A lot of people have set up their systems to utilize compressor’s Qmaster feature on their own system in order to use all available processor cores when encoding videos.
But what if you have multiple machines with access to file-level shared storage, like XSAN. All client computers can have access and write access to the SAN simultaneously, so how can we utilize this fact to process distributed encoding tasks across multiple computers?
Final Cut Pro composite modes determine how the brightness and color of one clip visually interact with those of another clip layered beneath it in a sequence. When you edit a clip into your sequence, it defaults to the Normal composite mode, meaning that it is a completely opaque layer that does not blend with the layers beneath.
Composite modes mix colors from overlapping images together based on the brightness values within each color channel in an image. Every image consists of red, green, blue, and alpha channels (or one luma and two chroma channels in the case of Y′CBCR component video). Each individual channel contains a range of brightness values that defines the intensity of each pixel in the image that uses some of that color.
The effect that each composite mode has on objects that overlap in the Canvas depends on the range of color values within each object. The red, green, and blue channels (or Y′CBCR channels) within each overlapping pixel are mathematically combined to yield the final image.
In the RGB color model, all three channels contribute to the perception of brightness. In the early 1950s, this was a problem when developing a three-channel color television system that would be compatible with existing black-and-white televisions. The solution was to encode a single channel that represented luminance—light intensity as perceived by humans—which existing black-and-white televisions could decode. Color televisions would receive the same luminance channel and two additional color channels that could be decoded back into RGB color for display.
Recently, I graded a set of short documentary films by director Doug Pray for Stamp Films & Philips Electronics for the Wake Up The Town campaign.
The films were set in the town of Longyearbyen, Norway and covered a study on the effects of the living in the Arctic Circle, where winter means almost four months of darkness. Obviously, light was an important part of these films and there were a few shots that needed a bit of extra love when it came to the delicate balance of an underexposed shot maintaing the dusk/night look while still being able to see the subject.
I took these shots into After Effects to do a little secondary color correction in a simple but pretty cool way.
Interlacing is a technique developed for transmitting television signals using limited bandwidth. In an interlaced system, only half the number of horizontal lines for each frame of video are transmitted at a time. Because of the speed of transmission, the afterglow of displays, and the persistence of vision, the viewer perceives each frame in full resolution. All of the analog television standards use interlacing. Digital television standards include both interlaced and noninterlaced varieties. Typically, interlaced signals are generated from interlaced scanning, whereas noninterlaced signals are generated from progressive scanning.