Film Festival, DVX100A/B FCP6 settings???

I am in a short film festival this weekend and I could use the canon HV20 (which I own) or a friends DVX100 (A or B, not sure?). The requirements of the festival are DV NTSC 4X3. I would like the project appear in 16X9 so the final output will have to be 4X3 letterboxed. Which will have better image quality? Shooting HDV with the HV20 and downconverting to SD 4X3 letterboxed, OR shoot with the DVX100 and use letterbox or use squeeze mode.
Whichever is the preferred method, *What are the particulars of the FCP audio/video settings*?
Thank you for the help.

The HV20 can look amazing if you know how to use it, but out of the box you cannot have manual focus AND manual iris at the same time. One or the other. If you are an automatic user, this may not make a difference, but if you like to have master control of your footage, DVX all the way.

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Recently shot a 24min. short in HD.Fairly large file and I need to compress and burn to DVD.I realze I won't get HD on DVD,but I need decent compression for Festival submission.Any sample settings I might try?

Recently edited a short to 24min.in FCPX.It is 1920x1080 24fps.It is large and I want to send on dvd for film festival submissions.How should I compress in Compressor to have the best quality and get it all on a dvd.I realize I won't get HD,but I need it small enough for dvd retaining some quality.

The short answer is, take a short but representative section and "test" and "re-test" until you get the best results you can attain.
Some further suggestions:
I assume that the festival specified DVD and that Blu-Ray is not an option.
The size of the file really doesn't matter to Compressor except that it somewhat reflects your movie's resolution and down-scaling from HD sizes to SD can introduce artifacts.
Start with the standard Disk Burning preset; duplicate it and save as custom settings; name them appropriately as you make adjustments so you can see at a glance what settings worked better or worse.
In Audio, set Dialogue Normalization to -31.
Don't judge the image quality on your computer. The Apple DVD Player may give you a rough idea of whether you have issues. But it's necessary to play out to a broadcast monitor or TV from a DVD player to see what it will truly look like.
Although it's possible that basic Disk Burning preset will give you what you want, I suggest turning opening Frame Controls (which should already be turned on) and setting the re-size filter to Best. You should also consider doing the scaling and the MPEG 2 encodes as separate steps (separate jobs).
The Encoder section of the Inspector allows you to adjust quality settings. You can test CBR and VBR settings at different bit rates. If VBR, use the Two Pass; the default bit rates are pretty good…you might be able to bump them up a little, but I wouldn't go above 8 Mbs.
BTW, how were you planning to burn them? If it's from Compressor, choose Hard Drive as Output Device to make a disk image. You can burn multiple copies from that disk image. You can also drag the Video TS folder into DVD Player to get a preliminary look at your results.
Good luck.
Russ

Do I need FC/e for Film Festival Submission?

Or could I get by with iMovie, say 11, 09, or my old HD?
Will I be able to submit a sufficiently high def version using iMovie 11? Or will the degradation be too much, supposing that I edit in iMovie, then burn to DVD with iDVD.
The film will be about 7 minutes and shot with Panasonic GH1 and a Go Pro in HD. There may be slow motion and a mix of ambient sound, voice, and music.
It'll be entirely shot outdoors under somewhat nasty conditions. Meaning no lights, usually no tripod.
The reason I mention these latter points is that perhaps the quality of what I bring back (shaky, low light) might be the limiting factor and not the image degradation.
I have made many iMovies for YouTube, but would like to go bigger, so to speak, in quality of video, not necessarily length.
Would I benefit from going to Final Cut Express? Or stick with iMovie?

Yes, Banff Mtn Film Festival:
Here's what they ask (don't actually understand all the requirements, yet)
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
For purposes of pre-selection, judging and festival screening, all
entries should meet the following criteria:
a) Entries MUST be accompanied by one polyboxed DVD-R NTSC
(Region 1 coded), which will be used for adjudication purposes.
b) Entries must also include a tape copy of the master. In order of
preference, videotape formats must be:
HD-D5 HDTV
DVC Pro
HDCam HDTV
HDV
Digital Betacam (525)
DVCam (525)
Betacam SP NTSC
MiniDV NTSC
Digital Betacam 625 and Betacam SP PAL/SECAM will
not be accepted. Due to reproduction issues, MiniDV
format is LEAST preferred.
c) Film entries must be 35mm or 16mm with OPTICAL or
MAGNETIC sound (no double band).
d) Production attributes should conform to typical broadcast
standards and include:
• 90 seconds of leader which include black, SMPTE colour bars
and black with either 0 dbvu (analogue) or –20dbFS (digital)
audio tone reference signals.
• Please remove commercial blacks and include a production
slate prior to the program start.
• 7.5 IRE Pedestal Black (preferred for NTSC).
• Maximum 105% IRE peak whites.
• Program start commences on the time-code hour.
• Program tail of two minutes of black.
• Digital content should be submitted with 48K audio and have
peak whites that do not exceed 105% IRE.

