DIGITAL FILMMAKING HANDBOOK phần 3 pptx

CHAPTER 5BUILDING A WORKSTATION Scratch Disks While you’re working, A dobe Photoshop will sometimes cache information on your hard drive. This scratch disk lets Photoshop sock away data that it can’t fit in memory. A large, fast scratch disk can greatly improve Photoshop’s perfor- mance. If you’ve got the room, you might consider creating a whole partition just for Photoshop’s scratch files. You can specify this drive as your primary scratch disk through Photoshop’s Preferences dialog. Remember, Photoshop ideally wants three times the RAM as the size of the image you’re editing. As you use a drive (or partition) it can become fragmented; that is, its con- tents can get spread all over the drive. Even individual files—such as a clip of video—can become fragmented across an entire drive. This can slow down throughput, as the computer will have to spend extra time moving the read/write head around to find the next chunk of data. Defragmenting (or de- fragging if you’re hip) or optimizing the drive will re-order the contents of a drive so that the computer can read as quickly as possible. (If you’re using an analog digitizing system, check your manual before optimizing a drive. Some software, such as Avid’s Media Composer, fragments the drives on purpose.) Drive optimizing software is a good way to defragment a drive that’s full of data or applications, but the fastest and most thorough way to optimize a drive is to reformat it. Because you may not have a place to stash your data in the meantime, reformatting is not always practical. However, reformatting your video storage drives before you start a new project is always a good idea. In addition to making sure your computer has enough RAM to run your edit- ing software and support applications, you also want to turn off any opera- tions that will slow down throughput when capturing or digitizing. Though different editing packages, whether analog or digital, will have guidelines for maximizing your RAM and tweaking your system, we can offer these general guidelines: • Turn off virtual memory. If your OS has a virtual memory feature, turn it off! You don’t want the computer taking the time to dump a chunk of memory to a drive while you’re trying to sustain a video transfer. • Free up as much RAM as you can. Turn off RAM disks and other processes that gobble up RAM. Managing Your RAM 95 • Turn off unnecessary processes. Screen savers, file serving software, e- mail programs, network backup systems, and other programs and oper- ations that periodically try to do things should be quit or disabled. You don’t want these operations trying to interfere with your digitizing or capturing. Mac users should actually shut down networking altogether, by going to the Chooser and switching AppleTalk to Off. TIP AppleScripting RAM Changes To speed up changing memory allocations, create AppleScripts that automatically change a program’s memory allocation before launching. You can use the Apple- Script Editor that ships with your Mac to create these AppleScripts. For example, we have a script that allocates all of our RAM to Photoshop and then launches it, and another script that allocates half of our RAM to Photoshop and then launches it. We can run these scripts to launch Photoshop with the con- figuration we need at the moment. For more details, check out www.dvhandbook.com/applescript. Managing Macintosh Memory While Windows 95, 98, and NT dynamically manage memory, Macintosh users still have to manage their RAM by hand (at least until OS X ships). Each application that you run consumes a certain amount of memory. You can see how much by switching to the Finder and selecting About this Computer from the Apple menu. To change the memory allocation for an application, click once on the application’s icon to select it, then choose Get Info from the Finder’s File menu. In the resulting dialog box, change the Show pop-up menu to mem- ory. You can now tell the computer how much memory to grab when launched. You may want to change your allocation to allow more programs to be open at the same time, or to provide more memory to a particularly RAM- hungry application. DIGITAL FILMMAKING HANDBOOK 96 CHAPTER 5BUILDING A WORKSTATION There are a lot of products and options out there for the digital video user. As a feature filmmaker, you don’t need to worry about most of them. Relative to some DV tasks, your needs are fairly simple, so don’t go overboard in building your system. Stick with what will work best for your production, and aim for a system that can support the software that you prefer to use. Conclusion 97 [...]