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10 years working with Cassablanca editors and I am dumping my first show with firewire. One thing I found already that I don't care for. I can't adjust the levels while I dump the video in. That may be a problem at times. But it looks good so far. Bob...

How could you live without Autosplit during that time? That in itself can save you hours of work!

How do you deal with no control going in? Bob..

Wowww your live will be better with the AUTO SPLIT... one of the best features from MS

I am looking forward to auto split but how do you deal with no control of color, brightness and contrast when inputting your footage?
I tryed a little last night and all I could figure was to go into Special to control image. That seems to lose the tie I gained with auto split at least some. Bob,,

Hi Bob

If you set your cameras colour and brightness before your shoot right you should not have to adjust it. Why don't you white balance your cameras at the same spot on the track manually under the same light conditions. Don't you shoot at the same track every week so write the camera settings down every week if you can and than use the one who are closest together.

I have the same problem when shooting with my Z1 and two HC7 Sony cameras the colours are never the same I usually run a colour control effect over the inserts if the colours are significantly different. This gives me more control over the colour saturation than to do it from the start as I can see the other cameras colours on the scene before the insert and can add more or less to it without losing the auto split function.

To lose the auto split function would devastating for me as some times I have tapes with 350 cuts in it and would take me a whole day to split that up instead of the 2min that auto split will do it.

You lose a lot of time having to "ride herd" on the input as that means you have to sit there the entire real time your tapes are inputting.

Why are you having to do this, do you not manual white balance your cams and such?

It is easier and more productive to do this using IP Effects rather than Special in most cases as you can apply them straight to the Storyboard so you only have to render those parts you are actually going to use rather than waiting for entire raw footage Scenes to be rendered like Special would require of you.

This will save you a lot of time and you can set it to batch render the various effects during your down time when you are out running errands, having fun and/or sleeping.

As far as AutoSplit, it is a great function if you are shooting a lot of stop and go scenes, but as it sounds like you just run tape on all three views continuously from the beginning of the night's races until the finish it won't do you any good as Auto Split will only detect your tape stoppages (as in Pause, Record, Pause,etc).

The racing is one of the most unusual shoots I ever make. You typically begin around 6:30 in the evening and certain times of the year that's good solid day light. Then the sun starts to go down and the light continually changes. I use auto white balance but I let it adjust at the same place every race and that's good. I have a large sponsors sign in the winners circle probably 80 feet in front of me and I zoom into that and let it adjust then when I go to the front of the race it is fine. When there is a caution I do that again. The color isn't the problem. I don't ride heard on the controls, I usually set the brightness and contrast before each race to compensate for the light. Once the suns down and it is just track lighting things are generally ok. Its the constant change before the suns down and when the track lighting is coming on with a mix of the suns light. Now that's a challenge. When the suns on the horizon and I go down into turn 1, I am almost directly in the sun. I usually zoom in as tight as I can and that gets me around most of it. This track is better than some that I have taped at. One the track layout put me where I was directly in the sun when the cars came out of turn 3 and down the back straight. Again the best way I found to deal with that was a tight zoom. I am going to try the auto split and see how it goes. That IP effects is a new one on me. I'll have to look at that. I usually learn just what I think I need on an editor and use it for years and not know some of what it will do. I guess that by that I have missed a lot of things that can be done. Thanks Bob..

You use IP Effects (menu button is one of the ones down on the right hand lower side of the menu screen) to do the same thing as Special except you Add it directly to the Storyboard and don't have to wait for an immediate Scene render (you choose the when), much more efficient work process.

If you have the most recent OS you can even Stack multiple IP Effects to a Scene or Scenes on the Storyboard at the same time.

I'll try that Tim. I have Operating system 7 I think. I have bunches of stuff to catch up with this week. My 2010 racing season starts Saturday and I have another shoot about 300 miles north and on the other coast. Thanks Bob..