Five Fingers

This past weekend the first of two time-consuming tasks was completed. Approximately 900 minutes of raw video was captured and filled a little less than 900 Gb on the hard drives. Capturing is a real-time process and it took all of Saturday and most of Sunday to finish the job.

What a difference from the last experience. Plugged everything in and it worked! So that is now behind us and we can get on to the real job of editing a film.

But, there is still another time-consuming task to be completed. Since there is so much footage to deal with and the fact there was little time to rent the video deck, each tape (about 30 minutes each) was captured as one large file. Now some housekeeping and organization is called for. I need to subdivide each of these long clips into smaller “subclips” based on scene #, angle, and take #. This will indeed take some time to finish. Once done, everything can easily be found and sorted into about 150 scenes. Imagine 150 file folders, each containing from one to over a dozen items.

The next task is to create a teaser of 30 seconds for publicity and marketing purposes. Perhaps more than one and perhaps as long as 60 seconds. Imagine that. 900 minutes of sound and image distilled down into 30 seconds.

Stay tuned.

I have been asked to edit a feature-length film to which I agreed.

About a month ago we decided to get a headstart on “capturing” the footage shot up until that point and begin doing some preliminary rough editing.

This is where the fun began.

The footage is being shot in high-definition (HD) video in a format called DVCPro HD. In order to capture this footage, I needed a deck; specifically Panasonic’s HDV1200. This is a $25K deck (if purchased) and rents for about $500 a day which is par for the course once one enters the broadcast/pro world of film/video these days.

Anyway, I got the deck, hooked it up to my system and everything worked except that no video or audio would get to the system. Nice. I have a screaming PC-based system and planned to cut the film in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0. To make a long story very short, it boiled down to the fact that Panasonic has created a proprietary format that really only works with Apple and specifically with Final Cut Pro.

Now one would have to believe that someone out in the world has actually used this deck with Adobe on a PC system but I couldn’t find anyone. Calling tech support was interesting too. Adobe had no documentation (but was able to determine where the problem was) nor a solution. They recommended I contact Panasonic tech support to see if there was some tweaking I could do on the deck. Of course, Panasonic was even less help and blamed it on Adobe. I know the problem is in the operating system (Windows XP) somewhere but trying to find an answer to that was just too frustrating and ultimately fruitless.

I will certainly take the responsibility for this confusion but not all of it. You see the problem is not with the format of the video (both Premiere and Final Cut Pro can handle it) but rather in the computer’s ability to talk to the Panasonic deck. Since it costs money to have the deck, it’s not easy (nor cheap) to do some serious troubleshooting (if there is a solution at all.)

What is the solution? Decide that it was time to go with the flow and set up a screaming Apple system installed with Final Cut Pro. Digital is digital and editing is editing but if the deck will not talk to a PC then utilize the system it will talk with.

Now, I wait another week or so to have the deck again and work with the Apple/Final Cut Pro system.

Bottom line to this experience? HD is still not a settled format for video work as there are still many issues floating around out there. Secondly, one must get into a level of hardware and software issues that has nothing whatsoever to do with the job at hand. Thirdly, one must throw money at it.

Stay tuned…