New Media Producer

Twitter Updates for 2008-11-12

Duncan — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:59:59 +0000

@roygriffiths Well done Roy now you’ll never get anthing done, just Tweeting all day! #
@roygriffiths Next thing to do is get your picture in your profile, at twitter.com/roygriffiths #

Final Cut Pro used for The Forbidden Kingdom

Duncan — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:37:12 +0000

Excellent article on Creative Cow about feature film use of Final Cut Pro…

Article Focus: A Creative Cow Exclusive! DigitalFilm Tree’s Zed Saeed has helped create pioneering digital workflows built around FCP, custom-designed for large-scale productions. Their biggest challenge so far has come on “The Forbidden Kingdom,” an epic film partnering Jackie Chan and Jet Li for the first time — with production and post in China, Korea, Australia, and multiple locations in the US. Here’s a look at how they put it all together with FCP, Xserve, XML, Color, file-based workflows…and hard, hard work.

The Forbidden Kingdom uses Apple Final Cut Pro in post production

Using VOB files in Premiere Pro

Duncan — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:15:10 +0000

It’s very common for a client to bring in video clips that they had made previously. If these have been originated in a camera they are not usually captured DV files in AVI format but are DVDs burnt with Nero etc.

The situation today was that I was presented with a DVD with files to add to the timeline of the production. I had shot original footage on a Sony V1 at 1080i (25fps PAL) and had decided to stay at in this HD format for editing even though I knew older DV footage in DVD format would be added.

So, as time was short, I opened the DVD in explorer and copied the VOB file from the TS_VIDEO folder over to the project folder on my external hard drive. Once there I made a copy, then changed the file extension to .mpg. Premier will not import VOB files directly but will import mpg. And this method does allow VOB files to be played with Windows Media Player, for example. (VLC Media Player is much better as it will play VOB files directly)

This proved a bit of a problem as Premier wanted to conform the file and this seemed to take forever. I decided to delete the file and do the job properly by transcoding the file first to a more Premier friendly format.

There are numerous ways to do this, mostly centred around ripping commercial DVD movies. However, the material I needed to use from my client was his own creation so no problems with copyright protection.

The tool I used was VirtualDubMod as it allows the use of the MPEG 2 stream that is a VOB file. VirtualDubMod has many settings but for a quick and easy transcode I just loaded the file, went to save as, choosing AVI, no recompression and simply saved the file. The process is quite quick and the resulting file loaded into Premiere with no conforming. I had to stretch it up to 1080 and crop it to the 16:9 format but the results were fine for the short presentation video.

VirtualDubMod Hompage

Bloglines code

Duncan — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 20:01:12 +0000

Test post for Technorati Profile

Duncan — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 19:05:45 +0000

Technorati Profile

Hello world!

Duncan — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 13:59:20 +0000

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!