how to capture feature film to FCP 5.04 for streaming?

I have a few older feature films shot on 35mm and telecined to 1 inch masters and 3/4 inch Umaitc tape. I want to capture them into FCP 5.04 and replace music and revamp them a little for streaming on my website. I may want to sell a limited number of DVDs as well.

I have a Pinnacle System 110 Movie Box for digitizing. I have digitized one of these movies and now it sits in my G5 as an NTSC DV 48 file. First of all, did I capture it to a correct preset? Could I have squeezed more quality out with some other present?

I will be exporting via DV Kitchen for streaming when I'm done editing. Please give me your insight regarding what I'm trying to do. I was originally thinking of going to a post house and taking my 35mm elements to have them telecined to 10-bit uncompressed; but that might be overkill at this point that I'm only trying to get some visibility for my movies online.

Thank you very much in advance for any help or suggestions you may offer.

(Incidentally, just to share a bit of knowledge with you guys: I was getting a mesh of a pattern on the faces of my characters in the movie. I didn't know what this was until I brought it up to one of my older friends who told me that it was a moiré pattern. He suggested I ground my 3/4 inch machine. I took the power cable and plugged the machine in a wall plug with ground and the moiré pattern disappeared. This had held me up for a few years.)

DV50 beats DV hands down. Use that instead.



www.strypesinpost.com

I just tried it, strypes. It says, "Capture has been aborted ... problem with your tape ... clip has been saved." But only one frame is saved, the first. This is when the Capture preset and Sequence preset are set to DV 50 NTSC.

Can you help. The quality looks much better :-) How can I capture with better quality?

thanks!

YOu can't capture DV50 with that Pinnacle. DV only. For DV50 you need a capture card.

DV is the best you can do. Especially coming off Umatic 3/4" tapes...that's the best you can do.


www.shanerosseditor.com

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Thanks for commenting, Shane. I was going nuts; I put in a few hours fiddling around with capture to no avail.

Ok, so DV is the best I can do with Pinnacle. Now, on to a capture card... which one shall I buy?

I guess I have to buy a capture card because I have several 35mm feature films that I'd like to digitize and revamp in FCP 5.04 and then put them on my site as streaming movies. This way I can promote them until I can figure out how to market all my movies online.

I'm getting involved with new technologies and new projects over the next few months, so I don't want to spend too much time on the older movies because frankly their time is gone; the Internet audience is changing rapidly. I've been reading the CES reports; there are a lot of new technologies coming out, 3D TVs etc. The whole exhibition of movies is changing.

Thanks again, Shane. I hope to see you at an LAFCPUG meeting one of these days.

--vic

Vic, take your footage to a place and have it captured. It'll be cheaper than buying a capture card, and needing the decks to capture. And the people doing the capturing have the experience and technical know how to do it right. You are an artist, leave a lot of the technical stuff to the technicians.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]

Thanks for the advice, Shane. I'm such a one-man-band filmmaker that I still cling to the old days of 35mm filmmaking when I did everything myself. I'm desperately trying to get back into the lab business, for example, when I should really be trying my best to catch up to the digital age. Oh, well...

I understand from your advice that digital is a whole other animal; it's not like 35mm film technology that some of us used to master.

I was fascinated by these I/O boards that one sticks in the computer and they do the magic; but I guess they're okay for amateur work or (not to upset those who know how to use them for specialized work professionally) for quick turn-around of web projects.

I will stop by some of the studios in Burbank and have my masters looked at. I need to get new masters and from what you tell me they will do a far better job than I can do on my own.

Thanks again. --vic

There's nothing wrong with, as the saying goes, owning the means of production. But if you want to spend more time being creative than you have to spend fighting with the equipment, then you have to make certain investments in tools that are known to work reliably and correctly.

If you're going to shop around anyway, it's worth taking your cut neg reels to various local transfer houses, and seeing what kind of deal they'll make you on an unsupervised best-light film scan. Old analog videotape masters are going to look like complete ass when delivered via the Internet, and many transfer houses have special pricing for non-commercial transfers. Home movies and such like. You might be able to get fresh scans of your finished films scanned for not much more than it would cost to didge your old analog videotapes.

Worst case scenario, you waste a little time on the phone. No biggie.

That's a great tip, Jeff. I'm getting on the cell phone in a minute.

for a low-cost capture card, check out Black Magic's Intensity and Intensity Pro.

you'll have to have a close look at the specs, though, as you are still on a G5.

also, coming off those old sources could be problematic, in terms of noise and video artifacts.
there's a very good, and affordable plug in foe FCP from Neat Video that does miracles with noise reduction.

[www.neatvideo.com]
[www.neatvideo.com]

i've been using the $50 "home" version

again check the specs, or write to them, to see if it will work with your set-up.


cheers,
nick

No dice, Nick.

Quote
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/techspecs/
PCI Express 1 lane, compatible with 1,4,8,16 lane PCI Express slots.

He'll be looking at a range of legacy cards, probably on eBay, which is tricker, coz you never know what they're selling. I don't think BMD or AJA still sells cards for the G5.



www.strypesinpost.com

Thanks, Nick. I like Neat Video. I'm going to buy it soon. Sometimes I want to use a clip from VHS tape and this filter will help me beautifully.

Thanks for checking out the other Black Magic Intensity boards. I had looked at them in magazines and wondered about them. You know, at a certain point I'm going to upgrade to the latest FCP program -- I'm not 100% sure on this because of After Effects ....

After Effects works best on a PC -- that is, in all its features. So Adobe Premiere Pro is also something I'm seriously considering in my journey over to the digital world.... Of course, it might be beyond my life span that digital projection will be the norm. Right now, 35mm is still the dominant exhibition format worldwide.

yeah, 35mm is very easy to distribute.
digital files for festivals is becoming more prevalent,
but in my recent experience it's a bit of a quagmire with people on both ends getting confused about what is needed.

an experience i had recently ended with the festival and the film maker just throwing in the towel, and projecting off a DVD.
that documentary was shot on HDV and finished to Prores and HDCam, and believe me, film was not an option.

vc, i'm not quite sure what you hope to get out of after effects. are you?

of course PC gear can be cheaper than Mac.
the documentary i mentioned was about filmmakers in the 3rd world,
and Premier on PCs are the standard for post from what i can tell.
(as is projecting 35m in the cinemas!)


nick

I think anyone who has used FCP would be able to pick up the new Premiere very easily too. I've had to run on it a few times to help people with troubleshooting, and it's almost identical in the way it thinks.

Plus it has a couple of very interesting features like auto transcribing, which I've been requesting for years - it listens to interviews and types them out for you. It's only about 85% accurate at this stage, but, wow, what a time saver it will be once it's fully functional.

> It's only about 85% accurate at this stage, but, wow, what a time saver it will be once it's fully
> functional.

I saw that function at the Adobe presentation at LAFCPUG last year. In my view, with transcription, even 70 per cent accurate would be a huge time saver. Correcting that will be a lot faster than transcribing the whole thing.


www.derekmok.com

>and it's almost identical in the way it thinks.

Yup, coz FCP and Premiere both have one name in common- Randy Ubillos.



www.strypesinpost.com