trim forward

Properly setting up Dell 24" displays on a Mac

I just discovered that you have to fiddle with a Dell display to get it to look right on a Mac.

After my main editing system died last week in the middle of a project (long story), I had to quickly switch and finish the project on my macbook. It was a 720P project on an external hard drive, so this was no problem.

So I unplugged one of my Dell 24" displays from the dead computer, and set it up as a secondary monitor for the macbook. What I noticed through this process was that the footage looked way brighter on the macbook screen than it did on the Dell screen.

I went fiddling in the physical menu of the monitor, and what I discovere was a setting on the monitor menu that changed everything!

Open the menu, and use the buttons to go over to "Color Settings". Next to "Color Settings Mode", you'll see PC Mode and MAC Mode. The interface sucks here... light blue means selected, and bright white means unselected. So unbeknownst to me, I had been in PC Mode for a whole year! I switched to Mac Mode, and all of a sudden, the screen colours brightened up and matched the macbook perfectly.

BTW: I highly recommend Dell 24" displays. They are reasonably priced, and absolutely comparable in quality to the 23" Apple Cinema displays. I like them better because they are a bit bigger, a lot more adjustable, and have a black frame instead of silver.

Editing slow motion HVX200 footage into a 24p timeline

I ran across a situation where the camera operator had to do some handheld shots out the window of a moving car, and decided to shoot them at 60fps, hoping that making the shot slow motion would smooth out the shot a bit. He didn't tell me about this, and so when I dropped the footage on my 24p timeline (after a P2 import), it not only wanted to render it, but it was playing at real speed, rather than slow motion.

So that's not going to work... what do I do?

The solution after the jump...

Hints for problems unsolved

As editors, new technologies make things exciting, but also severely complicate our lives. I find myself regularly searching for solutions to problems that occur with new software versions, new camera formats, etc. A lot of the time I don't find the answer, and end up having to figure it out myself.

The primary purpose of this blog is to allow me to make my findings available to others, to help independent directors, shooters and editors who are dealing with new technologies maximize quality by minimizing workflow mistakes. As a byproduct, I hope to get a few questions answered myself.

Expect to see workflow notes for everything from PXL2000 to XDCAM, from web compression to blu-ray production. Additionally, I'm a believer that Final Cut Studio on a $2000 computer can do almost anything.

Along the way, I may post about new products, but I will generally try to stay focussed on products I'm currently using. In real life, I hesitate to recommend solutions to people if I don't understand them myself, and that will apply here too.

Stay tuned.