Tapeless movie making

A warm welcome to all. Here we talk about films, which people put onto YouTube or Vimeo and embed here. The idea is to allow useful, friendly discussion.
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ned c
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Joined: Mon Jan 29, 2007 3:39 pm
Location: Dammeron Valley USA

Tapeless movie making

Post by ned c »

There is now a write up on tapeless shooting and post production at the AMPS website www.ampsvideo.com

ned c
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Dave Watterson
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Location: Bath, England
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Re: Tapeless movie making

Post by Dave Watterson »

And it is a thoroughly good, detailed but above all practical, look at the tapeless offerings ... which has already attracted positive responses from readers ...

set out with style and dignity, not to mention great charm ... (OK I'm the AMPS webmaster! :oops: )

Several writers on this forum have suggested "tapeless" is the way to go. With the proviso that archiving files to tape seems the best bet for longer storage, I reckon the advantages of lighter cameras with fewer moving parts are big ones. Think of the change in still photography from the days when you had to rewind film into its little tin and send it to a lab before eventually getting back your slides or prints. All that seems cumbersome in retrospect ... yet I recall being anxious about our then rare 1GB card containing all the pics of our trip to New Zealand. So much so that half way through our trip we found a friendly computer store who copied them to CD for us ... at a fraction of the price photographic shops were asking for the same service. I guess the computer guys did not have to buy in card-readers, computers and CD burners.

Dave
col lamb
Posts: 680
Joined: Tue Oct 16, 2007 9:51 pm
Location: Preston, Lancashire

Re: Tapeless movie making

Post by col lamb »

Ned

Its been quite a while since you last heard of me but needless to say I'm back.

The information on the AMPs site was extreemly useful.

I now have two AVCHD camcorders, a Sony TG3 and a Panasonic AG HMC 151. Both superb pieces of kit.

Now the editing has been interesting, converting the AVCHD files and using them in Premiere is a pig of a job.

Tried out Edius 5 and that worked great but again you have to convert.

To get to the chase, Magix 15+ and Edius Neo 2.5 (labelled as Edius Neo Booster) both work NATIVETY with the AVCHD files on a fast PC. Both work very well on my 2 core PC but a 4 core 3GHz would be better.

Of the two Neo Booster is great and is one I can highly recommend, I have been into NLE systems now for nearly 15 years, with building systems and lecturing on editing I rarely get excited about software but Grass Valley (formerly Canopus) certainly know how to produce great stable kit.

If you are interested in editing AVCHD files and have a fast PC then I think you will find that downloading it from the Grass Valley web site and trying it out for a month is well worth the effort.


Col Lamb
Preston
Col Lamb
Preston, Lancashire.
FCPX, Edius6.02, and Premiere CS 5.5 user.
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ned c
Posts: 910
Joined: Mon Jan 29, 2007 3:39 pm
Location: Dammeron Valley USA

Re: Tapeless movie making

Post by ned c »

Welcome Col, good to hear from you. You can add Vegas Pro 9 and the latest Vegas Studio Platinum to the list of edit software that natively handle AVCHD; a huge benefit I agree. I use FCP 7 and have to go to Capture and Transfer where the files grow about 8 times in size, fortunately storage is inexpensive now. I am becoming more comfortable with tapeless production but the archiving situation is still not fully solved, I store on HDDs and make tape copies as well!!!

I also wonder how shooting works in remote locations. We shot a documentary in a remotish area of Africa on tape, 33 hours of it, no problems but how would we have handled tapeless acquisition? Stored on a laptop? External HDD? We had a lot of power problems with the power going out or fading to brown, what would happen if in the middle of a download?

All ideas and thoughts on archiving/doc shooting welcome!!

ned c
tom hardwick
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Re: Tapeless movie making

Post by tom hardwick »

Col, you do indeed have to have Edius 5 convert your files but that makes the timeline run smooth as silk, and you can have many layers of real time effects as well. The only disadvantage is the storage space needed, but as Ned says, that's pretty cheap these days.

Or are you saying that working with the native files (assuming your pc's up to it) gives you better quality results?

tom.
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