Those who have switched, how are you getting on?

[Walter Biscardi]

[John Davidson] ” Oh, and it took 90 seconds to import a 30 second clip in prores. There’s no way I’m going back to that.”

You don’t import a ProRes Clip, you use AMA for that. It comes in near instantly. Took me a little while to figure that one out too.

[John Davidson] “We tried premiere and playback didn’t work right on both a screen and external monitor using Kona 3. I hear about enough little glitches in premiere to where I don’t have any desire to go further.”

Need to be on an 8 core minimum machine to make ProRes work with AJA Kona board.

There are more “gotchas” in Premiere Pro than Avid, but it’s pretty easy to pick up, especially if you use Richard Harrington’s book.

In both cases, Avid / Adobe, workflows are much faster than cutting with FCP 7. Our clients have noticed because they no longer have time to have coffee, read emails and play games on the computer because Log and Transfer is gone. We are literally trimming hours off some edits just by not transcoding anything. So not sitting still on FCP 7 is already paying dividends for us and our clients.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.

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[John Davidson]

I’ve been wondering if promos translate as well compared to most edit styles on the cow. We don’t do long string outs so renders aren’t really an issue for us. It’s completely possible that the other systems are better for longer form. That said, I also feel that X isn’t really suited for promos either. All that metadata stuff is kind of irrelevant when all you’re looking for is :30 to 2:00 of awesomeness.

I had heard that AMA was best for preview purposes. Is that wrong?

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Shane Ross]

AMA used to be just a way to access footage that you then convert. But with each update it gets better, and now Avid allows native editing of many formats via AMA.

I too cut promos, that is most of what I do lately. I still need separate track access and control (most of the time my mix is the final mix, and I have strict audio deliverable configs), external viewing (as I do the final color), and capture of non-FireWire formats.

Gobs of metadata is useless to me I watch the footage, make my notes, and cut. I tried FCX for one promo as a test and it was just all backwards for me. Heck, Avid is a bit much for what I do with Promos, and for a while didn’t do a few things I needed (audio wise). FCP 7 is perfect for my spots

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Rafael Amador]

Still on FCP.7 and without any rush to change.
When I’ll need to change I’ll go PP but not sure about the platform.
The economy around here only has permitted people to shift to FCP during the last three years and FCP just became the industrial standard recently.
In Macs or Hackintosh, they will keep working with FC.7 for a few year whatever happen in the rest of the world and this will be like that in many countries.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Helmut Kobler]

Frank, has the switch to the z800 been pretty smooth?

I’m continuing to give FCP X a chance, but if I’m not happy with the next update, or Apple seems like it’s too unreliable, I’ve been thinking about moving over from my 2009 Mac Pro to a Z800 and CS 5.5 and possibly Avid as well.

I love the Z800’s expandability. I could add anything i want to that beast, including some nice graphics cards. But my last PC experiences 3-5 years ago on XP only reinforced my desire to keep as far away from Windows as possible. I know Windows 7 is supposed to be better/more reliable.

Thanks!

——————-
Documentary Camera in Los Angeles
http://www.lacameraman.com

[Frank Gothmann]

Hi Helmut,

I have been using Win7 on Bootcamp MacPros for quite a while and although it hasn’t been my main day-in-day-out OS so far I always found it very stable, flexible and trouble free. I am actually looking forward to digging deeper into its bowels and spent more time with it. There is some stuff I like better in OSX but there are also elements that I find flat-out superior on Win7. Nothing out of the ordinary when moving from one OS to another – relearning, changing ones way of thinking, looking for helpful shareware to replace things one has gotten used to on the Mac side, some googling for tips and fine-tuning.
The z800s is the best workstation I ever had my hands on. Yes, its expandability is absolutely amazing, as is its horsepower in combination with Cuda.
All our add-on cards work smooth, no crashes, no blu-screens. So far the only issue has been the inability to encode to Prores on the Win side but DNX-HD looks like it can fill that spot just beautifully.

[Chris Harlan]

[Shane Ross] “FCP 7 is perfect for my spots
“

Here, here! Best promo machine ever.

[Timothy Auld]

Yes, and I do that. But that’s not the same as actually being able to toggle back and forth between two timelines.

bigpine

[Timothy Auld]

Amazing what you don’t know even after working with something so long. Thanks for the tip.

bigpine

[Andrew Richards]

[Darren Kelly] “The PC, which I built from scratch cost me less than $2K, has 13.5TB of storage, 16GB of RAM and 6 cores (It’s an AMD – I’d like to move up to the Bulldozer 8 core this winter).”

You might be better off with today’s AMD chip, or so I read.

Best,
Andy