Thursday, July 8, 2010

Trying HDSLR



Forced to produce some clips for an industry conference I decided to learn shooting better footage by using my Canon 7D DSLR. I read the manual and applied 720p50, this is 50 fr/s at HD Ready HDTV resolution. I used a Sigma wide angle zoom 10-20 mm... pretty cool! I then conformed the footage files with Cinema Tools to 23,976 fr/s which changed the original shooting speed to a kind of slow-mo at less than half the original shoot. That's cool because it slows down the free hand uncontrolled camera movements and the final outcome looks pretty smooth.

Doing a simple non-linear edit in Premiere Pro after shooting proved more of a challenge than I thought. First downloaded and installed the trial version from Adobe, but after loading my trial footage no single of them clips could play on the timeline for more than 16 frames. I tried all sorts of frame rates and clip formats... to no avail! I found then a dude's comment on a Net forum claiming he had a solution that he got from Adobe support (he was 2.5hrs on the line with them, he said, wow!), but it all felt like witchery to me. Listen carefully. These are the steps I had to do, following his advice.
  1. Repaired disk permissions.
  2. Deleted Premiere Preferences in the /user/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Premiere/5.0
  3. Enabled Root Login (that's a nice one)
  4. Logged out and back in, as Root this time.
  5. Launched Premiere and tried the clip playback, believe it or not, it just worked! 
  6. Logged-out again and back in with my regular user ID.
  7. Tried Premiere to make sure, and indeed it now runs smoothly!
The clip you see above was the result of my edit. I could also burn it in BluRay format with Ti Toaster all on a regular CD, and play it at the right 720p res on my player, no shit. Sweet! Other than the install problems (now I understand why el Jobso takes the piss on Adobe lately), Premiere Pro CS5 works fine. Lot easier then FCP. Also, quality of export clips is fantastic! They have foreseen all standard formats coming from DSLRs these days, I am told. Rendering times and edits went lightening fast on my Quad i7 iMac 27", 2T, 8G. Kinda workstation horsepower that is. With a real estate to kill for...

I remember when I was editing family clips the analog way, late 80ies. 20 yrs later the world looks like from another planet. Thanks much for the treat all of you out there, hi-tech geeks!

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