Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Hello Jerry…
Greetings, and congratulations… both on joining our little party here and on being a proud (I assume) new XLH1 owner.
We have been XLH1 users since they first came out, and after about a zillion miles on ours we are still very pleased with it. I’m sure you will enjoy using it.
As to your questions…
[Jerry Hdvideo] “1. Are canon batteries sufficient…”
It depends a bit on what you want to do. The little stock Canon batteries are ok, but not super great. You can buy a more powerful version of the battery that will power the camera a bit longer. OR… you can step things up a bit and use a more “professional” (as opposed to “prosumer”) battery system… I have been very happy with the goldmount adapter from Anton-Bauer…
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/488776-REG/Anton_Bauer_QRXLH_QR_XLH_Gold_Mount_for.html
That listing doesn’t really do a good job of showing where it goes and such, but here’s a picture that shows the battery adapter attached to the back our our XLH1…
With that, we can use “industry standard” Anton-Bauer batteries which will power the camera darn near forever (and we already had these batteries since we power most everything with them). You can use anything from full-size “bricks” like the one in the picture, down to the smaller AB “pancake” batteries. Yes, they add weight… but I like that… and makes the camera feel more balanced to me.
Nextly….
[Jerry Hdvideo] “2. What type of accessories would be suggested?”
Well, that really depends on how you plan on using the camera and what you are going to be doing with it. The sky is really the limit. Accessories could be anything from a $2 lens cap keeper to a $15,000 lens converter… and everything in between. If you can tell us a little more about what kind of projects you are going to be doing we might be able to narrow down suggestions a bit. Some of those suggestions might include additional lenses, a matte box, a follow focus unit, rod support systems… it really just depends on what you need to try to get out of your system.
[Jerry Hdvideo] “3. What type of editing software”
Well, now there’s a can of worms. Count up the number of different editing systems that exist, and that’s the number of different suggestions you will get, as everyone has their favorites. The Mac gang will of course tout Final Cut Pro… as for me, we are a PC house and use Premiere Pro… plus there’s Avid, Vegas, and others. That’s probably a question that bears more investigating than can be done in a single post here. You might browse some of the other forums (Art of the Edit, AJA, Final Cut, Avid, Matrox, etc.), make some contacts, and get some opinions there. People are often militant about their editing system preferences (we are… we love Premiere and abandoned Canopus systems…which we loved…simply because they don’t play well with Premiere anymore) and you will get some strong opinions. They are not always right… just right for the particular user who loves them.
Welcome!
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Mark Suszko] “What gives superior results is a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of both the audio and the video in a complementary fashion”
That’s true of course… but to cut video first and AND then attempt to marry audio to it (without having planned that much) is a nightmare. If I’m doing something that is extremely solo-narrator heavy (an industrial film, for example), I always like to lay audio down, then scissor it and slide it as needed… five frames, 10 seconds, a minute…whatever… to give me time to let the visuals do the work. To me snipping and sliding audio tracks is easy as pie… video, well (depending on its complexity), sometimes not so much. I’d never suggest producing radio with pictures, hopefully I didn’t give that impression. Just for me anyway, at least rough laying-in audio is technically a much easier workflow.
On the other side of the coin… I was always amazed at NFL Films, especially in the early days. Supposedly their cutters got the film fresh out of the soup and immediately started hacking away at the dozens of barely-dry 16mm reels… TOTALLY telling the story with the pictures only. AFTER they they had the visual part of the show complete, THEN a script was written to it and VO tracks were recorded….. of course by the late and legendary John Facenda… and I swear his pipes could have made your family’s Thanksgiving day touch football game sound like the most important matchup in the history of sports.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I don’t know about the Gefens… but Avocent Corporation is one of our big corporate clients, and we just finished an industrial for them… and they make KVM switches that do indeed work for Macs. You might check out their products.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[FischTale] “Even at $750 it’s still not bad if the other option is buying multiple consumer LCDs at $200-$300 each”
Well I believe you said quality didn’t matter at all, if I recall. So if it was me (and admitadly it isn’t), I think I’d just buy a couple of the cheap 4-plex splitters and a couple of really cheap small $88 plain ‘ol TV sets from WalMart or the like. Yes, that is one monitor more than you wanted, but still shouldn’t take up TOO much real estate, and you could view 8 cameras at once. You’d probably be out on $450 or so, total.
OR…just buy one of the quad splitters and one of the cheap TVs for now, since you only have four cameras at the moment. When you add more cameras, get another identical splitter and TV.
I haven’t read the specs, but I’m not sure those quad splitters will drive computer LCD monitors anyway (although they might)… the are primarily designed for regular NTSC monitors.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Well, I looked at that…. that might be what you need, but if it is I did not understand what your requirements are.
Firstly, that is entirely a computer-based card… it is going to require a computer and its resources to run it. I would think one of the little stand-alone boxes would be less trouble and less costly in the long run.
