Workflow and a lag question

[Enzo Tedeschi]

Interesting…

Cutting in SD would be ideal, but I suspect you will run into hassles working with uncompressed SD on that drive. Offlining to DV and back is a good solution if you do hit a brick wall, it’ll just be more complicated if you need to do FX shots.

Hard Drives spin down after a certain amount of idle time to save power and wear, so after they have done that and you access them, there will be a couple of seconds of lag while the drive spins up again.

If you are getting that every single time the drive is accessed, even with only a few seconds between access, then something is amiss.

Enzo Tedeschi
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Editor
Sydney, Australia

[Autorecall2003@yahoo.co.uk]

Hi,

I get the shutting down of the harddrive after maybe 1 minute of not running anything from it. So it’s all the time.

[Autorecall2003@yahoo.co.uk]

What’s the easy way of getting offline DV from the SD uncompressed material?

[David Battistella]

INthe engery saver control panel insystem preferences there is a checkbox that state “put the harddrives to sleep when possible” unselect that box if the DV thing is bugging you. You are seeing the lag NOT BECAUSE OF sleeping drives. It is more because of the DV CODEC. remember codec is short for compress and decompress and the processor has to compress and decompress that codec on the fly all the time. so there will always be slight lag with dv material. Isee it on drives pulling 500MB/sec.

SD to DV.
Capture the D-Beta material using a DV easy setup. Whenn you are finished editing media manage the project with and uncompressed SD sequence and recapture it.

You may need a Video card to capture or just have all of the D-beta TC duped to DV and capture those tapes. I’d get burnin on the dupes just to be safe.

David

I can’t believe it’s not butter!

[Enzo Tedeschi]

David,

I think you have perhaps misunderstood the post.

Yes, there is a lag with DV, but you shouldn’t be waiting seconds, more like a fraction of a second. I definitely think it’s the droves spinning down…

The more painful option if you don’t have the hardware, is to convert your uncompressed SD into DV via software. This will obviously be render intensive depending on how much footage you have may not be an option. You can then re-assign tc to match your SD files inside FCP.

As David suggested, burn-in on your DV files is a must to make sure things don’t go astray. You can add this in FCP as you down-convert.

Enzo Tedeschi
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Editor
Sydney, Australia

[Autorecall2003@yahoo.co.uk]

Thanks David, Enzo

I don’t want to go to the post house 3 times. Only 2 times. One to convert the Digibeta tape to QT files. And one for a TV master.

So I want to convert the material from SD into DV via software in FCP or compressor? I have about 40 minutes of material. And it’s a really good idea to burn in the TC – so I will be shure that it’s the right material I use in the end. How do I convert it the easy way with TC burned in???

Thanks for the advise on how to uncheck the sleep function.

[Enzo Tedeschi]

Take your 40 mins of footage and put it in a sequence in FCP. Make sure your sequence tc matches your clip’s tc. You can change this by Selecting the sequence in the project window, and selecting Timecode from the Modify menu.

Go into your Effects > Video Filters > Video, and find the Timecode Reader, drop it onto your clip and voila! TC burnin.

Export your timeline as a DV codec quicktime movie, and this will perform your conversion. When you re-import the DV files into your project, you can reset the timecode of each clip to match the burnin (and hence the original file) via the same Modify > Timecode method mentioned above.

Hope this helps… Good Luck!

Enzo Tedeschi
____________________________
Editor
Sydney, Australia

[Autorecall2003@yahoo.co.uk]

Thanks very much.

[Enzo Tedeschi]

You’re welcome. Let us know how you go.

Enzo Tedeschi
____________________________
Editor
Sydney, Australia