Newbie Technical Questions

[Ong Wan Shu]

hi all,

After much hard work in compressed time, i finally finished my principle photography of my short film on the PD100AP. HOwever, I know very little on post pro stuff and need some answers, advices and any tips u might have.

1) I know i need a very powerful PC to do editing, but how powerful is enuff? Right now I have a PC with 1 gig ram. I probably gonna buy 2 hard disk and connect as raid but i dunno how big i need my hard disk to be. I got 4 x 60mins of mini divi shot in PD100 (i guess that means more pixels, more memory needed). I probably need to transfer all the 4 discs of footage into my comp to choose the takes. Is my RAM enuff? how much hard disk do I need as a rough guide?

2) Is there any specific work flow, file format, that I should know to maximise the quality of the footage i took?

thanks and please give me any tips that you have for editing in PC.

thanks

[Brian M. Dickman]

DV runs about 13 GB for 60 minutes, so 13x4 tapes is 52 gigs. If your raid capacity ends up being 100GB, you should be more than fine.

[Richard Alvarez]

Most of your questions will be answered by learning the workflow of the Non Linnear Editing system you chose to work with. For PC's that would be Premiere, Vegas, Avid to name probably the thtree most common. Each has it's own strengths and weaknessess. Each has a slightly different approach to achieving similar results.

Once you have chosen your NLE... you need to familiarize yourself completely with it, before jumping in to cut your feature. Most come with a short tutorial that will help.

And of course, there are always formus like this.

[Adrian Douglas]

To start with you shouldn't capture the entire four hours of footage. You should go through your tapes and log the timecodes of the scenes you want to use. Once that is done you can then do a "batch capture" where you enter the timecodes of the scenes you wanted and your NLE will capture those scenes from your camera to your computer. This will save you harddrive space as well as time sorting through footage everytime you want to add a new shot.

If your PC has 1 GB of RAM then the processor should be more than enough to handle DV. It's when you want to get into effects composting and real-time editing that PC power comes into play.

[Ong Wan Shu]

"DV runs about 13 GB for 60 minutes"

Will this differ if I shot in a 1 ccd camera and a 3 ccd camera? I shot in a 3ccd camera, which is why i thought may take up more space due to the higher reso.

The camera that i shot with have aredy been returned as it is needed for commercial use. If i shot in a 3ccd camera, and try to transfer to my comp via a 1 ccd camera, will there be problems and hiccups? will the quality of the image drop?

I also heard about tranferring using a player. how does that work and any quality loss compared to transfering via the camera i shot with?

Thanks

[Adrian Douglas]

You shouldn't have any problems using a single chip cam to transfer your footage. In fact many people often use cheap single chip cameras as decks to save wear and tear on their more expensive 3 chip cams. You won't lose and quality and it won't take more space the DV signal is compressed as it is recorded so what you shot will be what you get into your computer.

[Rob Lohman]

DV is DV and runs at 13 GB/hour. It does not matter whether the
source is 1-CCD, 3-CCD, 500-CCD or a TV signal. Also you will not
NEED a VERY powerful system to do editing. You need an
increasing powerful PC if you do a lot of effects, transitions or
wipes. I mainly use straight cuts with a couple of fades and I
have no problems on my 1 ghz laptop pc with 256 mb of memory.

If you do color correcting on the whole thing and that needs to
be rendered a faster CPU will come in handy. But then again,
after I have color corrected my whole movie scene by scene
(which doesn't take that much CPU power) I can wait for a night
to render it. I don't need the results back in 30 minutes or
something.