Lucky for me, I have a locked cut of my film to submit.

Still, being the neurotic perfectionist that I am, I want to hold a few screening before proceeding with the sound edit/mix and color correction. Now, I could just screen my SD DVD but I shot high-def, I have a nice TV and a PS3, why the Hell shouldn’t I screen the best possible version I can? Really, what’s stopping me?

Well, nothing but time, technology and storage space.

Warning: I’m about to peg the geek/nerd/techie meter.

I shot my film with the Panasonic HVX200 so my footage is all 1080p/23.98 DVCproHD. I color corrected my locked, festival submission cut in After Effects with Colorista and Looks. So far, so good.

Now, the PS3 can handle H.264 but wants that in an MPEG-4 wrapper. That’s straightforward, right?

Yes… and no. After Effects won’t output a multi-pass codec so I needed to create an intermediary version. I went with ProRes. Why not the Animation codec or ProRes HQ? While those codecs deliver a higher quality image, the trade off in time is crippling. My After Effects ProRes output of a five reel film took 60 hours! ProRes HQ is roughly 20% larger than the vanilla ProRes I used, so that would have taken 72 hours. I couldn’t afford to tie up my computer for three full days. The Animation codec is lossless so God only knows how long that would have taken.

With my ProRes version in hand the next step was to create an H.264 version with AAC audio in Compressor. I think that took about a day, can’t really be sure because I farmed this work out to another computer; like I said, I have other work to complete, work that requires the use of my MacBook Pro.

After that it’s an easy passthrough in QTPro to wrap the file as MPEG-4 (thank you Stu for this tip).

Done.  Next, I had to transfer the film to my PS3 and I’m done. Not quite. My film is about 30GB but I only have 20GB left on my PS3 HDD. Solution: buy a new HDD (thank God the PS3 makes swapping the HDD easy). After hours/days of research I learned that I needed to purchase a 2.5″ 5400rpm 500GB SATA II HDD with a 16MB cache. I found a nice Hitachi on Amazon and I’m golden.

Well, no. See, they send me a drive with a 8MB cache. I send the drive back but in the meantime I do a bit more research. It looks like no one makes a 2.5″ 5400rpm 500GB SATA II HDD with a 16MB cache. You either get a 5400rpm with an 8MB cache or a 7200rpm HDD with a 16MB cache. I’m thinking I really could use the 16MB cache in regards to the heft of my file’s data rate but boards suggest that some folk have had issues with the 7200rpm drives in their PS3s. Ugh. Fine, I’ll go with an 8MB cache HDD.

The new HDD arrives and I immediately make 2 backups of my PS3 HDD before swapping it out for my new one. I pray this will go without a hitch. It almost does. I had to have the PS3 OS on a USB stick in order to properly format my new 500GB HDD. I then restored my original PS3 files but that took close to 5 hours. Once I verified that all my files were restored and worked, it’s finally time to transfer my file to my PS3. I can’t use my 30GB USB stick (formatted, it’s less than 30GB and we’re all experienced that pain/agony) but I have some space on the external HDD I use to back up my PS3. I hook that drive up to my MBP and…

Failure?! Yup. See, the HDD I use to backup my PS3 is formatted FAT 32, which restricts file size to 4GB or less. What’s worse, the PS3 won’t recognize a drive formatted any other way. FUCK! How the hell am I supposed to move this 30GB H.264 file from a Mac formatted HDD to my PS3?

The answer is PS3 Media Server. It’s a Mac app that lets your PS3 browse your Mac for playable media. At first I was worried that I’d have to always stream the media but there’s a “Copy to PS3″ function.

Did it work?

Hell yeah! My film transferred to my PS3, it plays in all its HD glory.

Now I need to organize a pair of screenings this weekend (all the while praying that work doesn’t ask me to come in Saturday or Sunday). Was this worth it? I think so but I’ll confirm after the screenings.  Meanwhile, if you’re trying to do the same thing with your Mac/PS3, feel free to shoot me your questions.

And so I stumbled across this article on freelance editing. If I may summarize, your three goals as a freelance editor are:

• Be a good editor
• Be mobile
• Get rehired

The article has some great tips (my favorite might be the “Hard Drive of Tricks”) that every serious freelance editor should take to heart.

