[Tom Matthies]

Litterboxed!
I love it. I will now use that term when describing the Letterboxed/Pillerboxed effect to my clients. I had been describing it as “Postage Stamped” but litterboxed is more descriptive when explaining to them just how crappy it will look.
Tom

E=MC2+/-2db

[Tom Matthies]

It’s a serious, ongoing problem in the business. No system is foolproof since fools are so ingenious. I used to teach operation of ENG vans and it’s amazing the ways people find to get around this stuff. We’d run into time crunch issues all of the time, especially, as you say, many places are now One Man Band operations. At least we had a Chief Engineer who was a no nonsense kind of guy. I had an instance where we were going live in the wake of a bunch of bad thunderstorms. As we were getting to ready to go on-air, lightning again began crashing down all around us. As the operator that day, I made the decision to lower the mast rather than turn the van into a lightning rod. The producer and News Director had a shit fit over the decision. It was a throw-away live shot, basically just a VO over B-Roll. I held my ground and dropped the mast fast and figured I’d deal with the aftermath later. When I got back the Chief Engineer (who was also the Station Manager) defended the decision and read the riot act to the Producer and News Director saying no live shot was worth risking the lives of the staff. He was backed up by the General Manager as well. That lead to a policy that if the ENG truck operator deemed that it was too dangerous to go live, he/she had the authority to pull the shot and had the backing of management in doing so. It was a big step in the right direction of common sense.I took the job seriously, to be sure. It’s a job that can kill with little warning.

E=MC2+/-2db

[Tom Matthies]

Open Compressor. Pick a Quicktime preset and assign it to your project. It doesn’t really matter which preset you use since you will be changing it anyhow.
Now, open the inspector panel and click on the Encoder tab. Just below the tab is a pulldown menu labeled “Quicktime Movie”. Click on it and there will be a choice for Quicktime Export Components”. Select it. A popup window will appear telling you that you are going to change your encoder settings. Click “OK”. The window will update and there will be a new pulldown menu choice for “Encoder Type”. Open it up and you should find the choice for encoding a WMV file. Click on the Options button and the usual Flip4Mac settings panel will open. Set your settings as desired.
The some of the other settings within the Comperssor preset window are still active, mostly the filters. Change as desired. Most other options will be grayed out. Save your new preset using the Save As feature. It will appear in the Custom folder.
That’s it.
Tom

E=MC2+/-2db

[Tom Matthies]

Go back into Preferences and recheck the “Remove Advanced Pulldown” (or something like that. I don’t have FCP open in front of me right now) Make sure that the box is actually checked and try it again.
Tom

E=MC2+/-2db

[Tom Matthies]

The battery charger IS the power supply as well. Hopefully you have the adapter that clips onto the battery port? The other end of that plugs into the charger and will power the camera.
Tom

E=MC2+/-2db

[Tom Matthies]

You may want to just try going into the Motion Tab of a clip and enabling the Motion Blur function. Set the samples to 16 or 32 and run the percent blur down a bit lower than the default. Play with the settings until you get the desired effect. The higher the samples number, the longer it will take to render, but with a bit of tweaking, it can look fairly good and it’s free. It’s one of those features that I hardly every see anyone taking advantage of.
Tom

E=MC2+/-2db

[Tom Matthies]

Open up Liveype. Go under the “Edit” pull down menu at the top of the screen. Go down to Project Properties and pick the size/aspect you need for your project. If you are editing in HD, I generally pick the size that matches my Sequence size and not the Media size.You should not need to resize your title at all. They should all be clean and crisp with the proper settings although the DV codec is pretty rough on the quality of titles.
Tom

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[Tom Matthies]

Yep. For some reason it just doesn’t like the footage that was run through Cinema Tools. It plays fine while editing. Composites to Green Screen very cleanly without interlacing. It just doesn’t want to do a final render. If I play the footage in Quicktime and look at info, it indicates that the files are DVCPro HD, as it should. All looks good just playing them back either in QT or FCP. This is the only time I’ve seen this. Something with the pseudo 1080/24p from the HVX.
Weird…

E=MC2+/-2db

[Tom Matthies]

Depending on the kind of lighting in the area where the shooting took place, the flicker can be better/worse. If the lighting was incandescent (light bulbs) the flicker will be less or not noticeable at all. If the lighting was an arc-type (sodium or mercury) the flicker will be much worse since it will flicker with the frequency of the electrical power in that area. In this case you were shooting at 60 frames/second and the lights were flickering at 50 frames.second.
Tom

E=MC2+/-2db

[Tom Matthies]

Try this.
Open up Log & Transfer. Open up the Preferences window.It’s on the upper right portion of the import window. Make sure that the “Remove Advanced Pulldown and Duplicate Frames” box is checked. Now, try to import your clips. This usually works.
Tom

E=MC2+/-2db