[Tom Meegan]

I would try dubbing the trouble areas to a fresh tape and see if the problem persists.

Good luck!

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

Do the tapes play back ok straight to monitoring?

If they do not play back properly, the problem is on the tapes. You are out of luck.

If they do play back properly straight to monitoring, then…

If you are capturing to the system drive, try a dedicated media drive.

If that doesn’t work…

Beg or borrow an alternative playback devise, and capture using it.

If that doesn’t work…

Beg or borrow a different fcp system and try a capure using this system

I realize you may not know anyone with another system, if not the next step would be…

Dub the bad sections of tape from one DV deck to another. Then try a capture.

Good luck.

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

Hi Alan,

I believe what Mark is refering to is pulling down just some of the frequencies of the music, and then pushing up those same frequencies in the voice track. When I do this, I find it helpful to figure out what frequencies are strongest in the voice and then work with those frequencies.

Because most voices are in the mid range, this allows the base and treble of the music to be “louder” without interfering with the intelligibility of the voice. Thus, in the case of a sports bumper, the base drum, base guitar, and cymbal hits can really drive the spot without making it impossible to understand.

One other mixing idea I did not see above

[Tom Meegan]

https://www.markertek.com/Product.asp?baseItem=LTM-WAVS-30&cat=VIDEOEQUIP&subcat=&prodClass=WRLESSV&mfg=&search=0&off=

I haven’t used that product, but it might be worth looking into.

Another option is walkie talkies to communicate as your videographer works…

https://www.jr.com/JRProductPage.process?Product_Id=4042404&JRSource=googlebase.datafeed.MOT+SX700R%2F2PK

In truth though, adding this technology for a one camera shoot will likely pull your focus away from the other producer/director duties.

As mentioned above, developing a relationship of trust and communication will likely serve you better on single camera shoots. If you add more than one camera, and intend to switch them live, then monitoring and communications become critical.

Best of luck.

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

I’ve had this problem recently also.

I found it is more likely to occur if I have Motion open, and most likely to occur if LiveType is open.

I’ve been saving my work more as a result, which is a good thing :->

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

Just pitching in to support what Ben said about creating the time lapse in the EVS. I’ve done this many times, and it works very well on same day events. If you need to turn something around very fast, the alternate technique below may help.

Record the afore mentioned “beauty camera” for the hours it takes for the stage to come together directly into the EVS (lock the router panel that feeds this EVS

[Tom Meegan]

My system is similar to Skougor’s, however in much of my work I have to pull a drive to work on another system in another location the next day. For this reason I keep the project and audio folders on my media drive. If I have have to run, everything I need is in one location.

At the end of the session I back up the projects folder to the boot drive in the documents folder.

I increment the project names daily. This has the side benefit of creating distinct folders for each day in the capture scratch folder. I back up my media to a firewire drive nightly, and the distinct folders allow me to keep track of new captures.

Incremented project names also provide me an added layer of protection against corruption. The Auto Save vault is good, but bad things happen to good people.

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

Here is the EVS solution…

https://www.evs.tv/Products/MediaXchange.asp

My opinion is that that you will likely be better off outputting the time lapse from FCP as baseband video into the EVS from the router.

Here are my reasons.

1. MediaXchange requires an xFile be on the EVS network. Not all OBs (or mobile units as we call them here in the states) have an xFile.

2. Baseband video through a router is a tried and true method. Every engineer and most technicians have a good grasp of how to trouble shoot problems with baseband video signal paths. This is not true of MediaXchange transfers.

3. You are doing this once, and if it doesn’t come off you will disappoint a client. If you were going to be doing quicktime to EVS transfers on a weekly basis, the the time spent exploring the MediaXchange possibility would be worth it. For a one time event, my suggestion would be to outfit your FCP system with an appropriate Black Magic Design or AJA card, and send the video through the router to the EVS when the time lapse is complete.

My two cents.

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

I haven’t used the DV-2500, but it should work fine using firewire, based on the reading I did researching your question.

If you are considering a purchase, get a return policy and test when you receive it. If it doesn’t work (after you have confirmed that it is not operator error) return it.

I have had good luck with Sony’s DSR-11, which has a similar feature set and price.

On the DV-2500, the ability to back up a DVX-100 as a recorder is pretty cool, if you own that camera.

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

As mentioned above you will want to look into a program that specializes in compression if you want to chase quality.

Apple’s compressor is a good choice. So is BitVice

https://www.innobits.com/

So is MegaPEG.X

https://www.digigami.com/products.html

and if you go over to the PC side there are even better choices, or so I hear.

Encoding mpeg 2 files with an eye toward quality is truly as much art as science. The folks who do it for hollywood releases use very expensive hard ware, and specialized technicians to do this work. It is a bit of a miracle that the “everything behind closed doors” iDVD does such a good job with most footage.

You can invest a lot of time and money in getting the “best quality.” How far you choose to go to pursue that quality depends on your audience, your client, your budget, and your delivery schedule.

Best,

Tom