Like me.

For the past year I’ve had three part-time jobs while working on my own creative endeavors including writing, directing small projects and posting my first feature.

In the past few months, I lost one of those jobs. Another job is forcing me into furloughs. A third is squeezing my hours and constantly paying me late. Add a recent tragedy that has hoisted additional financial responsibilities onto my shoulders and it’s time to put on the “freelance post-centric ninja” hat and start knocking on doors, offering my services.

I have my own editing rig and access to a second.

I can cut your project on Final Cut Pro, do some color correction and title design in After Effects, cut and mix your audio in Pro Tools or SoundTrack Pro. I can also write, direct, shoot & record audio. I’m a one-man band and here’s the proof:

I’m ready to tackle your documentary or web series. Bring it!

Factoids: I shot about an hour of HDV footage on a Sony A1U, converted it to ProRes, edited it down in Final Cut Pro and timed it in After Effects with Colorista.

First, my 30-second spec combined live action and stop-motion animation. I’ve done one other film like this (check out CONVERSING). For that short, I shot both the live action and stop-motion animation with a Panasonic DVX100; I used iStopMotion to record the stop-motion animation to my laptop. The digital video was shot 30p and the animation 15 fps. I used a Sennheiser ME66 and ProTools 6.4 to record the voice talent. I edited the film with Final Cut Pro and mixed in ProTools. I was going to use the same setup for this project but I really wanted a higher resolution final so I thought I’d put the final cut through Instant HD and viola, I’m done.

Just one problem: the test I put through Instant HD didn’t look as good as I hoped. I don’t blame the plugin, I just didn’t know how to punch up the optimum settings for export. Plus I was haunted by this post.

I also had access to both a Sony A1U HDV camcorder and a Nikon D100 plus I was looking for a good excuse to learn After Effects so why not take the plunge with this project? Who doesn’t love a challenge, right?

So, first I recorded my four actors (big thanks to Curtiss, Dan, Karina & Michael for lending their talent) using the above mentioned setup. I quickly cut and mixed the dialog so I could sync it up to my “proof of concept” cut. I then shot the live action (an extra thanks to Dan) as 59.94 HDV with the Sony “fake” Cineframe 30 mode turned on. After shooting I immediatly transcoded all the footage to ProRes for the rest of post. All of that went according to plan. The animation, not so much.

I thought about shooting RAW files with the D100 but I’d heard from my photographer friends that it’s a whole other beast so I chose large RGB TIFF files (3000 x 2000) instead. Unfortunately, the camera came with one 512MB CompactFlash (CF) card. That card coulldn’t hold more than 17 shots so if I had any animation longer than 1s4f (1 second, 4 frames), I’d have to download the card, wipe it clean and pray I hadn’t bumped the camera in the process. Um, no thanks. I looked in the manual and it said the camera could handle the “promised” 1GB card but nothing bigger. Guess what? Today it’s hard to find a CF card smaller than 4GB. Thank the lord the 4GB card worked. Unfortuantely, that was just the start of my troubles.

After shooting my first stop-motion shot I immediately ran head first into another problem. Although I put the camera in full manual, including the iris, the camera still adjusted the f-stop by 1/3 to 1/2 a stop according to the built in spot meter. That meant that the brightness of some frames in a single shot would be different than the others. I’d have to correct brightness frame by frame. Tedious? Yes. Doable? Yes. But that wasn’t the biggest pain in my neck.

No, it was the camera and the CF card that almost killed me. The camera could shoot 6 shots before it needed time to write the images from the internal memory buffer to the CF card. It could take 2-5 minutes to write one image to the CF. But the bigger problem was downloading from the camera into iPhoto. This took around 20 minutes per download and once took almost an hour. This forced my one-day shoot to take twice as long. Ugh.

