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There is a wealth of information and advice at the following, e.g. covering basic camera alignment and calibration, camera-matching and green screens.

http://www.dsclabs.com/tech_tips.htm

• Using a DSC Chart
• “Real World Use of DSC’s Fairburn 3-D Chart”
• “Exposure for Sony S-Log with New DSC Chart”
• “Selecting Production Parameters to Ensure that Picture Quality Accommodates the Intended and Possible Future Imaging Systems”
  • Methodical approach to configuring the camera’s matrix.
• “Establishing a repeatable baseline reference”
  • Includes S-Log
• “Matching Multiple Cameras”
• “Skin tone Waveform Levels”
• “Compromise between Color Accuracy and Signal Noise”
  • While full saturation on all colors results in the most accurate color reproduction, it can introduce more noise than is acceptable for our purposes.
  • We have found that a reduction of about 20% in green and cyan saturation (moving the green and cyan signals 1/5 of the distance towards the center of the vectorscope) is a good compromise between color accuracy and signal noise.
• “Do You Waveform Monitor the Lutted Image or the S-Log?”
  • I waveform the S-Log, the LUTs on set can wack out the waveform … and …. are … for comfort viewing only.
  • The S-Log is my neg
• “Matching the Sony EX-1 with more costly Broadcast Camera’s”
  • Unless you have a calibrated monitor, calibrated chart that is correctly lit and so forth, you can tweak all you want and not come up with the result you would like.
  • One thing that is a must with HD is avoiding washed out high-lights
• “Continuous Light Sources”
  • There is a growing trend to use fluorescent, LED and discharge light sources for film and video production.
  • One of the problems faced by these light sources is the lack of continuous spectrum activity
• “Red One and CMOS Static”
  • Every time you change a lens on a digital camera such as the Red One, be sure to check the sensor for dust. The single CMOS sensor has a static charge that attracts dust (just like DSLRs).
  • When dust is left on the sensor it appears as a soft grey blob in the image. This is not always visible on small displays and might not be noticed unless you see your work on a large display or projector.
  • Use a loop {loup?}  to magnify the sensor before blowing gently with a blower bulb or compressed air.  If blowing won’t remove the dust, then use a brush designed to clean DSLR sensors, but use it with great care.
• “BackFocus”
  • when performing a “flange-back” adjustment (as Back Focus is sometimes called) the Iris should be FULLY OPEN (so that) the depth of field is minimized
• “Are Six Colors Enough?”
• “Varicam Detail”
• “Noise, Green, Cyan, and Saturation”
• “Tips on HD”
• “Motion Artifacts”
• “Green Screen Technique”
  • I light the screen to 55-60 units on the scope and then use the vectorscope to check and make sure I’ve got lots of saturation. I’ve always had success that way.
  • It’s really more about making sure there’s more green (by 30 or 40 units) in the screen than anywhere else in the image.
• “Creating a Look”
• “Aberration”
• “Color Bar Symmetry”

A mathematical step forward likely (eventually) to improve media processing & encoding, among other things:

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/19/mit_fast_fourier_transform/
  • Researchers at MIT have published a paper detailing a new approach to Fast Fourier tranforms (FFT) that could increase the speeds of image and sound processing tenfold.

Just “Blog-Bookmarking” a great written tutorial:

• http://www.dvvideo.com/learn/dvPrimer/creating.php

I came across some old videos I shot on a Nokia N95 and pulled these into Adobe Premiere.  However the individual video clips were each listed with a different framerate, hovering vaguely around 29 fps (27.08 up to 29.45).   Questions:

• What does that even mean?
  • From web-search, it sounds like it’s an average, and N95 framerates within a given recording can vary wildly
    • e.g. between 6 and 38 fps.
• How do various apps etc. handle such material?
  • YouTube:
    • In 2009 at least, it sounds like YouTube went for the minimum fps in any such clip.
  • Adobe Premiere
    • Seems to go for the average
      • I dragged a N95 clip on the “New Sequence” button and the resulting sequence had the clip’s average framerate.
    • Presumably just duplicates/drops frames as required to maintain the Sequence’s framerate.
  • GSpot (video analyzer):
    • For a clip reported by Adobe Premiere to be 28.81 fps, GSpot reported it to be 29.412 fps.
      • Misleading info from one or other or both…

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Carbonite was drawn to my attention by a colleague, Mr. True, while we were discussing cloud-based services.