... bet- 107 DIGITAL FILMMAKING HANDBOOK 108 Digital Zoom Most consumer video cameras include a digital zoom feature When digital zoom is activated, the camera will begin to digitally enlarge the image after you have zoomed to the optical limit of the lens The results of this “fake zoom” are often terrible At extreme zooms, shapes become blobby mosaics of muddy color, and even a minor amount of digital. .. 16:9 effect is that you lose a lot of vertical resolution If your CCD only has 36 0,000 pixels and you’re using a third of DIGITAL FILMMAKING HANDBOOK 116 them for black areas above and below your image, you’re effectively shooting with much lower resolution than your camera is capable of (Figure 6.12) Some formats, such as Digital Betacam can shoot a true 16:9 aspect ratio because they use rectangular... effects, you’ll probably need to on-line edit those yourself to whatever format you can afford If you are using a digital interface to get video into your computer, then you will usually be capturing full-quality, on-line footage unless you have multiple 129 DIGITAL FILMMAKING HANDBOOK 130 resolutions available with your codec If you are using an analog video interface, as discussed in Chapter 5, your... GL-1) lacks the aliasing around the glasses 105 DIGITAL FILMMAKING HANDBOOK 106 F IGURE 6.5 If your camera has a manual sharpness control, you can decide how much sharpening is appropriate for your image At the prosumer and low-end professional level, most DV cameras have fixed, zoom lenses; that is, you can’t change the camera’s lens as you might do on your 35 mm SLR camera At the higher end, DV cameras... need still image capabilities, either for your video production or for other work, a DV camera is not the best answer Any digital still camera (or a film camera and a cheap scanner) will yield better still quality than a DV camera, and without using up videotape 119 DIGITAL FILMMAKING HANDBOOK 120 Accessorizing As with any piece of gear, there are loads of accessories available for your DV camera And,... the TRV-900 still provides very good image quality, and the camera packs very good manual controls including manual audio control Unfortunately, the TRV-900 lacks manual sharpness control, 1 23 DIGITAL FILMMAKING HANDBOOK 124 meaning you’ll have to rely on filters and post-processing if you want to reduce the camera’s hard-edged image JVC GY-DV500 (street price $6,000) Currently the most full-featured,... shooting conditions At the time of this writing, these represent the market leaders in cameras For updated listings and coverage of more models, check out www.dvhandbook.com/cameras 125 CHAPTER 7 Non-Linear Editing Software 127 DIGITAL FILMMAKING HANDBOOK 128 I N T HIS C HAPTER • • • • • • • • You Say On-Line, I Say Off-Line Non-Linear Editing Software Basics What’s in an NLE Getting Media into Your Project... frame rate than interlaced video Since progressive scanned video is running at 29.97 whole frames per second, it’s closer to film’s 24 fps than interlaced video’s 60 half-frames per second 1 13 DIGITAL FILMMAKING HANDBOOK 114 Some film transfer houses claim that progressive scan yields a better film transfer, and many transfer houses recommend shooting progressive Others are more comfortable with interlaced,... greatly expand the repertoire of what you can do with an otherwise simple camera (Figure 6.15) F IGURE 6.15 With the addition of a bracket, this tiny Sony DCR-PC1 becomes much easier to handle 121 DIGITAL FILMMAKING HANDBOOK 122 Microphones All video cameras—even at the higher end—have marginal microphones, so you’ll need to replace these with professional units designed for the type of shooting you’ll be... a better film transfer A UDIO After manual controls, your next concern should be the camera’s audio facilities It’s pretty safe to say that the microphones included on all camcorders are 111 DIGITAL FILMMAKING HANDBOOK 112 F IGURE 6.8a (a) At a somewhat “normal” shutter speed of 1/60th of a second, the moving car has a pronounced motion blur F IGURE 6.8b (b) At 1/4000th of a second, moving objects . sticking Camera Features DIGITAL FILMMAKING HANDBOOK 108 Digital Zoom Most consumer video cameras include a digital zoom feature. When digital zoom is activated, the camera will begin to digitally enlarge. particularly RAM- hungry application. DIGITAL FILMMAKING HANDBOOK 96 CHAPTER 5BUILDING A WORKSTATION There are a lot of products and options out there for the digital video user. As a feature filmmaker,. less-satu- rated images with stronger blues. One approach is not better than the other, DIGITAL FILMMAKING HANDBOOK 102 CCD Processor Light GB RRRR RRR RR RRRR RRR RR RRRR RRR RR RRRR RRR RR RRRR