Zak Mussig
Forum Replies Created
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Your post was so long ago that I’m sure you’ve figured something out by now and bogie always gives solid advice, but I had another thought.
You should suggest to your client that they go for a different color or less saturated and/or darker shade of red (not the suggestion), but if they don’t want to listen to your professional opinion they’re paying for then you’re stuck with it.
I would try using some kind of text style to add an outline, glow, drop shadow, or all of the above to soften the edges of your text. Subtly change the color from your text color to something more video friendly. I’m a bag fan of a 1 or 2 pixel outline of a just slightly lighter hue and and blurry contrasting glow with a subtle and blurred drop shadow (try a distance of 0 to use this a s a type of second glow) to set the whole thing apart from the background.
It’s all about the subtlety of the effect… just my $.02
Zak
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You can’t monitor HDV over firewire. If either of your cinema displays are a 23″ aluminum model, then your cheapest route to HD monitoring is with a Matrox MXO. That’s probably still the cheapest even if you have to buy a monitor to use with it. Go with Dell instead of Apple to save a good amount of money.
Beyond that, the other comments about Color and Colorista are all good.
Zak
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I’ve been dropping frames in HDV today on a Mac Pro, so I think the issue may be with Apple’s updates from yesterday. That’s all that’s changed on my system since yesterday when it ran just fine. I also started using Time Machine (only for the system drive), so that could just as easily be the culprit.
Zak
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Use craigslist.org for something like this. If you absolutely want 1 on 1 time with a local FCP editor that’s your best shot.
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Mats,
We downloaded dvMatte Pro from dvGarage, and have been very happy with it. It makes a base matte and a detail matte which it combines within the plugin for a final matte. Light wrap and some basic color correction are also built in. I don’t really have the patience (or the skill) to pull all of my keys in Shake, but this gives me a lot of that control in 1 plugin without needing a BS in Computer Science to understand what I’m doing.
My two cents,
Zak -
Do either of you have anything else installed on our machine besides the OS, FCS, Adobe Apps (video apps don’t work under Leopard right now… PS and Illustrator are fine), DeckLink driver, and maybe some misc. drag ‘n drop software?
My system is a Mac Pro with Leopard, FCS2, with Decklink driver 6.6 and it’s been working like gangbusters. Is it luck of the draw, or are your setups different? Did either of you use the migration assistant to bring over old files and settings after installing Leopard? That killed mine and I had to reinstall Leopard and FCS.
Zak
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Henry,
I haven’t used the new iMac for editing, just playing at the Apple store, but from my experience moving from a dual 2.5 G5 to 3.0 Mac Pro, the Intel Macs are much faster. I imagine the high-end 24″ model would hold up pretty for in a media lab setting. Motion 3 should perform pretty well… going forward with FCS3+, who knows. You may find yourself balancing performance with what you can afford. I’m assuming you’re in a setting where less systems which are more powerful and expandable in the future just sounds like less systems going up the ladder. There wouldn’t be any money to expand them later anyway, would there?
One thing I would look into a bit more are the rumblings of some hardware flaw with the new iMacs which makes systems drop XBOX 360 style. If there isn’t anything to it, I’d say the the aluminum iMac would suit you really well, and you’d be very happy compared to your current systems.
Zak
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Go to the DeckLink preference pane in System Preferences and see if the “Enable Video Desktop” box is checked.
Zak
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Is this FSC 1 or 2? Also, do you have video desktop enabled in system preferences? I’m wondering if your DL card is your “unsupported” video card.
I followed the same process as you (with FCS2) and my system is just peachy, so I’m just trying to eliminate a couple of possibilities.
Zak
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Paul,
I think you will probably be just fine running your FCS2 system on Leopard. From my experience there is, as you suggest, a right way to install. Your new system will be fine out of the box so long as you don’t use the Apple migration assistant to move users and such over from another Mac.
I installed Leopard 3 times before I got a working FCS2 system. Erase and install with a migration killed it, even w/o bringing over apps.
Just run all system updates, install FSC2, and then run all of it’s updates and you’ll be just fine. It’s worth pointing out that I only use Photoshop and Illustrator and no Adobe video apps (which don’t currently work on Leopard. Also, I went through all of these installs with my working Tiger system cloned onto a second drive in my Mac Pro as Jeremy suggested to that I could be working on a stable system with just a reboot.
Hope that helps,
Zak