H.264 for film festival

Hi. My film has been lucky enough to have been accepted into a film festival and the festival director would like an HD h.264 version for the screening. I have to send it so I made a 720p version because a 1080 version would be almost 8gigs and a 720 version would only be 1.5gb(he said 720 would be fine). My question is, going under the h.264 in export, I chose HDTV 720p 24fps since that seemed to be the highest quality choice under the h.264s.My main question is, do you think this is the right one to choose? His email said as long as the data rate is under 15mbps, looking at it, it's data rate is 5972kbps, so I think I'm cool, although I'm now questioning whether this is actually too low. In the end, I'd just like to know if this was the right choice to make in terms of export. Sorry for the question, I'm just a little nervous because it's all on me for whether the film shows correctly at the festival.

I have to send it so I made a 720p version because a 1080 version would be almost 8gigs and a 720 version would only be 1.5gb(he said 720 would be fine).
Do you not have a delivery method for an 8GB 1080 file?
If you do, I would send 1080 even if he says 720 is fine.
He did not specify a file size limit, correct?
His email said as long as the data rate is under 15mbps, looking at it, it's data rate is 5972kbps...
I would max out the bitrate to the level he specified.

CS6 keeps crashing. Film Festival doco due in 1 week. Help!

CS6 keeps crashing. Worked fine for a year. It's unlinking files - in fact unlinked the entire timeline for a documentary due to show at a film festival in one week. Help! We transferred all the files to a new computer with a new drive and new version of premiere, but it still keeps crashing.. It's telling us "Sorry a serious error has occurred that requires Adobe Premiere Pro to shut down. We will attempt to save your current project." Then it tells us "Adobe Premiere has stopped working. Cose the program and check for a solution online."
We're thinking that we have a corrupt fil, but how do we identify a corrupt file?

If this is Windows (the information you should provide http://forums.adobe.com/message/4200840 when asking a question) you MAY have an outdated graphics adapter driver due to a Windows update that has changed "something" in one or more DLL files
As well as the information in the link I provided, what is your brand/model graphics adapter (ATI or nVidia or ???) and the driver version?

Once a Week Online Film Festival Call for Entries

Once a Week online film festival is a weekly showcase of short indie films under 20 minutes. All films showcased come directly from submissions. Every Wednesday at 9pm eastern time the highest rated film will be shown on the homepage and will remain for an entire week. Each selected film will stay on the channel forever and as the festival grows will receive more and more views. Any genre accepted, no completion date, ongoing submissions. For more information on how to submit or to watch a few films please visit.
http://www.youtube.com/onceaweekfilmfest
http://www.onceaweekfilmfest.weebly.com
http://www.twitter.com/onceaweekfilm
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Once-a-Week-Online-Film-Festival/134351336588810?ref=ts

you're welcome. is true..
You might think this is strange ( I know I do ).. but the other day I was working on " unforgettable" ( the tv series ) as a 2nd unit dolly grip. Just the one day of employment ( to burn some doorway keyed against black background ).
So we had a crane and 20x20 foot black over the " set " ( we were outside in a giant parking lot of steiner studios) and blacks ( 20x20 and 12x 20 etc ) around the sides...and at one point ( since this is a cop show ) I asked someone.... " when in gawds name are we gonna stop making all these freakin cop shows ! ?? "
And the answer was..." when people stop watching them "
simple.

Any chance of success using iMovie for Film Festival Submission?

Say with iMovie, say 11, 09, or my old HD?
Or do I need Final Cut, say Express?
Will I be able to submit a sufficiently high def version using iMovie 11? Or will the degradation be too much, supposing that I edit in iMovie, then burn to DVD with iDVD.
The film will be about 7 minutes and shot with Panasonic GH1 and a Go Pro in HD. There may be slow motion and a mix of ambient sound, voice, and music.
It'll be entirely shot outdoors under somewhat nasty conditions. Meaning no lights, usually no tripod.
The reason I mention these latter points is that perhaps the quality of what I bring back (shaky, low light) might be the limiting factor and not the image degradation.
I have made many iMovies for YouTube, but would like to go bigger, so to speak, in quality of video, not necessarily length.
Would I benefit from going to Final Cut Express? Or could I stick with iMovie?
Anybody out there ever use iMovie for something like Banff Mtn Film Festival?

