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FCP to Premiere Pro CS5 with MXO2 mini questions
I’ve been using FCP for 10 years, and I’ve had premiere in my Adobe production bundle since CS3. I use the matrox mxo2 mini for in/out. Since it also works with Premiere, and the latest premiere seems to have some great features I thought I’d do a few tutorials and such. I’ve been able to open some ProRes 422 1080i projects and also bring in some prores 1080i clips. But just in browsing around I found one thing that might be a bug. I’ve got the matrox player for the editing mode, and have a new sequence setup with the matrox mxo2 1920x1080i preset. All seems to be well and the clips play back in the sequence with no rendering needed. But they consistently drop frames unless I put them on 1/2 res. FCP wouldn’t have even blinked at playing back these files (from a GRaid esata drive). So maybe I need to do something to optimize playback. But the bug I found was that if I turn on the title safe in the program monitor, when I hit play it goes to white. I have to muck around for awhile turning settings on and off until it will go back to the actual program view. All the while the matrox outputs just fine. Dropping frames of course. And it seems that if you turn off report dropped frames, it keeps playing, but keeps drifting farther and farther out of audio sync. So bear with me, this stuff doesn’t seem to happen unless using the mxo2, so wondering if it’s just a bug or what. mxo2 is the latest, premiere is the latest, and OSx is the latest.
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7 Replies
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Another follow-up. If I have a composition, and it’s edit mode isn’t matrox player, can I never play it out the matrox mxo2? So sequences are tied to specific hardware? Surely I’ve got this wrong.
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Premiere doesn’t know the Matrox hardware exists without installing the Matrox drivers and Adobe plug-in software. Even after installing the plug-in, Premiere still doesn’t “see” the Matrox hardware in its native mode – you need to choose a Matrox sequence preset, which in turn works with the plug-in to run the Matrox hardware.
This is the same if you get an AJA or BlackMagic I/O device as well, you’d need to run their preset to utilize their hardware. In other words, no matter which I/O device you get, you still need to run that companies preset to access their hardware in Premiere.
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
I have done exactly that. I thought I put that in the post. What I find a little odd, is that the sequence code for the matrox 1080 presets is a matrox mpeg 2 codec. Does that mean that the matrox is converting the pro res media to an mpeg format on the fly for output? As well, what if I wanted to switch the output of the sequence to different hardware? Say monitor 2 or my dv deck.
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My reply was aimed at your second post, regarding playback of non-Matrox sequences through the MXO2 hardware.
Regarding your last post – for CAPTURE, MXO2 can use the Matrox MPEG-2 I-Frame codec. This does not affect other formats that you drop on the timeline, it just plays them back directly, there is no conversion happening.
About sending to other outputs – you would not be able to send an HD sequence out to a DV deck through Premiere in any case for monitoring, thjis would require Premiere to both downconvert and convert to a DV signal on the fly. And not sure why you would want to use “Monitor 2” when you have an MXO2 device to feed a REAL video signal out through.
Jeff
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Thanks. Just stuff I’m used to being able to do easily in FCP. As to why, what if you’re using different machines? Say a laptop and your home system. If the sequence is a matrox sequence, seems you’d be up the creek when you try to use your laptop. Or perhaps your hdmi monitor is out for service and you’d like to use your second computer lcd. Or maybe your matrox is out for service or in the field and you’ve got your monitor hooked up to your DVCam. About a million different reasons to want to switch back and forth and I’ve used them all.
Basically, I’m trying to figure out some of the basic ins and outs. I like the power of premiere pro for sure,especially the power of AE intergration, mercury, and the real title tool, but some of the editing workflow seems to date back to much earlier versions of fcp. No program has it all of course.
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MXO2 Mini can be used with a laptop if it has an Expresscard/34 interface. A Matrox sequence can be copied into an Adobe-native sequence if need be (though Matrox effects would not be available, but there are just a couple anyway).
Regarding monitoring via DV connection – this is only good for an SD project, an HD project will not output a preview via DV
Jeff
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HD plays out DV in FCP no problem. It’s kind of a progressive low rez, but works really well. After Effects will do the same basic thing.
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