sibte hassan

I have a macBookPro and i know it doesnt have the P2 slot in there but I on set when I am working, two 4gig p2 cards on 1080i gives you 8 minutes. Once we get the shot and while the next shot is being setup i just connect the camera to the laptop and get everything downloaded at 1 gig per minute speed. If you want it to be a faster way then you can have an assistant with a your laptop and you can rent the card reader and hand him the card when its full so by the time you fill the next one he gives you the empty one. This work flow worked seamlessly on a short where I had 9 shots in 6 hours. Also I jacked up memory in my laptop (1.83 ghz) to 2 gigs. It plays back 1080i DVCproHD smooth as silk.

I agree with Shannon, portable computers are only made to handle upto 800mbit/sec if you are using firewire 800. That translates to 100MB/s whereas the uncompressed HD footage out of HD SDI will be 190MB/s or 270MB/s depending what format 24 or 30p you are using. For this rate you need a fiberchannel card (2gigBit/sec) with raid and now we are talking $$$. Just out of curiousity, have you tried the Panasonic HVX200. The workiflow is great and DvcProHD works perfectly for me, even though its compressed but its 4:2:2 and I have pulled keys and worked perfectly for me, just a suggestion :)

I think one more location shoot would have been better. There are some interesting shots but it gets slightly boring or is it just my ADD kicks in sooner with music videos. I wanted to ask you about the camera, which one did you use and did you only use a the 50mm?

you can do two things if you face the crease problem. 1. expose the green screen with larger and diffused source 2. Keep your iris open, have shallow depth so the background goes out of focus. it will give you a good key.

I am shooting a feature on my HVX200 at 24p. My camera does not shoot 1080p. I imported the footage and played it back and saw significant interlacing. Just out of curiosity I used 'cinema tools' and 'Reverse telecine' to the footage to and applied conform to 23.98. I played it back and now I dont see any interlacing now. My question is how much difference will there be to use this footage to edit rather than 1080i, will it look better on TV eventually or shall I keep it original. Also if this makes the 1080i to 1080p then is this poor mans way to get 1080p?.

Its doable but it will take some steps. First you need to export your film/video as a frame sequence, preferably TIFF. Then open up the first frame photoshop and apply your effect. If you like it then save this process as 'new action' and then 'Automate' this process for the rest of the sequence. Once all the frames are treated and saved then you can import them into any of the editing softwares as a sequence and export it as quicktime.

You can do it in after effects without a problem, only if you are shooting HD put the effect and then downsampling it to SD. the thing is that you will not have the clarity in DoF, you will have distortion. Or try using an expensive convex mirror, just like the one we use to look for the blind spot in traffic, it sits on the sideview mirror. hope this helps

If you post a reference image, i might be able to tell you how you can achieve that effect in After Effects.

Cole, I really like the video, two reasons, the music and the background have the same playful feel to it. The women are gorgeous!! adds tons to the look of the video. Editing is slightly loose which could be a stylistic thing. One suggestion i would like to make is to try to stay away from closeups while being on wide angle. It just simply distorts the pretty faces. The close up of tapping on the steel plate could be lit properly. I can imagine the constraints but one (wide) master shot would have been the cherry on top. Overall its very nice!!!

I just tested this out on my HVX. I shot 720p and played back frame by frame using the remote my camera comes with. I dont have a HD monitor I am sure you can watch this on screen, frame by frame.

720 vs 1080 720 is 960 x 720 with 1.33 pixel aspect ratio which makes it 1280 x 720. On the other hand 1080 is 1920 x 1080, which is 1.5 times larger. This gives you more room to play, easy zoom in and out or cutting to close based on your need.

Jeff, what kind of feedback do you want to get, shooting style, editing, color correction etc?. The more specific you are the better feedback you get.

Kent, DVCProHD at 720 is 5.9MB/s, even 25 seconds is close to 360 MB. You will be lucky to find some footage lying around. But the best would be to ask locally if someone can either shoot some test footage for you, If you happen to be in New York city, I can give you some on a DVD. I havent heard about the serial number of the camera relating to the drivers etc.

I shot a commercial two weeks ago and used greenscreen. www.sibte.com/riaz_web.mov (this is highly compressed). Except for the fact place where the model slaps the object around, I had absolutely no problem keying. There are however few things which I should share with you. Use the waveform and vector scope before and during your shoot. I kept the green close to 90 IRE, I am sure few people will not agree with me but it worked for me. Another thing which was really handy was that due to some technical issues as in not having 5.0.4 on my laptop I took a desktop G4 in the studio and had all the footage record directly on the timeline in FCP. I played all the clips in realtime to see if I had any problems. I shot all the footage at 2.8 aperture keeping the background soft, as its then easy not to see paint marks or any other artifacts. This greenscreen facility is in suburbs of chicago and it was cheaper for me to fly out there and spend the whole day as compared to using it in NYC.

This is what I found http://www.bella-usa.com/Catapult.htm It might be handy knowing a 60GB P2 costs 1800, while this combo 499+300 for the catapult with make it affordable, cant wait to see it

It seems that you can, now the catch is that the hard drive in the laptop should be running at 7200 rpm, which is rare. Or you can have a firewire drive plugged in, i would suggest using a firewire 800 for this. Hope this helps!!!

Another simpler way would be, but it will take toll on the band players, shoot the video on HVX200, set it to 720p @ 48 fps. Shoot the video in one take and then speed up the video 2x to make it 24fps. The band will be performing at normal speed while the people and the background goes crazy. Changing to 48fps, you need to play back the song and make the band perform at twice as long and twice as slow; a small calculation- song length 3:30, the band performs for 7:00 minutes and sings slowwwwwly, At 60fps you will make them go more slow thats 2.5 times slower, 3:30 will be 8:45minutes. You then dont need to rotoscope or any other effect.