Man, have I been neglectful of my blog. I hate it when I go to other blogs I read and see the same old post over and over again. Nothing new. Really? Nothing new? C’MON! You must be doing something.

Well, I am. I am busy…busy cutting. I am on Rough Cut 2 where we had to completely rearrange everything. Which is OK, as most of the stuff I roughed out in Rough Cut 1 I could use again as segments in Rough Cut 2. And I needed to expand on some segments, and cut some segments. And I’m glad that in these stages I don’t have TOO much music…because fixing music after adding or cutting is time consuming. We are just in “get it in the right order” mode…get the story in a good…story telling order.

ANYWAY, that isn’t what this post is about. I just wanted to let you all know that I have been busy. Because besides this job, I have a family with three girls and on the weekends they run me ragged. Mother’s Day hit too… Oh, wait, getting side tracked again.

I had today off. Because we had more footage to import (another shoot day), and the producer needed to get her bearings. So I went to the dentist (which everyone should do on a day off, I suppose…right?), and then saw Iron Man 2…in a theater ALL to myself. Private screening. NICE. And then I cam back and…took the rest of the day off? Nah…I can’t do that. I’m a workaholic. When I am not working…I make excuses to fire up my machine and do SOMETHING.

Well, I had a decent something to do today. Besides converting a bunch of footage at home for use in the show, I did some testing. Because when you aren’t working, you should test things. See how things might work out…BEFORE you impliment them. Well, the thing I wanted to test was taking this fine show cut on Avid Media Composer 4.0 (which I am LOVING, BTW), and get it over to FCP so I can send it to COLOR for color correcting. Because Color is not only easier to color correct with than the built in tools in MC, but because it is more powerful than MC.

So, I took an Act, exported an AAF file linking to media. Then used Automatic Duck Pro Import to import that into FCP (worked flawlessly)…media managed to ProRes 422 (because Color doesn’t work with the Avid codec)…and then sent to Color to correct a small chunk, then back to FCP to see the results.

I knew that eventually we’d output this 720p 23.98 (DVCPRO HD from P2) show to 1080psf HDCAM, I first media managed the media to 1080p 23.98, using the software to cross convert the footage.  Why not?  I was converting the footage to ProRes, why not kill two birds with one stone?  Well, it looked a little soft to me, so I media managed again to 720p ProRes…and that looked much better.  Sharp.  and toggling between the two I could definately see the difference.  And I know the cross convert capabilities of the MXO2 will look better than the software.  So I’ll do the cross convert when I output.

OK, now.  I still have some NAB stuff to get to.  YES, I DO!  I’ll try to do that when I am on the subway to work.  I have 1.5 hours to kill both ways.  It’s just not easy typing and managing my bike at the same time.