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Show all posts by userYour basic troubleshooting and discussion forum for all things about Adobe Premiere Pro CC.
Re: I'm looking for an external HD recommendation for new IMAC - 15 years agoPretty much everybody I know swears by the G-Safe from G-Tech. If you're only doing DV, though, maybe a new Drobo ? the Firewire one ? would be a good choice. I don't know anything about how a Drobo performs. And frankly, since it's so new, I also don't know how reliable one would be over the long term. But it's economical. I'm probably going to get one myself soon to attach to my AirPort Extremeby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: CAMERA AND SOUND - 15 years agoWhat consumers call "Mini DV," old farts tend to call "DV-S." It's an old habit. Sony's Betacam tapes came in S and L sizes; the S size was used in cameras, because it allowed the recorders to be physically smaller and less heavy. The L size was used in tape decks for mastering, because the large tapes could hold a whole hour-long program. DV ? in the generic sense, encompby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Developing a log-and-transfer plugin? - 15 years agoWe've got a copy. It's sitting in its box on a shelf in the graphics department. Nobody's had time, literally, to even install it, much less go through whatever necessary setup it requires. Since this is a public forum I won't go into details, but let's just say our engineering staff is unlike the engineering staffs I've worked with before.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Developing a log-and-transfer plugin? - 15 years agoI'm not in my suite right now so I don't remember exactly how I have it set, but I want to say it does four transcodes at a time. I think I'm I/O bound on that. Fifty hours of DVCPRO50 (which is a fair approximation of ProRes 422 SD) would only be about a terabyte, but still, that's a lot of disk-crunching. And the idea of having two shows at once on my framestore goes right out the window.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Developing a log-and-transfer plugin? - 15 years agoOh, I have no complaints about MPEG Streamclip's performance. But transcoding 20 or 30 minutes from MPEG-4 to ProRes takes a lot less time than transcoding 50 or 60 hours. Y'know?by Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Developing a log-and-transfer plugin? - 15 years agoYeah, Andres, that's definitely an option. Trouble is, a typical show starts with 50 to 70 hours of that archival stuff. Disk space isn't that big a deal ? at SD, ProRes is only about 40 Mbps or so ? but time is. That kind of conversion ain't speedy. Thanks for the suggestion, though.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA Developing a log-and-transfer plugin? - 15 years agoShort version: I wonder what the practicalities are for developing a custom log-and-transfer plugin for a particular tapeless workflow. Does anybody know anything about this? (Graeme, I'm looking at you here.) Longer version: My facility had, before I came along to be their first editor, a tapeless archive system in place that relies on MPEG-4 movies sitting on a server. A typical show will inby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: CAMERA AND SOUND - 15 years agoDVCPRO 50 is not a high-definition format. It's a standard-definition format. If you want to shoot DVCPRO, and you want high-definition, you must use DVCPRO HD.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: best compression settings for the web? Need some advise! - 15 years agoDon't bother sending over a DVCPRO HD file. They won't be able to read it unless they're on a Final Cut Studio system. That's why I suggested a 20 Mbps H.264 instead. High quality, universally accessible.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: best compression settings for the web? Need some advise! - 15 years agoIf the file you're exporting will subsequently be converted again into a Flash video file, then you're going about this wrong. You should not create the smallest file possible out of Final Cut. What you're creating is a mezzanine file, an intermediate file that's going to be used as the source for future encodings. This file should be as big and as faithful to the uncompressed sources as possibleby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Which is better- HDV transcode or re-capture? - 15 years agoBe careful there. When you say "batch recapture and batch transcode," the hair on the back of my neck stands up. When you run HDV through Compressor to turn it into ProRes, the original timecode track is lost. If you subsequently cut that footage into a Final Cut project, you won't be able to recapture it. The only way to make this work is to log-and-capture your HDV footage into oneby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: CAMERA AND SOUND - 15 years ago"Film look" means a lot more than frame rate. Shooting at 24p with a 1/48 shutter is required, but in order to get that cinematic look you'll also need to pay close attention to lighting and depth of field, not to mention color grading in post.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: CAMERA AND SOUND - 15 years agoUnfortunately, those aren't easy questions, Eric. There's no one-true-format any more. Once upon a time, if you wanted to shoot HD you shot on HDCAM and captured uncompressed and that was that. But those days are over. You could, depending on your budget, shoot anything from HDV all the way up to Red. DVCPRO HD will probably be easiest to work with for somebody who doesn't have a ton of experiby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: CAMERA AND SOUND - 15 years agoWe were just talking about this over in another thread: These days it's possible to get some fairly remarkable looks out of really cheap camera gear using just what comes in the Final Cut Studio box. There's a short film out now, "White Red Panic," that's gained a lot of attention for (a) looking really great and (b) being shot on a $600 Canon HV20 consumer HDV camera. If you're willby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Which is better- HDV transcode or re-capture? - 15 years agoOh, one little slightly-off-topic side note: I've done a lot of work with the 24F format shot on the XL H1. You wanna know Canon's dirty little secret? It's this: 24F is just 23.976p with plain old 2:3 pulldown added. The first time I tried shooting tethered, coming out of the HDSDI spigot into my Kona BOB and doing a "capture now" from a non-controllable device, I discovered that myby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Which is better- HDV transcode or re-capture? - 15 years agoHmm. I wouldn't use that signal path myself, Loren. I can understand the rationale behind it ? most HDV cameras lack SDI out so YPrPb is the best anybody could get, and until recently DVCPRO HD was way easier to work with than