Once in iPhoto, I renamed and exported the TIFF files to an external drive. It was then time for some After Effects magic. I was glad AFX allowed me to import a folder of still images as a contiguous video clip. Once in a timeline, I corrected the gamma to fix for the iris adjustment. Damn, that took a long time and boy did I grind my teeth. After that I created JPEG proxy files for the TIFF clips (a very good idea that saved me a ton of time). I then created another AFX project where I would lay in the animated clips end to end to get a sense of editing and pace. And, as I had 3000×2000 images but knew my final output would be a 1920×1080 HD Quicktime, I decided to create camera moves in post. Oh boy, the results looked so good I couldn’t have been happier.

Also, at this point, I could fix any image problems while still in the highest possible resolution; the Clone tool became one of my most trusted tools and Keylight is awesome for green-screen work. Once that was done, I took each shot and output it as a 1920×1080 ProRes Quciktime so that I could combine my live action and stop motion in a single AFX comp where I could color correct with Colorista which is a GPU based plugin; As you’d know from a previous post, the TIFF files were too big for this.

Once I laid out all the clips, it was time to apply Colorista. I took the Stu Maschwitz method and used Adjustment Layers instead of loading effects onto the master clip. This came in handy when I wanted to swap out clips (which happened more than a few times). Each clip had one color correction layer and all the live action clips had a secondary correction layer so I could bring my actor’s eyes up out of the darkness. Lastly, I applied a final “looks” layer over the whole project.

On the sound side, I tried Soundtrack Pro but grew frustrated so quickly I fell back to ProTools for the sound edit, design and mix. I did have to add a bit of music and I used GarageBand to create the cues and then exported them to ProTools.

Lastly, FYI, it took 14 minutes to render out a 30-second clip in After Effects but I’m incredibly happy with the results.

Here’s hoping you get to see the fruit of my labors as a finalist.

The gig: I was hired to edit a Spanish language medical video. The project was shot on the HVX200,1080i, 29.97 fps. I was using the latest version of Final Cut Pro (FCP). As the edit progressed, I was also given some animations (HD QT), layered Photoshop images, TIFF drop-ins to replace corrupted frames and 4K JPG stills from a DSLR. The final delivery was a high-quality SD DVD for client approval and then a native (1080 DVCproHD) QT to be sent to the DVD replication house.

Everything worked wonderfully until I started doing some minor color correction with Colorista. At this point I learned that my new favorite plugin (which I like much more than FCP’s 3-Way Color Corrector) is GPU based and as I’m editing on a 2.33 GHz MacBook Pro with 3GB RAM, the plugin can’t handle 4K JPG stills.

Okay, a minor setback but I had a solution. I only had two sequences of stills, one to open the industrial and one to close it.  Solution: why don’t I export each sequence of stills as a native DVCproHD QT. I’ll then re-import these two QT clips into my project, apply Colorista, export and I’m golden.

Not quite. I first noticed a problem after I exported my final edit (the full industrial with the two 4K JPG stills sequences transcoded to DVCproHD) via Compressor for DVD Studio Pro (DVDSP). The “closing” QT stills clip wound up looking like this:

Here I should note that 1) the rest of the industrial looked perfect and 2) both 4K JPG still sequences were exported with the exact same settings:

These settings matched the original DVCproHD sequence settings perfectly, but I only had issues with one of the QT stills clips, not both. Also, the problem only cropped up when exporting from FCP. The entire industrial looked great in FCP.

Time to trouble shoot.  First I thought it must be Colorista. I removed the plugin, exported the corruption-prone section of my final edit to QT but the resulting clip still had the same problem.  I went back to the original 4K JPG stills sequence and tried exporting another DVCproHD QT with the hope that it was a one-off issue.  Nope.  I tried different export settings but still had the exact same stumbling block.

Again, I went back to my original 4K JPG stills. As the problem looked like a field dominance issue, I tried exporting another DVCproHD QT movie with one exception–I set the field dominance to “none”:

I then imported this closing QT stills clip with the field dominance set to “none” into my final edit project and something weird happened. The QT stills clip suddenly had its field dominance set to “upper” (which is what the HD video was set to):

Okay, I started to freak out but my inner empiricist convinced me to follow through with my experiment. I applied Colorista to this new QT stills clip and exported the entire final edit to a native DVCproHD QT. Bingo, it worked:

I then sent the sequence to DVD SP via Compressor and that worked too.

Why? I have no idea. Do you?