Sunday – NAB a week away

I started this 2-59 project to fill in “empty” days (I’d just had a week’s shoot and edit cancelled at a day’s notice.)

Now I’m too busy to touch it. Pity. But I’ll be back.

Friday and this weekend has been tied up with getting a decent viewing copy of our Pinot epic for the Sonoma Film Festival. They wanted BetaSP. Should be easy as George has one… read on

Thursday/ Friday I make a standard definition copy from my High Def. Yuk! I LOVE HD.

Friday I went to George & Cissy’s office with a FireWire drive and a 90 minutes Beta tape to make a BetaSP copy. It always amazes me how differently people do things. I could not work out the setup at George’s. The good news was that his BetaSP deck is wired in as component video not composite. Makes a HUGE difference.

The bad news was that the Final Cut Pro countdown clock had a circle that looked like a squashed football – yet the movie itself looked OK – though a bit soft. But a worry. Hmm… Too many bad screening in my past lives.

I guess it is only the monitoring as it looked great on the FCP monitor. I sat there worrying for 75 minutes – then checked – yep it was definitely 16:9 but the countdown was wrong. I can imagine the projections getting the clock right and the main movie wrong. I hope there’s a rehearsal. The last screening I had at DV Expo in Pasadena, there was NO ONE working the HD projector. I just had a DVD stop start remote control. I think it went OK – “think” as I was on stage and couldn’t see the screen. Back to george’s place:

So I fiddled and discovered the the FCP setting – Anamorphic TICK was missing.

That fixed it. Now to re transfer the whole stupid thing. I started it said goodbye to my daughter and left it running – will collect on Monday. Can’t sit through another 75 minutes. I used to make 30 sec commercials. There were benefits.

Friday night and Saturday morning (was it only yesterday?) I thought I’d make a Blu-ray copy. It’s only 6 months since I made my last Blu-ray but I was totally lost. Adobe’s Encore is not DVD Studio Pro and very twitchy.

I made three dud Blu-rays!!! Each one took two hours to burn, so I was pretty upset at 1:00 pm. Six hours down the drain. Not only that, they were my last BD discs!

I looked everywhere. Nope – no more Blu-ray blanks. So we went to Office Depot where they had RE-WRITABLE blanks @ only $14. 00 ( a bargain as their write once were $11.00 – I buy them on line at under $3.00 ).

We lunched at BaJa Fresh in Corte Madera shopping mall and later Tricia had an eye exam and bought new glasses as her own were lost. She looks great!

Back home, I started from scratch with Encore – used a different start button and burned another Blu-ray. Wow! It works. The drag is – it takes 2 hours to find out. I though I’d better check it right through. Put it on our 8 ft screen. Looked great!

After a while it got dark – the film still running – our sons arrived for dinner. “It’s out of sync,” shouted Felix.

And he was right. Shit! Back to the drawing board.

Today – I looked at it. Nipped a frame out here and add two there. But last night it was a good four frames out. Huh??? Maybe our system… It’s a worry.

Now making yet another Blu-ray. Sigh.

Just projected it. Yep – it still looks a wee bit out of sync – but then “An Education” which we saw earlier wasn’t exactly in sync. Maybe our projection system delays the component video. Weird. Anyhow I suspect they’ll run the BetaSP.