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Punks and perfection — The instability debate
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Cory and Mike,
For the record, though it may seem so, no one here (myself included) denies that either of you has legitimate issues that need to be resolved. I think that Cory’s level of frustration became very evident, and perhaps that frustration level was so high on Friday that he felt the need to “vent” it in a very big way, and for me that level was just hard to listen to. Sorry about that Cory…
The problem is, as frustration levels rise, emotions rise, and communication and cooperation within groups tends to suffer. The Dog Whisperer talks about this phenomenon all the time.
So, in the effort to keep this pack happy and cooperative, let me suggest that when things get really frustrating, resist the temptation to let that frustration get emotions flowing. That’s the time to remain calm and take the time to post something like, “heck, I’m really getting frustrated and I can’t figure out how to solve the issues I’m having, can anyone please help.” Discussing that high level of frustration will elicit vastly more cooperation from a group than venting loudly or acting out on that frustration.
I sincerely hope this helps in some small way to get the pack (okay the herd) back on track…
The Cow Whisperer,
DavidDavid Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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[Dave Jenkins] “some problems can’t be solved in a forum. If you can’t get answers here then you need to bring someone into your facility to go through your systems. Not someone from the local Mac shop who says he knows FCP. You need someone who builds these systems to help you.”
This is my thought as well. There’s an explanation for anything and everything that doesn’t work, and if you can’t find it yourself, then you need to hire someone who can.
And, there are lemons in this world and lemon laws to protect consumers. If indeed you’ve got one, they need to be replaced as soon as you can.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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[CoryTV] “Shane #1) You’re right, this is not an optimal practice on FCP. I agree with you 100% here. But did you give him a workaround? No, you proceeded to tear him down for several paragraphs.”
Don’t try to edit with footage that isn’t intended to be edited with. WMV is a delivery codec, not an editing one…I said that. Workaround? Don’t download WMV files from the internet. GET source footage. DOn’t have access to source footage? Why? Who are you stealing this video from? Don’t say “the client put it there for me to grab and edit…” that is laughable.
Workaround? With Flip4Mac installed, open the clip in QT and export it into an editable format, like DV/NTSC. Make sure to adjust the resolution to match…720×480.
[CoryTV] ”
Shane #2)So, you say it’s a “UN TYPICAL” use for FCP. Again, I agree with you 100% here. It’s un-typical, but that doesn’t make it wrong, or invalid.”SURE it is…FCP isn’t designed to edit WMV files…only with the advent of third party apps is WMV even visible in QT. But still not designed to be edited with. So no…I don’t suggest editing WMV with FCP…not meant for this.
[CoryTV] “What if you had an application you were doing tutorials or demos for, and you wanted to do these in FCP. What if it was a windows application? WMV has a fantastic “screen” video encoder which is made for just this purpose, and FCP’s mixed-resolution timeline (should) be a perfect match for this–“
Don’t use those apps if you intend on editing the footage. Those apps aren’t intending the WMV to be edited, because…AGAIN…no editing software on the professional level is designed to edit a web delivery codec. Use Vegas if it will help…I hear that edits anything.
Want to do tutorials? Use screen capturing software that delivers EDITABLE formats. iShowU is Mac, so is SNAPZ Pro. Surely there are many PC ones that encode to AVI. Then if you must, convert those AVIs to MOVs using QT pro or something. Plenty of options, just make sure that the footage you capture is editable.
Mixed timelines…OK…where in ANY Apple presentation did they mention mixing WMV files, or AVI, or h.264…or Sorenson…or any other WEB DELIVERY CODEC? Nowhere. They talk about mixing the ones designed for editing…DV25, DVCPRO HD, HDV, Uncompressed 10-bit, AVCHD converted to ProRes. ALL codecs designed for editing. Again…no claim is made about web deliver codecs, so don’t complain when it doesn’t work. No one says it will. It is only possible thru third party apps, and is OPTIMAL…so if it doesn’t work smoothly…gee, wonder why?
