MattHawkins Online - Film Making Forum

Here is a link to the Berne convention which spells out the minimum protection afforded to copyright holders by countries which are signatory to the treaty. Countries are free to afford greater protection, ut when they sign the treaty they agree to accept it's terms as minimum. Section 7 spells out ...

There are lots of free site search scripts out there that you can download. Make certain tho they are written in a language your host supports. Perl, PHP, or ASP. Although all are cros paltform, ASP is more common on windoze hosts, while perl and php are more common on *Nix boxes. I do run all three...

The shells are designed to be launched out of a mortar for two reasons, to guide their flight and to provide sufficient pressure for teh shell to achieve burst height. Without the mortar you have an uncontolled rocket propelled ball, with no fins for guiance. You could end up creating one gigantic b...

Check out the zwei-stein editor from thugsatbay.com freeware with chromakey in it at least, They have a new release out which is supposed to be a bit smoother interface.

I finished writing a script for a short movie and now I'm having some trouble with what to do next. At this point I know the script well enough and have ideas on how things should look like in the finished product. But others don't. So, I can probably get some actors or have an audition of some sor...

Well i just got the trial for After Effects 6.5 Proffesional 2 days ago, and i can already tell that AE is much more powerful but at the same time more complex. Premiere doesnt have the special effects capabilities of After Effects but its role isnt really cutting edge special effects. They both ha...

Make sure the phantom power settings match between the beachtek and the mic, sounds lik eit might be an issue there. Also check that the impedence is correct on the mic to the beachtek and the beachtek to the cam. ALso the beachtek should be using a line level voltage out, and the camera set to acce...

Not to mention the taking off shoes and fingerprinting that they expose the passengers at US airports to. It's crazy, even if you're just stopping to pick up a connecting flight, you are put through all that. Finger printing? Haven't run into that in any airports, and we've flown the kids ( well 18...

Call and ask..... Best advice I can give. It may require permits, and there may be restrictions on what can be shot. In the US it is illegal to video or photgraph any security procedures or in the security areas.

Dead pixels will leave a blue or black square in the image - again a dead pixel in the viewfinder or LCD screen won't show up on tape, a dead pixel in the CCD imagers will ....

I gotta ask somethign here, can you use music that you bought on a CD, in a movie as long as its not for comercial purposes, i mean you're not making any money off of it so why not In a word, no, when you purchase music you do have a right to rip it to MP3, make a dupe to listen to in your car etc,...

Pretty much what I was figuring could be done with DVRack, just wasn't sure how accurate it really was, price wise compared to a hardware solution with equivalent options LOL.... Glad things are going well! We did get the show up and on air, the first season is under our belts, second season in prep...

Check the hours on the menu, nt sure what the sequence is but the manual should detail it.. will show head hours, drum hours and threaded hours... gives a good indication of how hard the beastie was used. Drop a tape and run a few seconds of video, review in the PD and another DV cam to make sure he...

A lot of the improvements you can make are in the setup of your shoot. What is your shooting environment like? Do you have the ability bring a computer with capture functionality onset? Hey Nick, where you been hiding down east? You bring up an interesting point on teh direct to disk capture. I've ...

Render times are about comaparable to AE, the more color correction and edge manipulation you do, the longer it takes, I was seeing about 2 to 1 if it didn;t need a lot of color correction, but up to 5:1 on some of the stuff we really had to work over. The absolute worst went to about 12:1 LOL... in...

Minute for minute in time invested Ultra gives a better key than AE. With either the more time you can invest, the better the key you can produce. But I find Ultras selection, color correction and edge management tools to be much more precise and user friendly than AE. Particularly when you need to ...

UF hit it right on the head, on a static shot on a tripod, the image stabilizer should be off. Even though the vx2100 does use optical stabilization, it will react to movment in the image as if it were comarea movement and try to compenstae for it. Anytime you are shooting, set as much of the camera...

You won't find a VHS-c with digital connection to you rPC, would require some type of analog capture card. as far as qualioty, - Standard VHS is lower quality than Hi-8. S-VHS on the other hand was a pro format using VHS size tape ( not the same tape tho! ) and was much better quality. Digitized S-V...

Air duswing won't remove any oxide build up from the heads, which is what would be causing your problems. It definitely sounds like dirty heads, or perhaps a tape path issue.

The manual may be downloadable from Sony, I know the pd170 manual is. The two cams are very similar in function with just a few things moved. Shouldn't need any software for the camera other than something capable of capturing and editing DV, which would not have come with the cam anyway. Generally ...

It may be interlaced, but I've noticed a definite issue with text generated in AE and then rendered out to DV. Uncompressed AVI seems to be better, but there is a definite quality loss. I always felt it was related to working with Bitmap fonts instead of vector fonts..

Tapes are tapes... doesn't matter whether you record a PAL or NTSC data stream to them. Make sure you capture as NTSC 29.97 FPS conversion to PAL may be possible depending what editing software you are using. The question will be how the software interpolates the missing lines of resolution. Next qu...

OK the first season ( 20 episodes) of The Underground TV are now on line in WMV streaming format. Several of the episodes need to be re-renderesd due to missing audio. The page hasn't been announced to the general public as of yet so the look is a bit.. umm simplistic LOL. http://www.theundergroundt...

The software capabilities do have some effect on the finished key, otherwise, why would TV stations spend the money on the systems they do to bring us the weather guy in front of the map :) As far as tutorials, this one has produced the best reaults I've found in AE, or if the project has it in the ...

I would look around and do some research. Read online articles, reviews, and product feedbacks. Look for something within your price range, a smooth frequency roll-off, and durability. To start, you probably want something very unidirectional, a cardoid pattern or a shotgun pattern, I would suggest...