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Results 2851 - 2880 of 2892
Zap your PRAM. Quick!
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
I do something similar, Casey. I've got about a 400 GB disk that I use for Mac OS X on my Mac Pro. I've got it partitioned in half (using Disk Utility). I installed Leopard on one half, installed Final Cut Studio and After Effects and whatnot, got them all updated and set up just how I like them. Then I used a little program called Super Duper to clone my whole system over to the other partition.
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
Shane, is there any virtue to getting a Kona 3 even if he doesn't need uncompressed I/O, for the real-time acceleration features Aja touts?
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
It'll look like 30p; that is, it'll look really cheap. The 1/48 shutter is a really distinctive look, and that's what people are used to seeing from big-budget productions. If you compare 24 fps with a 1/48 shutter to 30 fps with a 1/60 shutter, people will be able to see the difference. They might not be able to tell you exactly what's different, but they'll see it. And to them, it'll look more
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
If I remember correctly ? somebody please call me on this if I'm mistaken ? DVDs only support two frame rates: 29.97 interlaced, or 23.976 progressive. DVDs have no support for 29.97 progressive. If you feed a 29.97 progressive source movie to a DVD encoder like Compressor, it'll almost certainly play back the movie as if it had been interlaced. Which can result in motion artifacts on playback.
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
Just to clarify something Shane said, you actually can mix frame rates in the same timeline, with Final Cut 6. It's just that you might not like the results unless you mix them in just the right way. Even then, you still might not like the results.
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
Quote What I am trying to do is to create the largest possible file size up to 100 MB.
I think what you're really trying to do is create the best-looking file under 100 MB. The H.264 encoder won't just keep throwing bits at a video. If the data-rate ceiling you dial in is greater than the data rate the encoder decides it needs, then the file will be smaller than expected.
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
The H.264 encoder considers a manually dialed-in bit rate to be a ceiling not a fixed bit rate to which to encode. I have a Compressor preset that I use occasionally when I have to deliver an intermediate to somebody else to be encoded into a wacky format like Flash or WMV; that preset includes a data-rate ceiling of 20 Mbps. But the resulting files are almost never 20 Mbps, even for 1080p source
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
The pixels aren't square. TV deals with horizontal and vertical resolution totally separately, and before digital had no real concept of pixels at all. If you break an NTSC image up into pixels and measure them, you'll discover they're actually 0.88 times as wide as they are tall. So when you draw them all out, you end up with an image that has a 4:3 aspect ratio overall.
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
Not to be all Disagreey McDisagreeable here, but the wear and tear on a hard drive by spinning it up and down is far greater than the wear and tear of constant use. And modern Macs are so energy-efficient that the power consumed by a Mac Pro at idle is around 150 watts (bit more if you've got PCI cards or what have you), or comparable to a couple-three light bulbs. A fridge, by way of comparison,
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
Shelly, you'll get about a zillion responses to this (whether actually typed out or just recited mentally) that say the exact opposite, but my answer is that your Mac requires no preventative maintenance whatsoever.
Now, there's a caveat: You shouldn't turn off your Mac at night. As you almost certainly know, your Mac is configured by Apple to run certain tasks in the middle of the night and w
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
No, Tim, that's not me. Must be another guy.
Andy, I have heard stories of Apple system updates creating problems that could be solved by running "Repair permissions." But I've never actually witnessed it myself. It's possible the stories are true. But it's also possible that they're just urban legends propagated by the same people who think "Repair permissions" is more tha
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
Your work environment is the reason SANs were invented.
Consider Xsan. It's reasonably priced and cross-platform. Probably the biggest expense will be the fibre runs to your suites, but the increased productivity will pay for that quickly.
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
Just get the whole thing scanned on a Spirit to 4K DPX.
(I kid, I kid.)
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
Thanks for the feedback, everybody. I'm taking it all to heart.
by Jeff Harrell
- Show and Tell
That's a tricky one. There's something to be said for, if you're going to have it done anyway, going ahead and getting a quality HD transfer. That way you can put it on the shelf and go back to it in the future without having to run the film through a telecine a second time. I'm not a film guy particularly, but I do know that running old film through a telecine introduces the chance that some dam
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
I'm not sure where you got the idea that ProRes isn't good enough for broadcast. Both ProRes and the high-bit-rate DNxHD codecs are absolutely production quality. Heck, features have been shot on 10-bit HD and finished in both ProRes and DNxHD.
