Take those black mattes off your web movie for faster download

October 22nd, 2007

Hey,

Do you have Quicktime movie clips on your website that were shot in 16×9? Guess what, you can save 1/3 of your bandwidth by excluding the (4×3) black letterbox from your Quicktime Movie. Just crop into your Quicktime Movie using After Effects, Quicktime Pro, or similar software and recompress your film without the lame black space that does nothing for your movie except choke the download speed and use up valuable hard drive space. Not only that, but a 16×9 movie looks so much more professional when it is at the right shape and doesn’t have the black bars junking up the composition. And if you think that looks cool, do the same thing with your 1.85 or Panavision Quicktime movies. Welcome to Hollywood, baby!

kirk

Posted in 16x9, Letterbox, Quicktime Movie | Comments Off on Take those black mattes off your web movie for faster download

Dang! You can’t find the “A” frame! Use the MAGIC 9 TRICK!

October 22nd, 2007

If you don’t know what the “A” frame is, then skip this post because it is way too esoteric.
However, if you’re an editor and trying desperately to digitize an HD tape or film transfer that has been down-converted to a digibeta, there are a couple ways to find the A-frame:

1) Digitize the footage with a particular starting timecode. Then check to see if the material looks wonky in the editing system (like an Avid). If it looks wonky, start your TC In Point one frame later and try again. Do this about 6 times and you will find the A frame.

2) Or, use the magic 9 trick. Start with any tc number you want as long as the non-drop frame TC ends in “09.” So like 01:00:12:09 would be a perfect place to start your digitizing. You will ALWAYS hit the A frame everytime. Why is that? I always stunk at math, but I just know it works like a charm.

Posted in A-Frame | Comments Off on Dang! You can’t find the “A” frame! Use the MAGIC 9 TRICK!

Trouble-shooting 101 – Break this mutha down!

October 8th, 2007

This post may seem really lame or rudimentary, but I gotta tell ya… some people just don’t know how to trouble-shoot. Over my years in post production I’ve seen so many editors and other crafts people who can’t seem to trouble-shoot even the most basic problems.

When computer tech support facilities get a call from a consumer having a computer, the first question the tech wants to know is: “Is your computer plugged in?”

Some people are insulted by this elementary question, but 20 percent of the time, that is the ACTUAL problem!! Can you believe it?

But it’s a great illustration of how so many people don’t do even the most basic trouble-shooting.

So whether you are having computer problems, video equipment issues, or whatever, here are the big questions to ask in order to locate the trouble:

1) Has the unit ever worked before?
2) Does the unit function as a result of some other process?
3) Is that “other process” functioning?
4) If the unit is swapped out, does the replacement unit work?

Okay, now let’s take this into a practical situation.

The lamp in my living room doesn’t seem to work. Time to trouble-shoot it.

1) Has this lamp ever worked before? YES

2) Is there another lamp that is currently working and available to swap it out for a test? YES

3) When the lamp is swapped out, does the replacement work? NO

4) Ah ha! This tells us the outlet is dead, right? MAYBE

6) Are there any wall switches associate with this outlet? YES

7) When you flip the switch(s), does the replacement light work in the “bad” outlet? NO

8) Hmm. Must be the circuit breaker. Has the cicuit breaker been tripped? YES

9) After re-setting the circuit breaker, does the replacement light work? YES

10) Cool, now we’re getting somewhere! Now we swap back to the “bad” lamp. Does it work in that outlet now? NO

11) Okay, now we know either the lightbulb is dead or the lamp is broken. So when we switch the lightbulb over to the working lamp, does it light up? YES

12) Bingo! The original lamp must be broken. When we put the good lightbulb in the bad lamp, does it light up? YES

13) Yes?? What the heck is going on here? Both bulbs work in both lamps.

CONCLUSION… The original bulb wasn’t screwed in all the way. Good thing you didn’t throw that bulb or lamp in the trash! Good thing you didn’t call an electrician either!

kirk

Posted in Trouble-Shooting, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Trouble-shooting 101 – Break this mutha down!

Your feature film won’t fit on a BetaSP. Sorry. Really, it won’t.

