[Tod Hopkins]

Without seeing the result, we can’t tell if it is what we might expect, or can be improved, but your end product should be as good or better than it was prior to the camera upgrade. Starting with MPEG4 should not be a quality issue. However, getting from their to high quality standard def MPEG2 might not be as easy as it should be. Frankly, most software encoders don’t do MPEG2 well.

Dropping to NTSC is a major loss. Converting to MPEG2 is not, as long you compensate with bitrate. MPEG2 requires roughly 2x the bitrate to achieve the same quality. For standard definition (480), a 9Mbps MPEG2 is maximum DVD quality, and equivalent to a 4.5Mbps MPEG4 (h.264). This is a subjective rule of thumb that really only applies to lower bitrates. At higher bitrates above about 10Mbps, the difference is negligible. The real difference is that MPEG4 can maintain quality at much lower bitrates than MPEG2. An MPEG2@20Mbps is (arguably) broadcast quality and should be visually lossless compared to a standard definition master. Modern systems should
have no problem playing a 20Mbps file.

The other major issue is interlacing. You do NOT want it anywhere. If you are adding interlacing at any stage, you may wreck the picture. In theory, this should not be true going from progressive to interlaced. In practice though, it can be bad. Many compressors simply don’t handle MPEG2 progressive well even if you specify it. Many
compressors will presume that MPEG2 is interlaced because MPEG2 was specifically designed to handle interlacing.

In my experience, few software compressors do a good job of MPEG2. The best MPEG2 encoding is hardware-based and expensive. I do not use Apple Compressor, Adobe Encoder, or Sorenson Squeeze for high-quality progressive MPEG2 because I think they are all wanting. I use a lesser-known and cheaper Windows-only compressor called TMPEG Videoworks by Pegasys. In my opinion, the legacy TMPEGenc encoder (which can actually still be found for free) is better and much cheaper than any of the name brands I’ve worked with.

Yes, you should upgrade to 1080p, at least, but in the meantime your outputs should be at least as good as they were.

[Tod Hopkins]

Are you looking for hardware consoles?

https://loupedeck.com/en

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/panels

I have no experience with these. The Blackmagic product is for Resolve. I don’t know if they make anything compatible with Adobe.

Cheers,
tod

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

From one Dad to another, it sounds like you are doing a great job! Good luck to you and your boys.

Cheers,
tod

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

I agree that the audio is not bad. Perfectly acceptable for what you are doing. Some ways to improve the audio without investing money. Get closer. Record in quiet spaces with lots of soft surfaces. Outside works of course, if quiet, but stay away from walls, especially stone or concrete. Inside, cover floors and walls. Hang heavy blankets, put down carpet. Anything you can do to eliminate sound-reflecting surfaces.

Find and learn to use sound filters, especially normalization, compression, denoise (if you can find a good one), and de-reverb. The first two are the most important. Again, I don’t know Resolve, but it has a very powerful audio app in its suite. You might want to round-trip some tracks even if you never learn how to use Fairlight for mixing.

As for the performance in Resolve, I suspect the power of your computer is probably not the real issue. I suspect it’s the particular video compression and format you are shooting. Not 1080p. That’s fine. Make sure you are shooting a fixed frame rate. 30, 25, or 24fps. Phone compression is also likely to be an issue. Highly compressed formats are harder to edit directly. I don’t know that phone, but the easiest solution is probably to convert the native phone video to an editing format: ProRes, DNxHD, or Cineform. I’m not sure what intermediate Resolve prefers.

Here’s a good article by someone who knows much more than I do.

https://blog.frame.io/2020/02/24/davinci-resolve-performance/

Cheers,
tod

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

Excellent answer. BTW if you tried noise reduction in 2018, try again. The noise reduction filter was next to useless in 2018, but I’ve just finished using the 2019 version to filter the same interviews it failed on in 2018. The result was impressive. I was able to use the filter at very low levels (10%) and restricted to high and low end (most of the noise was low) to elimate significant HVAC noise on interviews recorded at too-low level without altering the voice in any way I could hear.

I feel you on the need to keep it simple. When you are working with low budget, hour-plus single takes production, it really needs to be simple and fast.

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

It sounds like your GPU has failed if nVidia can’t detect a GPU. Do you have two cards? Check your System Info and see if it reports the nVidia card. You might try pulling and re-seatting the card. You might also try running the Apple Diagnostics for your machine.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202731

If the machine is older than 2013, you need the Apple Hardware Test. See the link in the above article.

As for Premiere, current versions don’t have a CUDA option (2018+ I think), but assuming you haven’t updated, then this might also be a failed card.

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

Can someone please explain how these online sing-alongs work? I’ve tried singing with others live and it’s almost impossible with various time lags. Is there some trick to this that I’m missing? I mean syncing up in post, no problem, and it looks like there was plenty of post trickery in the Hamilton piece.

But there was a live sing-along. How?

Cheers,
tod

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

I accept that it was a pretty vague and probably unanswerable question.

I believe it does not have a single answer, but rather a more general one: neglect of the audio components within Premiere. Just like exporting directly from Premiere isn’t as stable as transcoding in Encode, Premiere doesn’t handle audio as well as Audition. And audio has never been Adobe’s strength in any case.

In my specific case yesterday, the audio was not the root of the problem, just the obvious symptom. Eventually, I solved the problem by deleting all previews, both video and audio. Yes, everything worked fine once nothing was rendered, as one might expect. ????

You might think this would absolve the audio, but it doesn’t since it was obvious that it was audio playback that was choking. For instance, any time the sequence hit an MP3 original (always a struggle for Premiere) it choked. Two channels of audio or unrendered peak files also triggered choking. It was clearly changes in the audio load, not the video, that triggered failures. Once the basic resource was clear, the system could once again handle the audio load.

By the way, the video is multi-cam 4k. No apparent problems with video-only.

Cheers,
tod

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

Yes, you only want one audio playback. I generally include audio on the stream that requires the hardest sync. In a two-screen show, it’s probably a coin toss.

Software. Dataton Watchout, overkill, not cheap and you need a lot of horsepower. It depends on how critical sync is. You could hack something if your hardware has the horsepower. For instance, play one 3840×1080 stream across an expanded desktop split between two projectors. People have done two screen presentations with two people pressing play on two laptops. This assumes the plus-minus a few frames is not critical. If your screens do not overlap or “seam” then your sync probably isn’t critical.

I use synchronized media players. One is the master and the others are slaved. This should give you plus/minus one frame. Generally these are connected in a local LAN, but they can be connected directly. Brightsign players is dominating the installation market at the moment, though they might be overkill for your purposes. You might call an event rental facility. They likely have Dataton Watchout dedicated players or something similar for rent.

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Tod Hopkins]

Edit both streams in a single master “canvas” (a sequence in Premiere). For instance, if your goal is two 1080p sequences, then nest these side-by-side in a double-wide sequence (3840x1080p) for synchronous review. This will work fine if there is no “overlap” of content from one screen to another. If there is, then this would happen in the double-wide “master” sequence which you would then nest into output sequences that crop out each screen’s worth from the master.

Many variations of the above, but that’s the basic idea. A master sequence contains your full canvas for composition and review, and nested sequences contain individual screens only. The order in which you nest depends on your particular needs.

I will warn you that keeping track of nested sequences can be daunting. Stay organized.

Cheers,
tod

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC