Kei Sugimoto

TK Digital Corporation is seeking DP's in the LA and/or NY area for an upcoming Japanese television commercial and for future reference. If interested, please send us an email at info@tk-digital.com. You can also send your DVD reel to TK Digital Corp 167 North 9th St. Unit 14 Brooklyn, NY 11211 Automotive commercial work is preferred. Thanks. Kei Sugimoto

I was on a production where we shot a shower head at 120fps, expecting to see the water droplets slowly coming out. After seeing the footage we found out that 120 fps was no where near what we needed to get ultra slow motion. If you've got an exploding glass, I definitely think creating the glass in post is the only way to go.

In terms of storage, I think its not that expensive if you also consider "ghetto" drive arrays. You can get a 200gig hard drive for around $150 now (http://www.essencompu.com/nupplysingar.asp?ID=5709) and a 6 drive ATA raid enclosure for $450 (http://shop.store.yahoo.com/extremepcgear/prosx6000pro.html). Put 6 drives together in a raid0 comfiguration and that comes to 1.2 terabytes at $1350. This configuration should easily be able to sustain 20MB/sec. (http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20040426/index.html) There's no technical support on home made options like these but theres nothing that hard about a raid array, and it would be great for people who want to shoot film on really low budget. Add in a decklink uncompressed card for $900 (http://www.blackmagic-design.com/site/decklinkx.htm) And you'd have a full uncompressed component editing system. Thats only if we could telecine to hard drive.

Can anybody tell me about the data recorder that was brought up earlier in this topic? I searched for such equipment on the net but all I could come up with were firewire DV hard disk recorders. Are there any equivalents in the HD world? If so how do they work? Do you just connect the data recorder to your computer, transfer your files (which are already in an NLE compatible format) and just start editing? If so thats really great.

I saw it at the Lincoln Center IMAX theater where it was projected with DLP digital. It was really wierd. The lack of dust and the static rating screen was so still that it looked like a slide. And the ability to see individual pixels made me think I was in front of a gigantic computer monitor. I just wondered if movies were all going to be like this in the future.

I guess I was thinking in much more simple terms. For more ghetto style editing I thought it would be nice to just hook up the component output of the telecine to a computers NLE and just press "Capture" and "Play" at the same time. For short music videos or student projects, timecode isnt such a big deal anyway. Especially if everything is going to be edited online, there will be no need to move between different systems.

Even if the HDDs are not satisfactory for editing, it would be a great way to transport the data. You could just copy the files to your RAID array once you get home. In doing so you would be able to save the cost of tape media and expensive dubb. (But its also notable that there are new Firewire800 raid array enclosures that could be considered portable. http://www.cooldrives.com/so13ideexras.html ) But my real curiosity is, what are all these "prosumer" HD editing cards for if the average indie editor cant afford to have a deck at home? How is he/she gonna get the video in and out of his/her computer? Is HD just a term bounced around as a marketing ploy? (Kind of like "realtime"?)

If you want to do it in Premiere I think you can use one of the video filters in the distort section. The filter will have to be applied to each individual clip, so it would be better to render out the whole thing as one clip and then aply the letterboxing. I use Premiere Pro, forgot exactly how to do it in 6.0. A cleaner way to do it would be to use AfterEffects. Once you export your finished edit from Premiere drop it into a composition in AfterEffects and go to the scale paramater. While leaving the horizontal value at 100, change the vertical value to 75. By the way, if I understand your situation I dont think you should CROP. If you crop, you will just be cutting off the top and bottom parts of your screen without fixing your aspect ration problem. Your subjects will probably look like they are vertically elongated.

Thanks for all the replies. I guess its just the money strapped independent people that think about such short cuts. I was just thinking, in terms of compatibility, if we could just ask the post house to give us files in uncompressed AVI or MOV format. Then we could just convert it into any format that our editing systems wants. It would be a lot of render time, but we could save hundreds of dollars renting an off line/ online suite and paying for each dubb. This would especially be a good option to have for HD as editing systems become more affordable.

With so many new cheap uncompressed cards coming out, I was wondering if uncompressed 4:2:2 editing is possible at home. Since buying a Digibeta deck is out of mind, my question is this. Why can't I just take a few firewire drives to a place like Duart and ask them to telecine directly onto my hard drive? After editing at home, I would just take the hard drive with the edited project to the facility again and ask them to transfer it to a Digibeta tape. My friend says, "although it is technically possible, no post houses would ever allow it because it would put them out of business. If it was possible, everybody would be doing that." Is this really so? If post houses won't transfer to hard drives, then whats the point of all the "prosumer" uncompressed editing systems?

sorry, I posted in the wrong category

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding your question but If you want to letterbox it, just vertically resize your project to 75% in Premiere or AfterEffects.

With so many new cheap uncompressed cards coming out, I was wondering if uncompressed 4:2:2 editing is possible at home. Since buying a Digibeta deck is out of mind, my question is this. Why can't I just take a few firewire drives to a place like Duart and ask them to telecine directly onto my hard drive? After editing at home, I would just take the hard drive with the edited project to the facility again and ask them to transfer it to a Digibeta tape. My friend says, "although it is technically possible, no post houses would ever allow it because it would put them out of business. If it was possible, everybody would be doing that." Is this really so? If post houses won't transfer to hard drives, then whats the point of all the "prosumer" uncompressed editing systems?