October 4th, 2007

We get a lot of calls from filmmakers wanting to submit their film to a tv station or film festival on BetaSP. This work-horse professional tape format is also known as Betacam SP. It’s the analogue little brother to DigiBeta.

Unfortunately, BetaSP has a maximum running time of 90 minutes. Maybe 92 if the tape has been over-spooled at the factory. But basically, most feature films won’t fit on a single BetaSP videocassette.

The solutions to the problem can be…

1) See if you can deliver on another, longer-running, more expensive tape format such as digibeta or DVCAM.

2) Split your show into two reels (old school though it may sound) and have the tv engineer or the festival projectionist tie them together. Sometimes this is done live, and so you will need to provide the exact timecode of the change-over. The projectionist will probably have two decks and slave the timecodes together for a seamless transistion. The tv station engineer will probably dump the movie to a hard drive and tie the two reels together electronically.

3) See if they’ll allow you to send a hard drive with a GIANT quicktime movie on it.

4) Make a shorter film. Trust me, I’m a professional editor and I can take a three hour movie and make it rock at 90 mins. So you can certainly cut down your 102 minute film to 90 mins. Just take the best, most killer stuff and leave the rest on the cutting room floor. You’d be amazed how little you miss that extra footage!

And by the way, not to just rant here, but I can’t stand when directors make a movie longer than 2 hours. C’mon people! It ain’t that precious. Audiences lose patience and have a limited attention span. Plus, the babysitter costs a hell of a lot more. Oh, and the parking, too. Why is it that cinematic films have always been shorter than 2 1/2 hours? “Wizard of Oz” is 101 minutes. “Citizen Kane” is 119 minutes. “Star Wars” is 121 minutes. “Jaws”, 124. So what changed everything in the 1990’s? For crying out loud, some people gotta pee.

Posted in BetaSP, Running Time | Comments Off on Your feature film won’t fit on a BetaSP. Sorry. Really, it won’t.

Home video Mini DVD camcorders – 10 reasons why they’re a very bad choice!

October 1st, 2007

Clever gadgets are fun to play with but not to record your important family events. In fact, just don’t use them. Seriously.

These are the type of cameras we’re talking about here:

Sony DCM-M1, Sony Handycam DCR-DVD108 DVD, Samsung SC-DC164, Canon DC-100, Canon DC-20, etc.

The problem with mini DVD camcorders:

1) The DVDs are very incompatible with many computer DVD trays.
2) A simple scratch when handling the disc and your memories are hosed forever. Look out, it’s a toddler with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!!
3) They usually only hold a miniscule 10 minutes of recording time at best quality! Ten minutes!!
4) Once finalized, the discs are done for. You can’t re-record over them like you can standard videotape.
5) The discs are expensive.
6) Special “ripping” software is usually required to edit the material on the discs.
7) There is substantial compression used on the image. If you try to project it for an audience on a big screen or do any kind of video compositing, the footage is going to have tons of really unpleasing artifacts.
8) They are really hard to clone for friends and relatives due to the compatibility issues.
9) People try to stick them in sideloading CD slots on computers it jams in there, resulting in repair fees and/or downtime.
10) Watch out for that toddler with the peanut butter sandwich… Oh my God!! he’s grabbing the disc off the table.

Yeah, this format wasn’t the greatest idea of gadgets. Please copy your material ASAP to a different format and dump that camcorder as fast as you can.

By the way, a good way to copy the disc to a better format is to use the factory-provided wire and connect it to a MiniDV camcorder or a standard DVD recorder.

kirk

Posted in Camcorders, Mini DVD | Comments Off on Home video Mini DVD camcorders – 10 reasons why they’re a very bad choice!

Transferring professional tapes for editing? Go to MiniDV tape, NOT DVD!

September 26th, 2007

A great number of our clients want to edit at home or the office but their origina masters are on a professional videotape format such as BetaSp, Digital Betacam, 1″, 3/4″, or DVCAM. The clients usually request that we (www.betasptodvd.com) transfer their masters to DVD for later importing and editing in Final Cut Pro, Avid, Vegas, or Premiere.