HDV, and capturing DVCPRO HD in real time is more time-effective than capturing HDV in real time and then transcoding. But ? geez, man. A D-to-A conversion, a downscaleby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Latest versions of OS, QT & FCP OK to use - 15 years agoI'm using all the latest everything ? I upgraded the whole world on a clone of my system disk in a fit of pique between shows ? on a Mac Pro with a Kona LHe, and I don't have any problems. Be aware, though, that I'm only using my Kona board for monitoring. I don't do video I/O through it at this time. (Tapeless shmapeless, give me a reliable old DVW-A500 any day of the week.)by Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Which is better- HDV transcode or re-capture? - 15 years agoLoren, stupid question: Why would you recapture HDV to go to DI? At the risk of repeating myself, once the footage has hit the tape, what you get out of it in the first real-time pass through Firewire is all that will ever be there. Everything after that is data. I guess I basically do a DI on my jobs, or at least on the ones I care about. It's a ghetto DI, admittedly; I use Color to gradeby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Which is better- HDV transcode or re-capture? - 15 years agoOh, right, duh. Sorry, it was really early in the morning. I thought you were talking about capturing from tape via SDI. Once your footage has hit the tape, it'll never get better than what you get over Firewire. But if you're operating on a tether and taking the output from the camera straight into a computer or recorder, it does in fact bypass the HDV encoding bits and gives you uncompressed 4:by Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Which is better- HDV transcode or re-capture? - 15 years agoThat's part of the beauty of it: there is no conform. (Blah blah dumb movie allusion re: spoons.) For those who are following along at home, the last step in editing an HDV timeline is "conforming." It's annoying as hell that Apple uses this term, since "conforming" isn't the same thing as conforming your edit. Compressed video ? and virtually all video is compressed theby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Which is better- HDV transcode or re-capture? - 15 years agoQuoteVery interesting choice! If I had SDI I'd be using that in a heartbeat. What for? HDV is HDV, and it'll never get better than that. Once it's hit the tape, coming out of the camera or deck via the SDI spigot won't make it look any better than coming out over Firewire. QuoteYou didn't mention your hardware-- an Intel octopus? Yeah, it's a relatively modest system for doing HD: An 8-proby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Double canvas or other app - 15 years agoDidn't I hear that Mocha was end-of-lifed? I thought Imagineer made some announcement to that effect back around NAB. Pretty poorly received, as I recall, but I might be misremembering. It IS 3:30 a.m., after all.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Double canvas or other app - 15 years agoDespite how it sounded, Nick wasn't being snippy there. "You Suck at Photoshop" really is a pretty outstanding set of online tutorials. Funny, too. Photoshop is, arguably, the single best program ever created for manipulating pixels. It doesn't have the chromakey features of something like Shake or Flame ? mmm, modular keyer goodness ? but if you're cutting mattes or painting, Photoby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Double canvas or other app - 15 years agoYou don't say much about what you're doing with this footage, exactly, but from your description it sounds like you're rotoscoping. Have you considered using After Effects for this? Oh, wait. You said stills. Heck, have you considered Photoshop? If all you're doing is matte-cutting, Photoshop will probably be easier to use than Final Cut, by far.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Which is better- HDV transcode or re-capture? - 15 years agoI wouldn't do either one of those things, Loren. I work in HDV a lot, and I have a very particular workflow. I won't say it's the RIGHT way, but it works flawlessly for me. I capture all my footage as straight HDV, right off the tape, over Firewire. It's coming in off an XL H1, which has an HDSDI output on it, so if I wanted I could capture through my Kona card as whatever I wanted. But I bby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Tascam FW-1082 with FCS2? - 15 years agoBased in no small part on Shane's endorsement up there, I ordered a Tascam FW-1082 yesterday. It arrived this morning (along with a crapload of other upgrades for my room). I had everything up and running by just after lunch. The 1082 is @#$%&-hot. I'm absolutely in love with it. As part of my how-does-this-thing-work routine I pulled up a Soundtrack project that I'd recently finished, deletedby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Mixed files after send to FCP from Color - 15 years agoWorking with Color and FCP presents the same mine field that we find everywhere else when it comes to all things Final Cut Studio: There's more than one way to do almost everything. My workflow, which has been very solid for me, is to eschew the "send to" commands, and export an XML from Final Cut. I import this into Color, then dive into the Finder to move the automatically-saved Coby Jeff Harrell - Color Re: view timeline after clip has been exported - 15 years agoIf you saved your project file, then sure. Easy as pie. If you didn't, and all you have left is your final Quicktime movie, then no, you're pretty well screwed. It's a shaky analogy at best, but that would be like putting a master tape back in the VTR and capturing it back in as a timeline complete with soft-edits and stuff. Here's an important point that Final Cut newbies ? and I'm not necby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: Compositing questions, layering and specal effects. - 15 years agoI'm with you, Joe, but I'm not happy about it. I really wish Motion were the tool it could be. It's got a lot of potential, but I just can't seem to do anything serious in it without running up against its limits. Luie, compositing systems can be broadly divided into real-time and non-real-time. After Effects is unapologetically a non-real-time system. Sure, on a beefy workstation it's prettyby Jeff Harrell - Café LA Re: OT: anyone have a good wrist brace to recommend? - 15 years agoI learned on a Flame and a Fire, back in the day ? I didn't learn much, at least not quickly, but that's where I started. Using a tablet on those systems is perfectly natural, but I never adjusted to using a tablet on Final Cut Pro or anything else. I think it's got to do with the overall UI design. On Flame and Fire, the UI was built for a tablet, with relatively big buttons all grouped togetheby Jeff Harrell - Café LA |
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