"Uncompressed" video is kind of a confusing subject anyway. In standard-definition world, D-5 is really uncompressed, but Digital Betacam isn
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
A SAN is something different. For all intents and purposes, hooking up to a SAN is just like plugging in a direct-attached fibre channel storage device, only you brought all your friends to the party with you. It's slightly more complicated than that ? a SAN needs a thing called a metadata arbiter that makes sure, for example, that no two computers try to write to the same block of data at the sa
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
Well, that's kind of the thing, Scott. In this particular case, the conventional troubleshooting wisdom is pure bunk.
The concept of "Repair permissions" didn't even exist until one of the dot-updates to Mac OS X 10.1. In those days, Macs could still boot Mac OS 9, and Mac OS 9 had absolutely no concept of POSIX file permissions. Booting a Mac OS X system in Mac OS 9 was a great way
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
Maybe I'm way off the mark here, but those look like something other than video cameras to me. I can't tell exactly what they are from look at Web pages, but I don't see anything about video standards. It seems to be more like a ? computer thing.
Is there some specific reason why you'd saddle yourself with such a non-standard recording system? I'm sure there are advantages; I just have no idea
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
DV movies are only 25 Mbps. They're really incredibly small, as these things go. Sure, with H.264 you might be able to squeeze them down to 6 or 8 Mbps with no egregiously obvious loss of quality. Depending on what kind of footage you're dealing with ? talking heads versus sports, etc. ? you might be able to go lower than that while keeping it acceptable.
But seriously, 25 Mbps is nothing in
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
Sorry to disagree, Scott, but that's not entirely correct.
Any time you install anything on Mac OS X using the Installer program, the software writes a little file called a "receipt" to a special folder on your system disk. Among other things, the receipt records what all the permissions were supposed to be for all the files installed. "Repair permissions" simply compares t
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
In my opinion, both of these sources are wrong.
A "safe boot" disables kernel extensions. It does other things too, depending on what version of Mac OS X you're talking about. But its real reason for existing is to let you disable kernel extensions, including ones that might be attempting to access malfunctioning hardware.
As such, doing a "safe boot" really has nothing
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
I use ProRes extensively, and in some pretty wacky ways. Last week I had to do some SD-to-HD blow-ups, on a timeline that prevented sending them out to be done in hardware. I ran them through Compressor using ProRes as my destination codec ? but at 1920x1440, so I could crop them in After Effects. Worked great. Turned out to be around 180 Mbps.
The only complaint I have is the aforementioned o
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
So a few weeks ago, a friend of mine made a drunken bar bet and ended up having to audition for TV's "The Bachelor." The screening process apparently involves sending in a video audition, and from among the piles and piles of video auditions offers of in-person auditions go out.
Because I had access to a camera, she asked me to shoot her audition video for her. Because I know an oppo
by Jeff Harrell
- Show and Tell
It is indeed, but it's on at the same time as "Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins." Decisions, decisions.
by Jeff Harrell
- Show and Tell
I'm running 10.5.3 with all the latest OS and Final Cut Studio updates. I was between shows, so on a lark I decided to try updating everything just to see what happened, and it turned out fine. Been running that way for about a week now, no complaints yet.
Mac Pro, 10.5.3, QuickTime 7.5, After Effects 8.0.2, FCP 6.0.3, Shake 4.10, Soundtrack Pro 2.0.2, Motion 3.0.2, Color 1.0.2, DVD Studio Pro
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
I hope this isn't out of bounds for this forum. I was wondering if y'all have any favorite sources for HD stock footage. Right now I'm looking for something specific ? a close-up shot of a mixing console or piece of audio equipment or something suitable for use as the background during one of those "9-1-1 tape" sequences ? but I'm in the market for a good supplier for the future as we
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
Probably not, if what you're trying to license is a work-for-hire. If the music we're talking about was composed as part of an original score, then it was almost certainly a work-for-hire, and the exclusive rights are owned by whomever holds the rights to the work the score was a part of. If that makes sense.
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
At the risk of contributing to the this-is-not-the-placeness, I can tell you that the hardest part of licensing music is determining who owns it. Do you want to use a piece of an original motion-picture score, or just a song that happened to appear on a movie soundtrack? In the first case, the score is almost certainly owned by the copyright holder of the film (check the tiny print at the end of
by Jeff Harrell
- Café LA
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