Working with efx offline and online
by Lili Lab
on
Sep 30, 2006 at 4:57:17 pm
Dear All,
hi, I have several people that I am working with who need to be able to do offline efx (complex compositing and animating) at home, with their offline format, and reintroduce it in an online room. We are mastering to HDCAM Blackmagic 8 bit here.
So this is what I've encountered as 2 questions:
1. Original footage HDV >>> want to add layers. composite, efx and master to HDCAM - Editing at home in HDV, want to output with 4:2:2: color space on HDCAM.
How is the best way for him to edit so he can output to HDCAM here? I dont' want him to work in native HDV, cause the color space for compositing and efx is not so good - apparently even DV looks better!
Therefore, should I have him
a) render everything out to HDCAM from the HDV timeline?
b) export all raw footage to HDCAM and add the efx in the HDCAM timeline?
I would probably expect B) would be better, but the problem is, his system won't let him playback HDCAM at home w/o a 2.5 terabyte raid. he only has a 250 gig drive. I've thought about asking him to work in HDCAM 1920 X 1080 (photo jpeg compression), but don't know if that will work either. Whatever the case, he's going to have to render all his HDV material out to HDCAM, on his old G4, which will choke the machine. So I think I'm stuck. What should I do?
2.Other efx person, Original footage HDCAM >>> want to offline at home and do online later in HDCAM
She will be editing at home, and can't playback HDCAM either, so what's a lower version that she should work in without haveing conflicts of scaling and aspect ratio. I thought that DVCPro is good or even HDV or DV, but when you take the clips and copy it into a HDCAM timeline with the filters and efx, the aspect ratio and scaling goes out of whack from . I want her to work in a 1920 X 1080 timeline, so there won't be any issues with distortion. Should I have her digitize at 1920 X 1080 Photo Jpeg? Is there a higher res. version of it that I can digitize? that will work on her g5 at home with a small lacie drive? I deal with a lot of offline and online people, and now efx. so what should I do?
Re: Working with efx offline and online by Del Holford on Oct 2, 2006 at 3:22:28 pm
Hello
I work with several editors/animators/motion graphics designers in town and have a great deal of trouble getting full HD delivered because of lack of storage on the supplier's part. I know it can get expensive, but if they want the business they are going to have to step up and buy more storage for HD. In order to work with HD Cam sources they have to be able to store them. We would loan a machine to a supplier if they needed it badly. I think I would tell my suppliers I will have to find someone else for the project (and future projects) if they can't step up. They can uprez to full HD within their systems to do the work.
I can take delivery on a DVD-RAM disk or several CDs with a tif sequence at full HD resolution (1920x1080@72dpi) but suppliers often don't have enough storage to create such a sequence, even if it is only :10. How they get it that way is up to them. HD Cam is our acquistion format but we output to D5.
Del
fire*, smoke*, photoshopCS2
Charlotte Public Television
Re: Working with efx offline and online by Jeff Brown on Oct 2, 2006 at 6:25:04 pm
As a stopgap, firewire drives are cheap. Export the footage to file sequences; I'd recommend PNG files, as it is lossless compression, but efficient. How long are the sequences your folks are working with? Short clips can be previewed in RAM. Or, an downsampled branch can be added to the compositing flow to preview in SD.
But, yeah, in the end, HD requires gear that can handle it.
From my estimating, a basic HD setup for efx/graphics (beefy computer, RAID, output card, and monitor) can be had for less than a BetaCam BVW. There's always lease/purchase (for about 18% per annum)