Guess you are asking me to shut my pie hole and let people try to use FCP for things it isn’t designed for. OK…I can do that.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net -
FWIW it’s interesting that the macbook pro is more stable – this is the machine which by definition is more ‘standard’ than your desktops. You’ve already mentioned that removing the kona helps things so I’d say it’s almost certainly some bit of hardware (capture card or controller) or its associated driver which isn’t playing well with everything else.
I think I’d be stripping everything out and trying the same actions with just final cut running on internal drives to see whether the crashing recurs. Hopefully adding things bit by bit will throw up where the problem lies. Do you have a note of when you had a stable configuration that you could roll back to?
Please don’t think I’m patronising you, there’s nothing more irritating than not being to trace a problem back and you sound very knowledgable but sharing of thoughts is what this place is all about. Good luck getting things sorted.
PS I’ve read somewhere that QT 7.2 is causing grief to a lot of people, could this be your problem??
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I’m one of the few that has very little if any stability issues.
I have to echo Shane’s comments that a dedicated “editing only” system is going to have less issues and thats exactly why I don’t have them.
I too have had to deal with .wmv and even dvd’s as source material. From my perspective its pretty crazy to be using
such low quality sources as material for TV commercials, but it is what it is and thats what some clients are forced to do now.When it comes to that, for me there is only one solution.
Convert whatever the source is, into an uncompressed or prores quicktime file that I know FCP will not have a problem dealing with.
I do this with my trusted and used daily copy of Mpeg Stream clip. I have not seen any watermarks though and you shouldn’t either with the free flip4mac .wmv reader. I’m not sure why it would do that.
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Your entire argument revolves around what Final Cut pro is and is not designed for, as if you have decided it, and so therefore it must be. This is a fallacious argument.
If it supports importing footage at any resolution in a given format, guess what? it’s designed for that.
If it wasn’t designed to do something, it wouldn’t support it at all. It would forcefully limit the codecs you could use to “recommended”
Not that you care, but the screen codec that’s a part of the WMV spec nearly-losslessly creates unlimited resolution files– as you are well aware, screen resolutions <> video resolutions, and many times exceed them (especially SD) My point was if you wanted to capture a 1280×1024 or 1440×1280 of your application, and use FCP to zoom in and out on it in a SD timeline, that would be an extremely valid use– and a perfect use of a WMV file with the screen codec– a tiny file. As video codecs don’t support non-standard resolution, your only option would be to capture an uncompressed AVI, and that sir, is sheer insanity.
My point is not that this is going to come up a lot, it’s just that every option doesn’t fit inside what you personally have decided FCP was “MEANT” to do. What if you’re doing a documentary on video on the web, and your only source is WMV? You would force everyone to transcode something manually rather than just throw it in the timeline? That, sir, is insanity.
Your various suggestions involving additional steps as workarounds serve to demonstrate EXACTLY what drives me nuts with cult of Mac’ers. To come forward with a convoluted or more difficult solution than something that should (or in this case does) work in another, easier way is insanity– a bizarre form of self-flaggelation.
All of your workarounds and obsession with “designed for FCP” have to do with RT performance. That’s not always needed– and again, having an oversized (larger resolution) WMV with SCREENCAP codec, virtually lossless, tiny filesize is far superior to having a downrezzed clip that works in RT.
To recap
1: You don’t get to decide what FCP is or is not designed for.
2: Your interpretation of “open timeline” is dead wrong, and I can prove it. If you take a 320×240 video and put it into an SD timeline, FCP will automatically scale it to fit the timeline. Therefore, it is, in fact, DESIGNED to be exactly that — open to any form of media that can be imported. Would you argue that non standard size media– like say a still graphic is not what FCP is “DESIGNED FOR”? No. Of course not. If it’s digital media that can be imported into FCP, it is therefore usable in a timeline. Inherent limitations like no RT? Sure, that’s part of the deal, but if it wasn’t designed for it, IT WOULDNT WORK AT ALL.
3: Please don’t reply to people who are having problems and need help by crapping on them like this– cause that’s what you’re doing.. Coming up to someone who is injured on the side of the road and taking a dump on them. Stop it. If you don’t want to stop and offer help, fine, just don’t be a rotten Samaritan.