Yes, Banff Mtn Film Festival:
Here's what they ask (don't actually understand all the requirements, yet)
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
For purposes of pre-selection, judging and festival screening, all
entries should meet the following criteria:
a) Entries MUST be accompanied by one polyboxed DVD-R NTSC
(Region 1 coded), which will be used for adjudication purposes.
b) Entries must also include a tape copy of the master. In order of
preference, videotape formats must be:
HD-D5 HDTV
DVC Pro
HDCam HDTV
HDV
Digital Betacam (525)
DVCam (525)
Betacam SP NTSC
MiniDV NTSC
Digital Betacam 625 and Betacam SP PAL/SECAM will
not be accepted. Due to reproduction issues, MiniDV
format is LEAST preferred.
c) Film entries must be 35mm or 16mm with OPTICAL or
MAGNETIC sound (no double band).
d) Production attributes should conform to typical broadcast
standards and include:
• 90 seconds of leader which include black, SMPTE colour bars
and black with either 0 dbvu (analogue) or –20dbFS (digital)
audio tone reference signals.
• Please remove commercial blacks and include a production
slate prior to the program start.
• 7.5 IRE Pedestal Black (preferred for NTSC).
• Maximum 105% IRE peak whites.
• Program start commences on the time-code hour.
• Program tail of two minutes of black.
• Digital content should be submitted with 48K audio and have
peak whites that do not exceed 105% IRE.

DVD for Film Festival Screening & Blu-Ray Question

Hey Everyone,
I just wanted to double check something.
I have been making DVD's with DVD Studio Pro for a short film shot on HDV -- 23.98 and they look great. I chose the "Best Quality" output, etc. etc. This project is going to be screening in a small film festival and they are going to project off of a DVD. I did a test screening in a theater classroom on a big screen and it looked fine.
I wanted to check in and see if anyone thinks there is a better output option for this. I don't have a Blu-Ray Burner at this time.
Also, I plan on getting a Blu-Ray burner in the future. I hear Lacie is the way to go? Any other suggestions, and/or links to other burners highly recommended. Also, do you need Toast to burn Blu-Ray?
Thanks for your input!
- Eric

You might be able to play a true HD file from your computer, you don't need the BD. But you must test the display output from your card to the projector in advance to know you've got what it takes to connect the two and if the projector is even capable of showing 1080. Most are not.
It is highly unlikely a festival will require BD submissions, too much hassle for them and for the participants.
bogiesan
Message was edited by: David Bogie Chq-1

Running a dv film festival on keynote

I am potentialy involved in making a film festival presentation and thought that keynote would be good to use, the presentation file could end up with somewhere around an hours worth of video files in it, or maybe more, and i also plan on having movie files with the lower third graphics playing with transparency over resized dv footage. And this thing simply can not crash or freeze since it is a film festival (i will hopefully have backup computers) does anybody have experience with this kind of thing? is there anything i should be thinking about to make sure this thing works, or is keynote even the best choice of programs for something like this?
Thanks!

I wouldn't trust Keynote to not stutter once in a while on your video. The better way to do a film festival would be to have several machines all running through a video mixer capable of keying out certain colors. Use one machine to run Keynote (for regular slides), one machine to cue videos from (running QT Pro for full screen ability or some other video cuing app) and then possibly yet another machine that's running your lower thirds (though you could make those in Keynote and use the mixer to key out a background color of your choice, leaving only the lower third over the video).
If you're wanting to go completely low budget, Keynote can probably do what you want, but I just wouldn't trust it for performance. Sometimes you'll see no problems, other times videos will just stutter a lot.

Bruning to proper format for film festival

I am finally ready to submit my documetnary to the Berlin International Film Festival. Below are the specs they require.
Can I do this easily in FC Studio 2?
Would the DVD be easier then the ProRES?
My timeline is 59.94 FPS and they require 29.97. Does that automaticall happen during the DVD production?
I appreciate your help.

OK, thanks, ProRes it is.
So to convert my project, I can export right in FC Studio. Export> Quicktime movie conversion> Quicktime movie> Options> Apple ProRes422?
This is being sent to Germany so the specs have to be correct for the hard drive.
If I want to send it to other festivals, who accept only DVD, how would I export to DVD from FC Studio 2?

Exporting- Export settings needed for a film festival-Lots of specifics I know nothing about

Can any of you help me walk through the export process with the specs listed below. I understand some,but maybe just not seeing what I need. Im new to all of this, so just not sure where it is all located.
Clips Export - SD 8-bit Uncompressed NTSC
Uncompressed 8-bit NTSC Video with audio pass-through
File Extension: mov
Estimated size: >10 GB
Audio: multi-track passthrough
Video Encoder
Format: QT
Width: 960
Height: 540
Pixel aspect ratio: Square
Crop: None
Padding: None
Frame rate: 29.97
Frame Controls: Automatically selected: Off
Codec Type: Uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2
Multi-pass: Off, frame reorder: Off
Pixel depth: 24
Spatial quality: 50
Min. Spatial quality: 0
Temporal quality: 0
Min. temporal quality: 0
thanks

