Search results

Personally I don't know anyone who's shot 16mm in the last five years: it's all been either 35mm or DV... and now either 35mm or HDV.

As far as I'm aware it's the same, other than the limitations above (no commercial use and no third-party software included). Later when you have some money to spare you can probably get a cheap upgrade deal to the commercial version though.

Basically you trace the outline of the actors in each frame and use that as a matte to control which parts of them are visible.

You can't just use a line down the middle of the shot unless it's very simple; otherwise you need to rotoscope the action so that you matte out all the areas where parts of one actor pass in front of the other. Any decent effects program should allow you to do that, but it can take a lot of work.

Not yet, I'll have to take a look.

Afraid I don't have the link, though I'd guess a search would turn them up easily enough. I remember 'The Birds' and 'Psycho' being on there at least.

The great thing about recent trailers is that so many of them have all the good bits of the movie and most of the plot, so there's no reason to pay money to see the movie after you've seen the trailer :). I was watching a couple of Hitchcock's trailers on youtube recently and they were really...

You're always going to end up doing a 4:3 stretch on the footage, so inevitably it will end up soft. You can't create detail that isn't there. I'd just leave it letterboxed myself.

There are two limitations I'm aware of with the student version of Xpress Pro: 1. you're not supposed to use it on commercial projects. 2. the third-party software (e.g. Sorenson Squeeze) isn't included. I don't think you can directly import FCP projects into Avid, though there may be some...

Sure, but unless I'm much mistaken it's not HDV-compatible...

The DSR-11 is DV-only, isn't it?

Again, I don't know about the DVX100, but the Sony cameras I've used have a reset switch you can press with a paper-clip which should reset them to factory defaults; if the DVX100 does have one then you could try pressing that to clear out any bad settings.

Well, if you have Xpress Pro 5.0, you can download 5.2.x from Avid's site. I'm sure it worked with my on-board Realtek sound in 4.x, but I bought an Audigy 2 before I upgraded to 5.0.

I don't know about the DVX100, but I do know some cameras have a variety of timecode recording options. Have you checked through the menus to see if you've accidentally enabled some unusual timecode setting?

Difficult to say. IMHO, despite the lack of real 16:9 the DVX100 produces the best-looking footage of any of the semi-pro DV cameras, so if you're only ever going to release your movies on DVD then you're probably better off with it. If you're actually going to release them in HD eventually...

Yeah, those points are definitely worth considering. Since I normally have to record sound and edit the movie, I prefer to record on the camera and live with the hassle of following it around with cables rather than sync everything manually :).

As for what to look for, ideally I'd say you want low noise, enough inputs and outputs for as many mikes as you'd use, phantom power for the mikes, a decent meter and controls, a limiter to handle peaks 'nicely' when you can't avoid going over the volume limits, and a nice robust case for when...

I think Avid will convert the audio to the project rate for you, but I haven't tried mixing different rates from tape.

I've used SQN and ACS (or is it ASC, I forget?) mixers, but they're British so I'm not sure if they're used in other countries. SQN make very tough and high-end mixers that are used a lot in professional production, the ACS Minx is a cheaper mixer designed for news work, but is fine for...

Two definitely unless you have a really crappy camera. The benefits of the mixer will outweigh any quality loss from recording into a decent DV camera rather than a DAT.