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[CoryTV] “Shane, this is exactly the sort of ‘punk’ behavior I was talking about. You didn’t help the guy, he made it very clear in his post that this was a stopgap measure, and you have exhibited that PRECISE cult-of-mac attitude which drives people like me insane.
Cory,
Whether you like or not, people can’t help but react in a negative way to anyone who responds to a level-2 crisis with a level-10 response. You needn’t hammer home your level of frustration, its clear that its very high, you’ve brought more than enough attention to that fact.
The question is, do you really want to alienate all of the most helpful, knowledgeable, and willing people here, or do you want to solve the vexing problems that are the real source of your “insanity?” Only you can make that decision. But, I assure you, continue down the road you’re on and no one will want to help you.
David
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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It’s really simple. Apple has a “my way or the highway” philosophy. The do not believe WMV files should work in Final Cut. Just like they don’t believe MP3 files should. That’s what comes down to more than anything. But its not a simple as you think.
Final Cut and Quicktime are based on very old code. Part of the reason Premiere Pro doesn’t have these limitations is because Mircrosoft’s Directshow works much differently than Quicktime, and Adobe designed their own video renderer for Premiere Pro, which in turn was recently created from the ground up (2004 I believe). This probably had a lot to do with why Premiere Pro was not released for the Macintosh until just this year.
Quicktime cannot just edit, remux, and render any random intraframe codec. It WASN’T designed to do this. Period. Look at how clunky HDV editing is (HDV is an intraframe codec just like VC-1 WMVs). They obviously struggled to make HDV and IMX work. And those intraframe codecs use a GOP stucture that is far more edit-friendly than VC1. So it’s not like they can just flip a switch and make MPEG2, VC1, h264, etc. work. Final Cut uses legacy technology. And Apple also believe it isn’t necessary, and that professionals do not need to do this with any type of regularity. And in this case, they are right. VC-1 is not designed for editing. And just because you can get it to work in Premiere Pro, doesn’t mean Adobe or anyone else thinks its a good idea. This is the type of workflow that is slow, clunky, and lossy. No matter what NLE you manage to do it on.
Some people here (particularly Cow leaders) agree with Apple’s philosophy. On top of that, many people who are trying to make FCP what it is not designed for (and you are wrong – it was NOT designed for certain tasks) appear unprofessional. Many haven’t read the manual. And many will not consider alternative ways of doing things (like converting the WMV to something else, perhaps?). This annoys people. And you get obnoxious replies to it. That’s the way it works around here. Like it or not.
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> I see from more than one topic that the testiness over FCP
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Mike,
Obviously there is a lot of passion out there about all sorts of issues, but at this moment I’m reformatting my Dual Quad core Mac Pro, because of exactly the issue of instability in FCP Studio 2.
I’ve been using FCP since 2000 editing HD, beginning with the first Cinewave boards that were delivered and have not run into this sort of instability since those early days of FCP 2.
I too have spent hours on the phone with AJA and Apple trying to solve the various issues I’ve run into. The last apple solution was to create a new user and see of that helped an issue I was having in Motion.
It actually solved my Motion problem and for the first time I was actually sble to see the automatic guides. However it also caused Compressor to crash everytime I opened it and now I get File IO errors when I try to render my FCP timeline, plus on my last launch of the project I’m workign on now, all my renders have dissappeared, plus analysis of retiming files and smoothcam files are gone.
It will be interesting to see if the reformat helps. By the time I reinstall everything I may have an answer tomorrow.
I do agree rather than swapping insults or putting those of us down that are asking for some help or opinion it would be a lot more productive if those who are, or consider themselves experts, thow a bone or two to those of us that may be having a problem. I’m no expert, but I have released over 70 hours of HD television programming since 2000, so I do have a little experience with the program.
Thanks for eloquently presenting what many of us feel.
It’s also a shame that in this particular string that someone jumps into it with a problem that should have been addressed in a sperate post, which distracts the entire thread from your original post.
thx….jw
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