So here I just web-trawled a little. From that, it sounds like:

• One must be wary of the “small print” about throttling.
  • Then again could anyone reasonably expect massive video file type storage for such a low price?
• One alternative is Mozy
  • Some people find this better in terms of bandwidth,  service level and applications quality
  • It has apps for both iphone and android.

http://www.carbonite.co.uk/company

• Carbonite automatically backs up new and changed files. You don’t have to do anything
• One of Carbonite’s key advantages is offering unlimited backup for one fixed price
  • e.g. £41.95 / Year
• PC & Mac
• Carbonite for iPhone allows you to browse and share files from your iPhone.
• Carbonite uses the same technology as banks to encrypt your data making it completely secure so only you can ever see it.
• We have our own data centers where the the disk arrays are far more reliable than your computer’s hard drive.
• Limitations?
  • “Bandwidth throttling - Yes (35GB, 200GB)” (?)
  • “Default max file size” (?)

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22910253-Rant-Carbonite-Backup-is-not-unlimited-as-they-claim

• 2009-08-23, thedragonmas:
  • I have used both Carbonite and MOZY. I had Carbonite for 2+ years, worked as advertised, had over 450 gigs backed up no problem, always maxed out my connection. However, problem came from their client, which is a buggy piece of shit.
  • Switched to mozy, managed to re-back up all 450 gigs in 2 months using my Sprint EVDO Cellular (I get awesome speeds on my data card!).
  • Real problem with Carbonite is, when you select to backup “Everything” it in fact, does NOT backup everything. Such as video files, files over a certain gig size and what not, which will then need to be done manually.
    With MOZY, when I told it to backup EVERYTHING, it DID BACKUP EVERYTHING!
  • I am now a happy MOZY Customer. I am now pushing over 1tb of backed up data.
  • Only problem I have now, is if I need to restore my data, you get 30 days to restore your data before it is removed from their servers, and my present internet connection, that is not possible
•  2009-09-11, Kramer:
  •  I was uploading about 5GB/day for the first 50GB or so and then was throttled back significantly after that.

I saw in the Sony Vegas forum that GiveAwayOfTheDay (GAOTD):

• Zebra-Media
  • http://www.zebra-media.com/zebra_media_surveillance_system.html
    • Video surveillance and motion capture  software.
    • Some key features are: unlimited cameras (including IP and USB cameras), motion detection, SMS and MMS and Email alerts, play sound file (useful on motion detection), adjustable sensitivity for each zone, record on detection, save video into archive or file with automatically or manually selected compression, record on schedule, registration of all events continuously by intervals or on motion detected, password protection, adding a text, time stamps, watermarks to your video.
    • For each video frame, if motion is detected, the Alarm event occurs, that returns a global motion ratio, depending of the number of cells in which motion has been detected, and the level of motion in each cell
    • A sensitivity grid is applied on video frames. You can adjust the sensitivity of the detection, and mask out areas of the camera view to avoid false alarms. When the camera captures video frames in a dark environment, it is possible that the electrical background noise of the CCD video cell creates fake motion detection events. It is possible to reduce the sensitivity of to the video noise by enabling the Reduce Video Noise option. When an alarm condition is detected, the program can sound an audible alarm, or send you an email with a photo. Automatically capture photos, or record video in compressed files. Surveillance System includes an advanced player that allows to play video clips, capture video frames and perform frame overlay. Each camera has its own individual monitoring and recording settings. All settings, such as alerts, photos, and video recordings can be turned on and off using the built-in scheduler. All monitoring and alert events are logged with date and time stamps. Each camera has its own scheduled on(off) times. Building upon the interface options introduced in MS Outlook, scheduler includes event recurrence control and customizable Date Navigator. Access to all data is provided through a well encrypted password

Some alternatives indicated by reviewers:

