FCP5 and HDV useless

[David Roth weiss]

Bob,

Wondering why, as a regular, how come you didn’t/don’t cross post this on the HDV Forum??? I think everybody over there would be pretty interested to hear this. As someone considering FCP in large part because of its touted HDV handling, I feel lucky to have stumbled upon this.

DRW

[Steve Connor]

Are those times from your G5?

Steve Connor
Cardinal HD

[Sean Oneil]

While otherwise rock solid, I’m having serious rendering issues with the new Final Cut Studio on Tiger. I haven’t tried HDV but I anticipate we’re having the same problem. I opened up an old project (720p uncompressed) that took 45 minutes to render in FCP 4.5. Now it’s telling me it will take 4 hours.

I had another project filled with Live Type and Motion project clips. Hitting “option-R” to render worked for about 30 seconds. Then it gives me an “out of memory” error. I can get the job done by rendering a little bit, hitting cancel, and the rendering a little more, etc.

I opened up a Live Type project in the new Live Type which I had to change one word of text in it. I rendered it to a Quicktime. It got to the 90% mark and then said I was out of memory. I restarted, repaired permissions, yadda yadda, and I still get that error. It worked fine with the Live Type on Panther. My solution was to copy it to a co-worker’s G5 (same as mine) which still had the old pro apps on it. It worked fine.

[Hector Candleleven]

The only solution I can think of is to finish all of your old projects with FCP 4.5 and then move on. You should never upgrade in the middle of a project.

HDV – I think that many people are not using there heads when it comes to HDV. Even if it only took 5 minutes to render a movie there’s nothing you can do with. There are no HD DVD or Blue Ray DVD players. I believe from reading the post on this and other forums that rendering out for DVD will be obsolete. I don’t think broadcast facilities have caught up to HDV yet. I think that where you disappoint comes from is how young this technology stands. You can’t even use a full size tape with HDV.

Down-convert your footage to DV and you can at least use existing-proven-technology until the rest of the world catches up.

[Serge Rodnunsky]

I’m curious if you can send your timeline out to the Z1 and recapture the same timeline back to FCP5 using the Z1’s DV converters.

For features delivering HD masters has become a big deal.

I haven’t gotten FCP5 Sony Z1 yet but currently use DVCPRO HD on FCP4.5.

[Tim O’grady]

This problem is mentioned regularly on this forum and may not have anything to do with your upgrade to FCP 5. I have had this problem twice in FCP 4.x and after doing a search of posts here on the Cow, I was directed to check my media for a corrupted file. Same problem each time, and both times a Photoshop file. Two ways I know of to solve this:

1. Take all your media files offline and reconnect one or two at a time until you find the bad file.

2. Get Disk Warrior and run it on your media drives, it will find any errors on your drives and may indicate to you which file is bad.

You may want to do a search here using key words “Error 34” and “out of memory” to find more info.

Hope that helps.
Good luck.

Tim

[Steve Connor]

“HDV – I think that many people are not using there heads when it comes to HDV. Even if it only took 5 minutes to render a movie there’s nothing you can do with. There are no HD DVD or Blue Ray DVD players.”

So what! There will be and when there is you have a master on HDV! HDV quality in FCP is superb, I have spent two days testing the workflow and quality is outstanding. I basically cut a 3 minute sequence with 40 edits all dissolves. This took just 5 minutes to conform to HDV and was then printed to tape. I then recaptured the sequence into FCP – there was NO visible loss in quality. I then added about 30 seconds of captions, exported again, took 6 minutes this time and the quality was unafffected. OK text is not a pristine as uncompressed but to my eye it was no worse than text in DV.

However at the end of the day, the downconversion from HDV to DV from the M10 recorder is till better than the downconvert in FCP.

Basically I am very very happy with HDV in FCP5!

Steve Connor
Cardinal HD

[Tim O’grady]

My previous post is in response to Sean O’Neils post. My apologies for it’s misplacement.

Tim

[Hector Candleleven]

“So what! There will be and when there is you have a master on HDV! HDV quality in FCP is superb, I have spent two days testing the workflow and quality is outstanding.”

Who here questioned the quality of HDV? We’re talking about workflow. As it stands you CAN”T put HDV footage on today’s DVDs. It’s true that you will someday, but I don’t base my workflow on the promises of tomorrow only on the realities of today.

The original poster has a problem with 1 1/2 sequence. NOT a 3 min sequence. When the rest of technology catches up ( HD DVD, Blue Ray, full-size tapes, DVD players) you’ll see the true benefits of HDV.

So next time, instead of jumping down my throat – READ.

[Steve Connor]

Hector,

firstly don’t shout – I can hear you fine, I wasn’t jumping down your throat, I was expressing an opinion that is different from yours.

If you actually read MY post it IS about workflow, fact is FCP gives you and end to end HDV solution. You actually end up with an HDV master that you can downconvert in realtime to DV for client delivery today, even if you have to split longer programmes on to two tapes. Then when the client comes back in a years time and wants it on HD DVD you have a master ready and waiting. To me that is a much more forward thinking workflow than just converting the whole lot to DV, plus the fact most of our clients want delivery on SD DVD today. If you encode directly from an HDV timeline to mpeg 2 it looks better than from a DV timeline, but it will take longer

May not work for some people, but for what WE need it’s great.

Steve Connor
Cardinal HD