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Sucess story for a change
With so many posts about what goes wrong, I thought it might be nice to share my success story about upgrading to FCS3, because a lot of the credit goes to the many wise and experienced posters who frequent this forum.
My five year old G5 limped across the line on the last series as I waited patiently for Snow Leopard and FCS3. Reading lots of posts and bothering to do a lot of searching, I settled on a complete hardware upgrade to an Octo 2.9 Nehalem grunt box with 16 gigs of RAM, ATI 4870 and a brand new Kona 3.
Not the cheapest option but performance and longevity matter to me. I find it cheaper in the long run. So fresh install, latest Kona drivers and today I find myself successfully grading in Color after careful prep (thanks Walter and others for the tips at the Color forum). Renders are fast, Kona interface fantastic. Zero problems on a machine that will stay lean.
So do the homework and trust the wealth of shared knowledge that this forum offers. It is possible to do a total upgrade in a day and a half in the middle of seven programs and get up to speed on new software. I picked up the Kona at lunchtime and have finished graded and rendered 15 minutes of program by 7pm.
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11 Replies
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Congrats on a successful install and good choice on the machine / graphics card combo.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” now in Post.
Creative Cow Forum Host:
Apple Final Cut Pro, Apple Motion, Apple Color, AJA Kona, Business & Marketing, Maxx Digital. -
Hi Michael,
Great to hear that.
I’m still in Leopard with FC 6.0.5
I bought a NANO-Flash and, I need a bit more of power.
I expect to get a new Mac by the beginning of the next year and will be the moment to update everything.
Anyway, must be because I’m getting old, but I don’t feel the rush to update as before.
I just want a faster FC.
Yes, like the kids,but we have better things to do with my time than watching the blue bar progressing.
Cheers,
rafael -
I was itching to get into Color but patient enough in my old age to wait until FCS3 and reliable round tripping.
I skipped Leopard entirely.
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[Michael Gissing] “I was itching to get into Color but patient enough in my old age to wait until FCS3 and reliable round tripping. “
Round Tripping has been completely reliable for a while now. Really only Final Touch 2.6 and Color 1.0 were the problems.
Unreliable round tripping with Color 1.0.1 – 1.0.4 was 90% caused by people who didn’t follow the correct procedures to set up their timelines. We’ve easily done over 100 projects in Final Touch / Color with only one set of 6 programs having a bad issues during the changeover from FT to Color.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” now in Post.
Creative Cow Forum Host:
Apple Final Cut Pro, Apple Motion, Apple Color, AJA Kona, Business & Marketing, Maxx Digital. -
[walter biscardi] “Round Tripping has been completely reliable for a while now.”
Even with codecs like HDV & XDCam? As I am mostly on docos, they seem to be the most common codes I get delivered. Not many people do the ProRes ingest and even fewer ask me before they capture.
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[Michael Gissing] “Even with codecs like HDV & XDCam? “
XDCAM I didn’t see any issues here. We only did two projects, but didn’t see any issues. It rendered out of Color in ProRes.
HDV we never use natively so I don’t know. But definitely not a recommended codec for Color.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” now in Post.
Creative Cow Forum Host:
Apple Final Cut Pro, Apple Motion, Apple Color, AJA Kona, Business & Marketing, Maxx Digital. -
[walter biscardi] “HDV we never use natively so I don’t know. But definitely not a recommended codec for Color. “
I would agree with Walter completely. We are an HDV & XDCAM shop and I have never many seen issues with XDCAM and Color.
HDV… This is a terrible creature that reared its ugly head at the request of Sony to get out another cheap codec. Working with this monster in FCP is never fun.
I do want to give you a word of warning about HDV-ProRes Capture. This is a great concept BUT when you do this, you video remains in the 1440×1080 aspect. It marries well with XDCAM HD 1440×1080 but not so well with other full res codecs. On top of that… your render times will be terrible.
I found it extremely ironic that Apple created a full res codec and then created a way to capture HDV into it but leaving the aspect alone. This creates a problem with ProRes because its aspect is wrong for the codec.
Just a word of caution…
_______________________________
Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
https://web.mac.com/schazamproductions
schazamproductions@mac.com -
[Wayne Carey] “I found it extremely ironic that Apple created a full res codec and then created a way to capture HDV into it but leaving the aspect alone. This creates a problem with ProRes because its aspect is wrong for the codec.
“I think you have to have a card to stretch the video out to full raster, the software can’t do it by itself in realtime.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” now in Post.
Creative Cow Forum Host:
Apple Final Cut Pro, Apple Motion, Apple Color, AJA Kona, Business & Marketing, Maxx Digital. -
[walter biscardi] “I think you have to have a card to stretch the video out to full raster, the software can’t do it by itself in realtime. “
Yes, Walter…. Its a Kona 3 using the 7.0 drivers. And just to let you know… AJA does not support the 1440 aspect ratio. I just spent the month with tech support pointing out this issue and they have decided that there is a software issue when using non-square pixel formats. AJA software engineering has confirmed this.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
https://web.mac.com/schazamproductions
schazamproductions@mac.com -
I hear the advice. Unfortunately I often get the call to book the post long after the show has been captured and editing is in fine cut stage.
I will experiment with converting to ProRes pre grade and whether software conversion to 1920 looks as good or better than letting the Kona do it on the fly.
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