• iSpy:
  • http://www.ispyconnect.com/
    • Open Source
    • iSpy uses your cameras, webcams, IP cams and microphones to detect and record movement or sound. Captured media is compressed to flash video or mp4 and streamed securely over the web and local network. iSpy can run on multiple computers simultaneously and has full Email, SMS and MMS alerting functions and remote viewing
    • iSpy is probably the worlds most feature-rich surveillance software. Some key features are: Unlimited Cameras and Microphones (including IP and USB cameras), Motion Detection (3 types), Motion Processing (4 types), Record on Detection, Record on Schedule, Record with Audio, Remote Access, Network Audio Broadcasting (via iSpy Server), Password Protection, Desktop Recording, Automated YouTube Uploading, SMS and MMS and Email alerts
• YawCam
  • http://www.yawcam.com/
    • Yet Another WebCAM (software).
    • Yawcam is a webcam software for windows written in java. The main ideas for Yawcam are to keep it simple and easy to use but to include all the usual features.
    • Yawcam features:
      • Video streaming
      •  Image snapshots
      • Built-in webserver
      • Motion detection
      • Ftp-upload
      • Text and image overlays
      • Password protection
      • Online announcements for communities
      • Scheduler for online time
      • Time lapse movies
      • Run as a Windows service
      • Multi languages

Back in early 2010, I bought a MacBook Pro.  Like my existing Mac Pro desktop it had a FireWire 800 (FW800) port, but unlike the Mac desktop that port would only function under Mac OS, not Boot Camp > Windows.  The desktop had Windows XP 32-bit while the MacBook had Windows 7 64-bit.

In a prolonged attempt (the latter half of 2010) I did a lot of searching, browsing, emailing, phoning and conversing to try to find out if it was “just me” or a recognised issue.   The main source of misleading answers to the effect that many had never had that problem was that those same people had never tried (saying that at the start would have been a more useful answer).  Or else my question got “pidgeonholed” into a standard one about booting from an external drive - something I was definitely not trying to do. Next, it seemed that some older laptops had a different chipset, by Texas Instruments, and those did not have the same problem.

One workaround some people employed was to go via a FW800 ExpressCard adaptor.  But that only works on certain models and certain versions of Windows it appears.

In conclusion, the issue appears to remain in force, it’s not “just me”, and sadly there is little prospect of it being fixed.  I had this vain hope that maybe newer macbook models or newer Boot Camp releases might have sorted things a bit.  Doesn’t look like it…

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These are the applications  listed when, in my Windows VM on Mac, I did [RightClick>OpenWith] on a [.EDL] file:

• Avid:
  • ALE
  • EDLManager
• Apple:
  • Color

Here I look at the advantage/point of Sony Vegas’s options for exporting the project/timeline/sequence structure.

Rebuild Project:

• Question: Can one export (in some form, possibly partial) a Project (sequence/timeline) from Sony Vegas 10 that can then be imported to other NLEs or versions of Sony Vegas ?
  •  A couple or so years ago (Vegas 9) I determined it was not practical to exchange between Vegas and FCP.  But time has passed, attention has shifted away from FCP to other NLEs (chiefly Adobe Production CS5.5) , and for various reasons, earlier versions of Vegas are more attractive to me than the latest batches.
• Part-Answer:
  •  Yes for [File > SaveAs > EDL] / [File > Open (Same kind of EDL File) ]
  • Can open even in previous versions of Vegas.
  • But not everything gets reinstated - e.g. Project settings, Text, Pan/Crop.

Repair:

• Can repair a project by doing this.
  • In my case, a video pan was “snatching”, not smooth.
  • The process of Opening a Vegas-EDL [.txt] re-created “peaks” sidecar files [.sfk] for each media file.
  • Somehow, the pan played more smoothly after this (possibly due to this or some other effect of the “new project”

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I’ve begun by re-creating from-scratch a project which I already have in Sony Vegas.

• Media Browser:
  • aMedia > DoubleClick
    • Goes to Source Monitor
• Source Monitor:
  • Adjust In/Out points e.g. as per [View Details] window in Sony Vegas
• Drag from Source Monitor to Timeline
• Use timecode from elements in Sony Vegas project as a starting-point.  Drag Dissolve transitions (Effects) from bottom-left hand pane in between clips.  Trim transition to preference, either by drag or numbers.  Pretty easy.
• Timeline:
  • [Clip > RtClk > Scale to Frame Size]
    • Then drag scale/pan/crop rectangle to required size/zoom level.
• [File > Export > Media]  = Ctrl-M
  • This created [C:\Users\David\Documents\Adobe\Premiere Pro\5.5\Sequence 01.avi]
• Renamed the Sequence as [Intro]
  • Now it saves to [Intro.avi] or the following time to [Intro_1.avi]

Pretty intuitive really.  Next I’d like to find the levels and color correction features, then (following the inevitablegrain created by that process) some means of running the Neat Video temporal denoiser.