Don’t transfer to DVD for editing!! There is far too much video compression. Not only that, but the material has to be “ripped” off the DVD prior to being editable. This ripping, especially on longer videos, can have a sync drift between the audio and video. There are also other artifacts that can pop up depending on the method of ripping used.

Additionally, a DVD makes a terrible archive for this purpose. We can assume that the original professional tape format of the master is fading out of its technicalogical lifespan. While it’s a good idea to archive them, DVDs are not a great format for archiving of professional material. DVDs are suseptable to scratches, warping, and being technologically outdated over time.

We always suggeset transferring to MiniDV tape standard defition editing and archiving. MiniDV tape is very robust as a format. Many people consider the image to be of poor quality these days, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. MiniDV looks pretty bad when shot is someone’s camcorder with poor lighting and a cheap lens. But when you transfer to MiniDV directly from a professional source, MiniDV looks absolutely phenominal. That’s because it is all digital and encoded in good old 1’s and 0’s. we have done blind testing where we show people MiniDV footage and Digibeta footage and nobody can discern the difference. They can’t tell which was played back from which!

The MiniDV tapes are very small, easy to store, and deliver a crisp and vivid image.

It’s such a great format that HDV (the first format for consumer high defintion video) is based on the MiniDV tape.

IMPORT USING A CAMCORDER AND FIREWIRE OR A BASIC DV CABLE!

The tapes import for editing with any standard MiniDV camcorder using the firewire or DV cable that comes with the camera.

Plus, the MiniDV camcorder is the most ubiquitious camcorder ever made. It’s everywhere. So if you don’t have one, call up your neighbor and ask to borrow the camcorder so you can digitize your footage into your editing system. It’s really easy!

Posted in Digitizing, Editing, For Editing, MiniDV, Ripping | Comments Off on Transferring professional tapes for editing? Go to MiniDV tape, NOT DVD!

How does Hollywood fit 3 hours on a DVD when I can only fit 1 hour at the same quality?

September 24th, 2007

Here’s the deal…

The discs you rent from NetFlix or BlockBuster are recorded on a DVD that holds 9 gigs on two layers. A DVD-R that you record on your computer at home is about half the size and usually only records on one layer. Many computer burners can burn dual-layer these days, but the discs are much more sensitive to scratches and dirt than commercially produced DVDs. That’s because the commercial DVDs are pressed from a glass master and literally stamp the image into the DVD instead of trying to “burn” it. In addtion, “Hollywood” discs are burned from the absolute very best possible master and all the compression is done by really experienced professionals.

Dual Layer DVDs that you make at home are also not very compatible with the various consumer DVD players that are out there. Most times it costs about $1000 minimum to create a glass master of a DVD. Sorry, but you just gotta compress your video a lot more in order to fit it on one disc and expect broad compatibility.

Kirk

Posted in DVD, DVD-R | Comments Off on How does Hollywood fit 3 hours on a DVD when I can only fit 1 hour at the same quality?

Look out Hollywood, it’s a kid with a $99 still camera making high-def movies!

September 21st, 2007

That’s right. If you’re a kid with a $99 still camera (or a grown-up who’s damn creative), you can make movies that compete with Hollywood!
It’s not just a still camera any more. It’s a frame by frame high definition movie camera.

Take your dad’s high-def still camera and a lot of brain power and go out there and make a feature film. All you gotta do is have a killer story that is really engaging and a lot of imagination and shoot your film one frame at a time. Make sure that the resolution is never less than 1920×1080 pixels and you have high def. Just make sure that throughout the process, no matter what software you use, that you never blow up your image. It’s okay to crop down to 1920×1080 pixels if you shot bigger than that, but just don’t crop into the 1920×1080.

It’s awesome for post production effects and color correction because the resolution is so high.

The film can be pixelization, creative story-telling, claymation, stop-motion, or whatever you can dream up. It would really lend itself well to the horror genre too.

Okay, so maybe this technique is not just for kids, but it does take someone equally free-thinking!

Posted in Animation, Cameras-Still | Comments Off on Look out Hollywood, it’s a kid with a $99 still camera making high-def movies!

