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I’m coming to this a little late but I have to say great question braker!! I thought it was perfectly worded and I’m sorry it seemed to produce some defensive responses along with honest attempts to answer it for you.

I seriously doubt that Final Cut Pro can composite, cc or do anything else with ProRes video without decompressing first, seems as though it must decompress, composite and/or apply effects, recompress to ProRes and pass it back to the IO HD to be decompressed again for monitoring. (Sorry for repeating exactly what you outlined in the initial question, just want to get it completely straight for myself too). Anyway to me it seems like getting a laptop to do all that compression/decompression in software, when you have the codec in hardware sitting on the IO box doesn’t make a lot of sense, as does that final recompression to ProRes purely to put across the firewire cable to be decompressed again.

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who expected a bit more from the box, don’t get me wrong, it’s great for what it does, I just wish they’d put a PCI-E or eSATA connection on it too so I could capture uncompressed if my drives could handle it, or pass it data and put that hardware to work as I edit.

Do I have it wrong?

Glennser

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I’ve been playing around with Genuine Fractals and it can do some really cool stuff, it does get an “artistic” look to it which I recognize from large poster and billboards. I tested it against Blowup and it was hard to pick one over the other as far as results go, they both have demos available and are worth checking out, one job could pay for them.
Is it just me or does anyone else have a deep seated hatred of people talking dpi in reference to digital imaging, for scanning and print it has a purpose but otherwise I find it confusing and meaningless…
Glennser

PS I didn’t mean anyone here was misusing dpi, just that I’ve had some bad experiences trying to explain to people that unless you’re printing or scanning dpi is meaningless, or had them explain to me that a 1000px square image can’t be used in an after effects comp for standard def because it only has 72 dpi…

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Thanks for the advice guys, it really was with CS3 in mind that I wanted it, can’t wait for it to ship.
Glennser

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Sorry Bob but I also have to agree with Jeremy and Gary and do not appreciate being called a moron for working at 23.98 fps instead of 29.97, please tell me why I would have the deck insert pulldown during capture when I could capture progressive 23.98, work at that framerate and then insert pulldown if necessary on the fly during output if I want it?
I think you’d be surprised at how practical the universal master workflow is too, we deliver pal and ntsc as well as HD and working at 23.98 is great for us.
True most of our source material comes from feature films but I’m not going to attempt to persuade every DP, director and client in the world that 23.98 is for morons, that’s what they want and dammit that’s what they’ll get.

Glennser

PS can you explain your workflow for delivering PAL and ntsc from 59.94 source material? Once you break the cadence removing pulldown is a real pain and shooting at 59.94 is never going to look good at 25fps

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Thanks Guys,
I did flash the firmware on the card and install all the latest drivers when I was trying to get it to work before NAB, I know new ones were coming out pretty quickly then which led me to believe it was an Apple-ATTO problem, I’ll check again as soon as I get back in the office.

ruslan_3d, has everything been OK since you switched to the Apple fibre card? Damn those things aren’t cheap, if there is a known problem with the ATTO cards I wish I’d heard about it before buying it.

Luke do you think the ATTO really is the problem? Is it another case of Apple screwing over 3rd party developers and just a matter of time before ATTO get up to speed? As it is I’m pretty annoyed that they didn’t even put one legacy PCI slot on the mainboard so we wouldn’t have to purchase all new boards when upgrading the machine, it adds up as we have 5 stations to do, new fibre and decklink cards for each…. typical Apple mentality

It’s definitely some PCI-e conflict as it would sometimes work for a couple of hours but the machine would eventually lock up and lose one of the cards when it came back up, unfortunately the only way I could get it to show up was reseat the card but it looks like a complete shutdown might work too, thank goodness that bloody card as been in and out like a yo-yo trying to get this to work, the whole thing is in rack too which doesn’t make it any easier (sorry I know you don’t want to hear my whinging and crying…).

Thanks again,
Glennser

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I remember seeing a cool way of laying thing out in a grid using the layer index, the expression set the first position, then each layer was that position plus an offset multiplied by the layer index, all you had to do was duplicate the layers and they spread out in a grid automatically.
Sorry I can’t remember what tutorial it was in, pretty sure it was Dan Ebberts.

Glennser

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Corner pinning does have some gotchas that drive me nuts sometimes (Layer co-ords vs Comp co-ords is the big one). Your description is pretty good but even still I’m not 100% certain of what exactly the problem is do I’m going to suggest my own fix when I get this stuff wrong.

I would recommend leaving the corner-pinned elements in the comp you built them, turn off the background layer you used to track the corners into place and then nest that whole comp into the 486 comp with the original footage, if it’s not already filling the whole comp without spilling over the edges (if all your PAR’s are right it should fit perfectly) use Cmd+Opt+F to “fit to fill”, usually that just locks everything back in the right place and corrects mistakes with PAR, almost like corner pinning it back in without the hassle of motion. (Don’t collapse transformations though as it will mess it up again
)
Good luck, I’ve had some hellish weeks getting corner pinning to look nice, if it’s off at all you get a horrible wiggle effect.
Glennser

PS the advice so far was spot on, I always find with PAR stuff once you get the interpretation right After Effects will look after the rest, when in doubt fit to fill usually fixes it for me though.

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I’ve been able to open and edit files in notepad/textedit without any problem, saving as plain text and then manually adding the .jsx extension. I don’t want to get annoying but as someone else asked you are positive the os isn’t hiding the extensions on you?
Whether AE lets you “see” a script file to select it should be dependent on the name alone as far as I’m aware.
Glennser

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You could also trace the layer directly in After Effects using the Layer/Auto-trace command, I’ve had some surprizingly good results recently, don’t know how they’d compete with Live Trace though.

Glennser

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It’s a while since we’ve used them but when they do work they are definitely the best plugins for format/framerate/deinterlace/deartifact processing, I’ve been experimenting with everything available for years (Twixtor, Retimer, Kronos/Timewarp, Optical Flow) and Algolith is the best so far. I seem to remember a lot of crashes, for example each time I applied the effect to a layer, and those annoying popups about framerate and pixel aspect ratio having to match all the time get old pretty quick. When they do work it’s worth it though. Of course some framerate conversions are never going to work without leaving some kind of artifacts or cleanup.

What kind of errors are you having and what do you have to convert? I know we had trouble with the one-week mac license and they gave us a free week on the PC to make up for it, that was a couple of versions ago but they were decent on the phone/email.

Andrew Kramer’s preset it sweet but the quality of the results, especially if you have to deinterlace don’t compare with those of Algolith, (in no way is that Andrew’s fault, just different plugins) they have some great algorithms but are buggy. I used to always set it up with CAPS on, also never jump around the timeline as most of these plugins have caching problems. Another thing to remember is that resulting frames will look slightly different depending on where you start rendering as they progressively calculate the motion frame by frame (rendering in reverse will not produce matching frames with forward if you try to make a quick patch or add machines to your render, they are usually pretty close, just not exactly the same).

I also seem to remember the most stable version was on PC using image sequences instead of Quicktimes but now that I think of it that could have been Kronos and not Algolith.

I considered buying the standalone application, maybe it’s better? Has anyone used it?

Let us know how you get on with it, despite the hassle we might buy it soon.

Glennser