jerronimo, posts by tag: editing - LiveJournal

Threw this together last night in around 3 hours or so. I'm really getting pretty good of getting a visual in my mind, then being able to generate it with Final Cut. In both layout/timing as well as colors/contrast/feel...

If i were to re-do this, it would probably be completely different, although I'd keep the green/blue/red color themes... although perhpas swap green/red... i dunno. I also didn't use the "wheelchair on fire" clip, but it didn't seem to fit with the feel of what I created here...

comments, creative criticisms, thoughts are always welcome. (both here and on the youtube entry for this song/edit.)

Well, that didn't work out. I probably could have gotten it eventually, but I instead decided to use stories instead.

Rather than lots of "Tracks" with scripts to tie them together or not, I have one big long track with lots of "Stories" that use segments of the Track.

Probably more compatible to do this anyway.

I'll persue the scripting more later. At least now I know how to do the trick that professional DVDs do where they have a submenu where you can select a different audio track.

I'm attempting to figure out how to script in Final Cut Studio... fun!

It's a little confusing, but I think i'm starting to get it... kinda.

It's like coding in a very restrictive ASM with an IDE. Weird.

This is why we burn test DVDs.

I just burned a test DVD of most of the sequences for MVP2 (the 48 minute long sequence didn't complete overnight... the 6 3-5 minute long sequences didn't complete overnight either...)

Some problems I found on this test burn:

I forgot to add chapters at the end of one of the sequences. This is a little trick that Curt showed me. It's what all of the studios do so that when you're sitting there, watching your movie, and you want to skip to the end, you can just keep hitting the "foward chapter" button and it will eventually finish.

(As a sidenote; always set up your chapters in Final Cut, so that you get more precise timing on them... select a point in the timeline, and hit 'm' to create a "mark", then mash 'm' again, and it brings up a dainty little window where you can click on the "make this a chapter mark. word" button. Snoogins.)

Anyway...

I also forgot to put chapters in one sequence altogether. oops. And one of the sequences had a scrap clip at the end, bringing it from 3 minutes to 12 minutes. oops.

I was also overcompensating for color correcting and brightening up of the footage. When it goes all zebra stripey, that's not "it will look good" it means "it will look super bright and washed out, you idiot." And just throwing the "broadcast safe" filter on there is not a good solution.

So I went through each sequence and did what I probably should have done the first time; made sure that they all had appropriate chapter stops, appropriate luma and chroma levels to make it look good. I re-export it tonight, and hopefully have what I need for a final version.

I think that the parties involved, as well as third parties will like what i've done with it all. :D

Whoo! I think I just finished the 7th of all 7 segments of "Mystery Video Project Number 2" Whoooo!

I've gotta make up the DVD menus, and burn a test dvd to play out, and see how it came out. Then I get to give it to the mystery gift recievers!

:D

Last night, I managed to finish a second segment for Mystery Video Project #2.

I'm really happy with the way it came out. I need to make a minor audio tweak, but it's otherwise completed. I wasn't really sure what direction I was going to go with it, but once I got the footage I needed from Chris, the direction to go just seemed to be obvious. :D

It's nice when it works out like that.

I think i have 2-3 more segments to complete on this project. :D

I also figured out the best way to take footage directly from a DVD and use it in Final Cut, without having to use my non-macrovision DVD player, record to tape, then import the tape. Whoo. It does take up a lot of space to do it though, a 6 minute segment was something like 600mb. heh. It'll work well for short segments anyway. Which means I can use this for Mystery Video Project #3, when I start to work on that.

So, i was trying to find a good power brick for my 2.5" USB drive (with a 20gb found drive inside it) since it actually worked for video capture, and apparently the power circuit in the external drive case is shite, and it let too high current go to the drive.

now, all the drive does is make click noises.

I even captured the entire source tape yesterday onto it for Mystery Film Project #2.

I dropped that disk into an old powerbook just to make sure it's the drive and not the tiny circuitry board, and it was the drive. 20gb bye!

