1″ would be sufficient, but you might want to go up or down one size depending on your exact needs.

Criss-cross the pipes into your grid and join the intersections with U-bolts the way most grids are made… or you can drill holes through them where they cross and bolt them together.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

[Chris Blair] “Premiere Pro cannot be considered at the top of the heap of any high-end editing system. Can you edit professional projects with it. Yes. Can you do it without pulling your hair out? Doubtful”

Oh, I’ll bite back at that.

We are not a big-time big-city post house by any means, but we do very professional work and broadcast commercials on the local, regional, and occasional national level.

We’ve been a Premiere house since we started, 12 years ago.

The very first machine we had cost darn near half as much as my house, was a DPS Perception machine (anybody but Tim Kolb remember those?) running Premiere 4 on Windows NT. Since then we have been through a number of generations… Canopus DVrex, Canopus Storm2, Aja XENA, and Matrox AXIO. Right now we have three Windows suites running Premiere… my personal suite is an AXIO running Premiere CS3.

Believe it or not that original Perception machine is still running strong…. rarely used, of course, but we keep it around in the rare instances that we have to access those old proprietary .pvd files.

With a couple of exceptions and a few small speedbumps through the years, we have never had any problem with any of our boxes, they are rock solid stable, never crash… and all happily run Premiere. And I am happy to edit with it.

And even though I probably technically shouldn’t… I will routinely keep quite a few other applications running while in Premiere. It’s never given me a second’s worth of trouble to do that or bog down any machines in any way.

All of the editing platforms have come a long way through the years… so much so that these days FCP, Avid, and Premiere are darn near interchangable in terms of quality, usability, and fuctionality.

Now, all that being said… we do typically buy whatever is absolutely the most powerful smokin’ fast computer availble anytime we are moving to a new NLE… but… I think the success has a lot more to do with the fact that the machines are perfectly and properly configured by a VAR that builds turnkey systems for a living. I’m a relatively swift guy, but I would never attempt it myself. I’d much rather pay someone who knows how to do it right than waste my time trying to do it myself.

I think configuration is key.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com