Secondly, I didn’t read it all extremely closely, but I don’t think that device will allow for screen splitting (seeing all your sources in a quad split or hex split at once). Rather instead of a splitter, it is a multiplexer. You may have seen multiplexed footage before, if you have ever seen a raw security camera tape from a store with lots of cameras. What multiplexers do is show ALL the video sources full screen, one after the other after the other. Screen durations can be of any length, but I see them average about 5 frames each in length, I’d say (anyone remember Wang Chung’s “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” video?..or am I dating myself? That’s what multiplexed video looks like, although that was only from two sources).
I only know a little bit about this because last year we did a marketing film for a company that makes software that “demultiplexes” multiplexed video. I’m not sure that card-based solution will give you the results you desire, if I was reading your requirements correctly.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Yikes, for some reason the links that I sent you didn’t even come CLOSE to showing the right products (even though I pasted them exactly from a search I did), I seem to have forgotten that Markertek’s links are for some reason screwy that way..
If you want to see those, go to markertek.com and do a manual search in the “SEARCH BY PART #” box for these three items:
Part RQS-5C
Part CQ-900
Part MAR-VR151P4Hope this helps, sorry for the confusion.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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To see four pictures on the same screen from four different sources you need what is known as a “quad splitter.”
They actually can be had pretty cheaply….
https://www.markertek.com/SearchProduct.asp?item=CQ%2D900&off=33&sort=prod
There are monitors with built-in quad splitters as well, but they tend to be a fair bit more expensive…
https://www.markertek.com/SearchProduct.asp?item=MAR%2DVR151P4&off=13&sort=prod
I’m not sure exacly what you call splitters that do six-way splits exactly (hex splitters, maybe), but I know they exist. A couple of broadcast studios I have been in use big 50 inch plasma screens that have 16-way splits in them, eliminating a need for a big monitor bank (but no doubt eventually burning their plasma tubes).
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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This works well for small backdrops, especially “one time use” deals where you discard it…
It just so happens that one block from our studio is a school supply place called “SchoolCraft”… they sell supplies to teachers, etc. One of the items they happen to stock are rolls of colored paper like teachers use to make bulletin boards, etc. It’s about five feet wide, available in about 25 colors (including darn-near chroma green), and is only about 50 cents a foot. Many times we have zipped down there and bought 8 or 10 feet of something for a specific project. If it survives the shoot, we roll it up and save it. If it doesn’t, no worries since it is so darn cheap.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Ryan Santos] “What is the normal practice, edit the video first then record the voice-over later?”
Only if you want to go very very insane. 🙂
For something that is very narration heavy (anywhere from fairly heavy all the way up to wall-to-wall voice-over) the easiest way would be to throw your narration pieces on the timeline and then edit the visual to them. In most videos like this the narration dictates the pace of the visuals, so that is by far the easiest way. You can always adjust the voice tracks (breaking them apart, sliding them to create spaces, etc.).
You CAN stick a mic into your computer and record directly into Premiere, but that is the very lowest of the low-end way to do it. You will get better results by either 1) having the VO tracks recorded in a professional audio studio and they deliver you an audio CD or a data CD with .wav files on it… or 2) recording yourself into a more specific audio program such as Audition, Soundbooth, Soundforge, or one of the flavors of Vegas audio. There you will have much more control over the sound files… can cut, paste, trim, eliminate breaths, fix levels, equalize, all that good stuff.
In our particular case we have a small audio booth in our studio… it is hardwired (mic and headphone cables running through the walls and floors) to each of our edit suites, where it first goes through a small Mackie mixer in each suite, and then into either the Canopus, AJA, or Matrox breakout box (depending on the suite). We used to have an Alesis compressor/noisegate in that chain as well, but compression can now be done so well in post we have eliminated it. As the talent performs in the booth, we record them into either Audition or Soundbooth… save the tracks as .wav files… and import them into Premiere later.
And of course…use the very best microphone that you can get your hands on (and a pop screen is a good idea, too).
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I agree, the P+S Technik is not for everyone… it is definitely the “Rolls Royce” of lens converters, but it does come with a related pricetag. I generally recommend it for cinematographers who will be shooting relatively high-end jobs at least a couple of days a week or more… less than that and it’s a bit hard to justify the cost (although I will say that it is one of the best-designed and best-built pieces of hardware that we’ve ever had).
I didn’t know that Cinevate was coming out with a “flip” version of the Brevis35… I will have to check that out. Now that MAY be a good thing, or maybe NOT…depending on what or how you shoot. The DOWNside is that it will be more light-hungry… the prisms required to “right” the image in the higher-end units do suck up a fair bit of light… at least one stop, maybe as much as two. That’s why superspeed lenses are most useful with “right side up” converters like the P+S Technik, MovieTube, etc. Depending on your shooting circumstances (and how much lighting you like to do for interiors, especially), you MIGHT find that you’d prefer to live with the “upside down” image rather than increase your lighting needs. And depending on your camera, it might not be such a big deal… for instance, as I said we had been planning to buy a Brevis35 to use with our little Canon HV20 crashcam… that camera is so tiny it would be just as easy to mount it upside down, thus avoiding both light-loss AND having to flip the image in post.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com