Figures. Once I found a working solution (with my only spare 2.5" disk) it would crap the bed on me.

I guess maybe I'm just not supposed to work on film projects with this computer.

I do have a spare G4 Tower. I can always put Final Cut 4 on that, but that's cumbersome as hell. To have to switch back and forth between computers just to capture is a pain in the ass.

The other solution (and probably what I should do) is to clear off, or reinstall the laptop from scratch. This thing does have a 100gb disk in it. I can probably be sure to always have like 30 gb free on it for film projects.

I just tried a test.

I forogt that I had a USB 2.0 2.5" tiny external drive, so I hooked that up and tried capturing on the original system (10.4.8/5.0.4) from the problematic dv tape to it.

and it worked.

So... apparently this machine has a problem saving out data to hard disks on the same firewire bus as the camcorder. It might be firewire controller or disk in the disk enclosure - both are different than what i've used before.

I did notice major issues with similar things a couple of years back when I was trying out a firewire hub... nothing could keep up with anything.

So... the next two things to try:

• FireWire 800-400 cable for the disk drives - put the disks on that firewire chain, and the camera on its own. ($20?)
• USB 2.0 enclosures for my 3.5" drives ($25?)

This is starting to look good.

i forgot to post after last night's fiasco.

I got the 100gb disk hooked up, and after messing with the 10.3 cds for a while, i came to realize that this mac has only ever had 10.4 on it. So i installed 10.4

First time, i let it update everything, not including the os level. i kept it at 10.4.0, but wasn't thinking and let quicktime go to 7.1.whatever the current is. I installed all of the apps, and it had the same capture problem (stutters/fails)

Next, I tried for a while to back-out the quicktime to 7.0, but that didn't work, so i re-installed over it. Got it back to a desktop to find that it didn't reinstall quicktime, since a newer version was there.

So i completely wiped the disk and started over. OS X 10.0, Quicktime 7.0, Final Cut 5.0.4, and it stil stutters/fails.

The only thing i can think of left is to reinstall the CD/DVD versions of Final Cut (5.0) or go through the transgrade to 5.1.

after thinking about things, i'm not sure that i've ever done any capture with this laptop. All of the projects I've worked on were captured on rob's dual G5. I think I might have edited "5 Corners" with it, but I think I stored the files on the internal hard disk...

So... possible things to try from here:

• reinstall Final Cut Studio from disc (and do not upgrade)
• clean the tape heads - somehow they might be just dirty enough?
• hook the camera up on its own firewire chain (use internal for capture)
• capture using a different machine (last resort)
• get the G4 tower set up with final cut 4, and capture there, and bring the projects over to the powerbook?

I did manage to complete "Mystery Film Project #1", which wasn't too much work. I captured using iDVD, then imported the .dv files into Final Cut. I did the very minor edits needed for it, generated the DVD in DVD Studio Pro, and burned a couple of discs

"Mystery Film Project #2" is a lot more work, and I'll get to that shortly.

FYI roughly 10gb per hour of SDTV .DV footage.

I've got a couple of things to try out, but I think I've got a solution.

One of the things I noticed about Curt's setup, is that he runs an ancient version of Final Cut (2?) running on an ancient version of MacOS (9.2?).

I was thinking that the last time FCP worked well on my system was about a year ago. I'd love to re-install my system to 10.3, and get it running again, but I need/want some of the 10.4 features on this machine, as it's my "daily driver" as it were.

Then I was thinking, perhaps i should wipe the (cluttered) disk, and start over from scratch, perhaps dual-boot it 10.3/10.4 on two partitions...

And then the optimal solution hit me.

I've got a spare largeish disk. I'll plug that into the lappy, install 10.3 and the final cut suite on it, and be done with it.

When I want to do editing, i boot with that (known working) final cut setup, and I never have to worry about upgrades or anything like that. Huzzah!

I started the PC copying all of the files off of that drive while I'm at work. My only issue is that it's a noisy disk. Perhaps I should buy some small sheets of dynamat or somesuch to quiet it down...