I did see the quicktime setting, but not sure how to change to their specifics such as Uncompressed 8-bit NTSC Video with audio pass-through
Im pretty novice with all of this. Just learning as I go unfortunately

Best way to export a 720p project to a 1080 file for film festival

I have a 4 year long project, in FCP7, with a 720/24 timeline. Most footage was shot 720, though some later was shot 1080... the film is complete, and now has been accepted into film festivals. (YAY!) Now I need to create a 1080/24 Pro Res file for a festival screener.
What is the BEST way to create that file?
Right now FCP 7 is chugging away in the background as I tried Export->QuickTime Movie and selected the desired codec, and checked recompress all frames and make movie self contained.
Is this the best way?
And, I need to FedEx this out tonight... :-)
Thanks in advance for your help...
kevin
Portland Maine

>Right now FCP 7 is chugging away in the background as I tried Export->QuickTime Movie and selected the desired codec, and checked recompress all frames and make movie self contained.
No. Don't recompress...that adds a layer of compression. Simply export a QT movie...self contained, using the sequence settings. And then use Compressor to resize it to 1080.

Problems in DVD Studio for Film Festival Short Film

I'm trying to package my short film for a DVD to send to film festivals. I sent it to Compressor from FCP and used the HDDVD settings to compress it to H.264. Then I opened it in DVD Studio Pro and burnt a disc, but the disc will not play on stand alone DVD players and when it plays on my computer, the picture is very "jumpy." What do I need to change? If I need to go back to Compressor and re-compress, what settings do I need to use? I want to have the highest possible quality. The footage is 1080p (natively H.264 and transcoded to Apple ProRes 422). Thanks!

SD DVD is a highly compressed format designed to cram a lot of material onto a disk.
Compressing material to look as good as it can in the m2v (mpeg2) codec is a little of a dark art.
Start with one of the standard presets in Compressor for DVDs and experiment. If your material is less than 1 hour, you might get away with bumping up the bitrate to 7. I find Constant Bit Rate (CBR) usually gives me better results with short pieces. Variable Bit Rate (VBR) compression comes into play when you are trying to fit longer pieces (over an hour) with lots of action into a 4.7GB disk.
Create a bunch of presets and do some trials. Look at the outcome. Pick the settings that yield the best visual outcome for your particular video.
Have fun.
x

81-minute film: need to adjust pan settings in every audio clip! help!

Hi all,
I spent last summer editing an 81-minute extravaganza that I knew was going straight to DVD. When I used to work in news, I put all the narration and soundbites on one channel and all the natural sound on the other. Easy to deal with, easy to broadcast, easy to extract video later without narration getting in the way of a mixed track.
For this film, I wanted to keep almost all my audio centered, so narration, music, soundbites, etc. I set most of the pan levels to 0. Great for theatrical and home screenings. But now an international broadcaster wants a digibeta dub of the film, and I think I've got to split everything off properly so they can do a re-edit.
But it'll take me forever to go clip by clip and re-direct the audio. I'm curious whether there's a way to globally adjust each track to left or right so they're all consistent and I don't miss anything (I have 8 tracks of audio). It's either impossible, or there's a simple way to do this. Either way, I'm clueless and I don't have much time!
Thanks for any advice you can provide. This forum saved my butt countless times last year.
(shameless plug: you can watch the FCP 5.0/HDV produced movie trailer at http://www.independentamerica.net).
Hanson

Interesting Nathan, I had no idea that digibeta had 4 audio tracks. That's actually quite helpful since I was wondering how the broadcaster was going to deal with the music. I'm only used to dealing with two tracks.
Would it make most sense to keep the music to one track so they can remove it/edit it at will without affecting the other three?
When I used to cut news in Avid, I would put narration on Track 1, natural sound on Track 2, and soundbites on Track 4. Naturally, that stereo split the narration from the rest of the audio. Is there a similar standard operating procedure for 4-track audio on digibeta? (i.e. a generally accepted practice that the broadcaster can easily manage? I'm dealing with a Japanese company).
Thanks,
Hanson

Mac computer and camera for Film Festival productions

I use a Mac Book for Writing. I watched the imovie09 tutorial and want to use it for making quality short films. Can I do this on a Mac Mini? Do Macs work seamlessly with what they need the finished products in? I think they want DVD samples and Mini DV tapes for showing. Suggestions?

Most film festivals accept DVDs for submission.
You can use a Mac Mini to make a great video.
The camera, what's in front of the camera, and who's behind the camera
are much more important than the computer.
If you're selected, you'll have time to figure out whatever they need to show.
Just make sure to keep your master edit (and back it up!).
By the way, www.withoutabox.com is an excellent resource for finding and submitting to festivals.

Film Festival, DVX100A/B FCP6 settings???

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