Aspect Ratio – Please don’t squeeze me, baby!

September 20th, 2007

The whole aspect ratio thing is way too big to tackle in a single post here, so let me break it down for you to give you (almost) all you need to know.

There are different screen shapes like 1.78 (16×9), 1.33 (4×3 – also called “academy”), 1.85 (the shape of normal theatrical movies), 2.35 (the shape of Panavision movies), and on and on. In fact, when Edison invented motion picture film, he experimented with all kinds of different shapes to see which was the most useful and pleasing. Other folks even toyed with round screens. Whatever.

The there are square pixels and non-square pixels, each of which affects the image presentation shape.

Chicks hate it if they were shot in 1.33 and squeezed down to 1.78. They hate it because it makes them look fat. This is a common site at sports bars when their monitors are high def 16×9 and then the commercials are in 4×3.

Chicks love it when they were shot in high def 16×9 and squeezed into the 4×3 shape; they look tall and skinny like the supermodels they are inside.

So rather than give you all the ways to solve these issues here’s the tip for always getting it right:

1) In photoshop (or using a scanner and construction paper) Make a perfect circle the that is the same height as the original image footage.

2) Do whatever process you intend to do with the real footage, whether it’s converting it, exporting it, burning it to DVD, making a dub or whatever.

3) Check to make sure that the finished test circle after your processing looks exactly like a perfect circle. If it looks like an EGG, then you messed up somewhere. Go play with the settings until you get a perfect circle.

4) Forget reading endless blogs and wikipedia about all the things that could be causing the problem. Just test it a couple times with different settings and behold… A BEAUTIFUL CIRCLE. Kiss it.

Posted in Aspect Ratio, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Aspect Ratio – Please don’t squeeze me, baby!

Hi8 and Digital-8, the greatest video format to every exist… for about a year.

September 17th, 2007

Remember back to the days when the “I Love Lucy” was in its first run and we were all so excited about the brave new video format Hi-8? Well, maybe it wasn’t way back in the Lucy days, but it was an exciting format and great buzzword at video cocktail parties. Yeah, it had the word “Hi” in it so it must be some AMAZING quality and resolution. Cut to today, some 15 years later, and Hi-8 really looks like crap when compared to modern video formats.

Anyway, if you ended up shooting all of your home movies on that tape, or worse yet… recording a professional project on that tape, then you need to back it up right away! Because the tape itself is quite thin and delicate, the cameras and decks had a history of eating tapes. It’s even worse these days since the cameras are so old and deteriorating. They love to eat tapes.

Shortly after Hi-8 was invented, we dove headlong into the digital age!! Hi-8 was only on the market a couple of years before it was eaten alive by its offspring, Digital 8 (sometimes called Digital High 8).

Digital 8 delivered so much more quality and it was actually DIGITAL! This paved the way for the world famous MiniDV format which quickly overtook Digital 8 like jet airplanes did to propeller planes. There was no turning back.

Here’s the rub, now it’s all these years later and your original camcorder, which busted five years ago, was unceremoniously pitched out. You have all these tapes in a shoe box but don’t know if they are Hi-8 or Digital-8. So you don’t know which camera to buy on ebay in order to transfer the footage to a contemporary format.

Since the tapes look identical, here’s a couple hints to help you:

1) Hi-8 tapes will NEVER have the word “digital” written on the cassette labeling.
2) If the tape labeling says, for “Hi-8 or digital recording”, trust me, it’s going to be a digital signal on that tape. Nobody would every consider spending the extra dough on a digitally capable tape unless they meant to use it for digital.
3) Hi-8 will play on a Digital 8 camcorder, but Digital 8 will not play on a Hi-8 camcorder. So go with buying the Digital 8 camcorder and then you’re covered both ways.

And one last thought… If you see video “snow” on your tapes, do NOT throw them in the trash thinking all your memories are lost forever. You are most likely looking at a DIGITAL-8 tape on a Hi-8 Machine the you purchased by mistake.

kirk

Posted in Digital 8, Hi-8 | Comments Off on Hi8 and Digital-8, the greatest video format to every exist… for about a year.

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »