Tools of the Trade - Part 2

The exorbitantly expensive Panasonic P2 Card and it's little friend, a Sandisk Extreme 3 SD Card.

Now we’ve already covered the point of acquisition, the camera, but once it’s shot and sitting on those memory cards, where does it go? Here in Part 2 of Tools of the Trade we’re going to find out.

The Canon 500D shoots to High speed SD cards. High speed because the video aspect has a rather high sustained data rate, it’s not like stills where you can fill up the buffer and when it’s full, it just slows down your maximum shooting speed. Video has to be able to dump continuously to the card. For that reason I use a Sandisk Extreme III Card rated to Class 6. Which I think is around 30mb/s. Don’t quote me on that one .

I just plug the USB cable into the computer and then into the computer and dump the card to my dump directory, aptly named ‘Dump’. From there I use Cinema Tools to conform the footage to 25P so it plays nice with my HVX stuff, and then MPEG Streamclip to convert it to ProRes. My trusty Quad G5 2.5, although up to most things I throw at it, does not like to edit native h.264. To be honest I can’t blame it, whilst it’s a beautiful codec to behold, it’s an unwieldy monster beneath the hood.

The Panasonic HVX-202 Stuff is a little convoluted. It shoots to a proprietary Panasonic memory card dubbed P2. It was specially designed by Panasonic and is basically a PCMCIA Card with an array of high speed SD cards inside, a little controller and enough confusing stuff to ensure that nobody could reverse engineer it and make the damn things cheaper for the average Joe. Unfortunate for us, great for Panasonic! The exorbitant amount they charge for these things must make them a mint! but I digress.

The old P2 card is slotted straight into the side of my 17″ Powerbook G4, which hasn’t been retired yet because of it’s useful PCMCIA port, despite it’s now defunct processor. The P2 Card appears like a drive, and I just copy the contents of the P2 card to a new folder on an external drive. Once it’s safely on the drive, it’s plugged back into the G5, and the required files are converted to Quicktime files using the Log and Transfer utility within Final Cut. That creates DVCPRO HD Quicktime files which can be edited nice and easily in the timeline with almost any other codec footage I have lying around.

Once the ProRes conversion is all done on the 500D stuff, it’s straight into Final Cut Pro, where it’s chopped, cut and spat out the other end, either in it’s native quicktime format, or through compressor into H.264 for web viewing.

I rarely go to much trouble grading my footage, preferring to achieve most colours in camera. I have used Apple Color and Magic Bullet Looks (MBL) extensively and to be honest whilst I understand they have a place, I have come to appreciate the purity of an image straight out of the camera. Not only that, but often you watch a clip and see some poorly executed MBL absolutely destroy what was probably some really nice footage to start with. I know this is probably the user, not the software, but still, it’s become kind of cliché. Grading is good, but you don’t need it all the time. Simple is good, simple is fast! I’d prefer to walk away from a shoot, knowing that it already looks the way I want, rather than knowing I’ll be grading for an hour or two in the edit. I’d rather be out shooting!

I do make use of Adobe After Effects on occasion, for TVC’s and things like that where the basic motion effects in Final Cut are insufficient, but not so much.

For the photography side of things, Adobe Lightroom is my program of choice. It is fantastic! Not only for it’s fantastic asset management system, but also it’s editing features. On an average day I am normally dealing with around 100 images, and that can reach anywhere up to 300, depending on the job. Dealing with that amount of images, it’s easy to lose track of what you have and have not got and where what you have or haven’t got is. Advanced search tools, albums, a star-based rating system and the ability to flag photo’s make dealing with bulk images a breeze.

The processing module in Lightroom is sufficient for most edits. You’ve got your normal raw editing tools as well as some really useful custom masking tools. If there’s some very specific masking or layering required, then Photoshop CS4 mops that up nicely. You can also export straight from Lightroom to a web gallery, or even upload that gallery straight to your website via. FTP. I don’t know if I said it already, but Lightroom is fantastic! If you’re into digital photography, get onto it! Check Lightroom out here.

I use all Apple computers. I’m not a fanboy or anything. I used PC’s for close to 15 years, got sick of them crashing whilst editing, got a mac, no more crashes. Great computers, great OS, but most importantly, they suite the way I work really well.

So that’s the Post-Processing side of things covered. . . .I could probably keep going on for ages, but hey, it’s Saturday night, almost 9:30pm and I can hear the couch, popcorn and a movie calling. . .What a party animal!!!

More coming in Part 3. . .