[MacDV] v arious problems

[Robert Rothgery]

On Wednesday, August 11, 2004, at 07:15 AM, lloyds wrote:

> After 18 months and hundreds of hours of preparation, interviews, 
> etc., I'm finally editing a community video in FCE. Some accumulated 
> problems I'd really welcome help on:
>
> 1. Some interviews, with multiple people, were recorded with a 
> boundary mike which produces mono sound on one track only. They sound 
> weak when I project them, since they come from only one speaker. Is 
> there any way to get that sound onto the second stereo track, so we 
> keep stereo sound throughout? I tried copy and paste one track onto 
> the other in the time line, but it doesn't work. I have a couple of 
> sound editing programs (Peak and Amadeus II), but I haven't used them 
> much, nor do I know how to connect them to FCE sound track. Can you 
> help me with this?
Perhaps the audio is panned to the left channel.  try changing the 
audio pan on the cloned audio clip.  Triple and quadrupling the number 
of tracks might create a more robust sound.
>
> 2. When fading between scenes of the same still shot to successively 
> brighter levels, during the fade the level goes up to beyond the level 
> of second scene than drops back down (in a fraction of a second). Is 
> there any way to get a smooth ramp up to the second level, with no 
> drop back? I've explored the cross fade control windows with no 
> success. I finally used a dithered cross fade which makes the drop 
> back less obvious, but I'd prefer a straight, smooth cross fade.
Are you selecting cross dissolve?  Sounds like you are trying an 
additive dissolve.
>
> 3. In some interviews, the light level fades in and out, I'm guessing 
> because of some auto level response on the camcorder which I didn't 
> notice at the time. Can this be corrected in the editing process?
Not very well.
>
> 4. Some of the sound bites start abruptly (in order to get rid of 
> previous sound fragments). Can I add a space of silence before the 
> sound starts? How? Is there a way to fake ambient sound?
Go back to the same location and record ambient sound.  It will most 
likely sound very similar.
>
> 6. The quality of some of the still shots (from slides), which look 
> fine on the computer monitor, look lousy on the video monitor. But 
> some of them look terrific, which baffles me. I have struggled with 
> taking them into and out of Photoshop with no consistent results. Most 
> of them have been processed by PhotoWorks, who send them back on disc 
> in three different resolutions -- 384x256 pixels, 768x512 pixels and 
> 1536x1024 pixels. I have been using the middle range, which seems to 
> offer the best results, but still often not great on the video 
> monitor. How can I improve the quality of the poor ones -- which look 
> just fine on the computer monitor in FCE and Photoshop? They are all 
> jpeg images. Is there some standard procedure for maximizing the 
> quality of slides inserted into a FCE? This is a big problem for me 
> because the slides are a very important part of the message of this 
> project. It's hard to believe that with all this magical electronic 
> equipment, something better can'tbe made to happen.
You need to ensure that the color is corrected to NTSC standards in 
Photoshop and the broadcast quality standard is set to conservative.  
100-110 ire units.  If the tape is to be telecast over a licensed 
broadcaster the maximum IRE should be 100 and minimum 7.5.
>
> If I make a tape and play it through a TV set, the images look a 
> little bit better, but the landscapes still look pretty flat and 
> pixellated (is that a word?). What is going to happen if I try to 
> publish on VHS?
A VHS layoff will look even worse.  Colors muddied by lack of NTSC 
compatibility,  inattention to signal quality, and stills that don't 
move all make for a pretty crappy signal.  (768x512 is not a size that 
lends itself well to panning and scaling)  Images that were 500 lines 
are reduced to 240 lines or less.  Dubs from the VHS master or 
transfers to a cable systems server will result in further bleeding of 
color and a symptom called cartoon effect which blends slight color 
differences into a single flat color.

But then some clown will just say.  "well, its just access television"
>
> TIA
>
> BobLL
>
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