Monitoring

Figuring out and dealing with monitoring HD out of my editing suite has been a real pain. Having received the digitized files from VideoArts, odell and I were anxious to compare them to the Bonolabs files. The Dell 2405FPW arrived, and we were excited to finally get a true idea what the hd files would look like to push the film side of my footage forward.
It didn't look very good, at first..
The Dell monitor is fine for a computer graphics monitor, but it was aweful for displaying video. The color and scaling were terrible, and even worse, every time we tried feeding it a 1080 23.976PsF input, my Blackmagic card hung, and the G5 had to be rebooted. This was true for both the component output, and viewing through a HDlink my dealer let me borrow for testing. (The image was better with the HDlink, but not enough to justify its cost..)
So, today I arranged for the return of the Dell monitor, and purchased a Sony KLV-S26A10 HDTV to use as a monitor. Setup was much simpler, and everything is looking much better.

We still have not received the images from SpyPost yet, but this is the trade-off we currently see with the 2 options for telecine.. the images from Bonolabs are soft. The images coming though HDcam are full of noise. Which is better for downrezing to SD? We're trying to figure it out.

However, dealing with the video footage, the edit is going well. The 2004 part of the film is very different now from how it was in May, and much improved. We are just beginning to work on the 2005 material's incorporation, which is also going well so far. We are on track to have another edit done by Thanksgiving as hoped, due to both odell and I working long long hours.
There will be additional work to do later, as UNHCR has gotten back to me that they are not going to release the footage I asked for until they see the cut we are about to complete, kind of a catch-22. odell will probably need some additional time with the film footage too.

It would be nice to have the film footage online by the next update I write!
David