Adolfo Rozenfeld
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I’m glad it was helpful for you. It’s worth noting, in case this is useful for you in the future, that nowadays 7200 RPM drives go faster than the FW400 transfer ceiling. It’s not uncommon for last generation drives to achieve sustained transfer rates of 60-65 MB/s (FW400’s ceiling is 50 MB/s).
So, in the future, you may consider getting a Firewire 800 or SATA ExpressCard. They can more than accomodate the newer drives’ speed and, with the right adapter cable, Firewire 800 is backwards compatible with Firewire 400: you can connect FW 400 drives using a 6 to 9 pin cable.ExpressCard rocks. PCI Express on a laptop! In a not so distant future, people doing video on laptops will wonder how we lived without it until now 🙂
Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
I meant connect your DV/HDV devices to the built-in port and the hard drive to the ExpressCard port.
Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
Hello, Noah.
Are you familiar with 3D Assistants? Because the Spheroid creator makes stuff like this with text layers in a snap. Actually, AE does: 3D Assistants just automate the process so that it takes 30 seconds instead of 30 hours. They are keyframe assistants like the other ones in AE: they do not add functionality but rather produce complex animation in an automated manner.I enjoy Cinema 4D a lot. One of my favorite applications (Mograph’s Cloner objects would also help in assembling something like this easily, but MG was released later than the Apple NAB spot) But usually, when these things are done in a 3D applications, you notice objects “bend” or adapt to the spherical pattern. This case is typical 2.5D, as in AE or the other applicationes we mentioned. So, if they used a 3D application, they made sure it looked like it was done in a 2.5D tool. So, the relevant thing for the original question is: it can be done in a 2.5D app (like those mentioned before) or in a 3D application but with your hand tied so it doesn’t look like you did it that way 🙂
All the best!Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
No,No, No 🙂
Final Cut Pro is much more specific in terms of what it expects from a Firewire port than a Hard Drive is.
In fact, FCP is expecting the standard Firewire chipsets on a Mac, nothing more, nothing less.
Connect your drive to the built-in Firewire port and the hard drive to the ExpressCard.
This may explain why it didn’t work well.
‘Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
Motion doesn’t have any form of 3D space in its’ current form. Notice that the animation you bring is not just about perspective and Z distance: the objects in the back are, well, in the back. That points to a true 3D space system. It could have been done in Shake, Combustion or After Effects. I believe it is the later, since Imaginary Forces (the people behind many of these Apple animations) use AE a lot, and also because it looks like they could have used 3D Assistants: a tool that helps you assemble complex 3D patterns from plain layers in After Effects. Any other way, it wouldn’t be “human” to animate the construction of a spherical pattern with hundreds of text layers like they did.
If you want Motion to have this kind of 3D space functionality, let them know: start sending those featue requests!
The good news is: If Motion ever goes 3D, what you saw here is very related to the idea of “Replicators”. So, Motion with 3D would really be a weapon of mass destruction!Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
Hello, Ben.
Don’t worry. We are not starting anything 🙂
When I said “wrong” I was only (and really only) commenting Walter’s comment that the signal would go straight to the hard drive. It doesn’t, and I think I explained clearly why it doesn’t.
What’s the bottleneck? You’re right in that it usually works. BUT, beside “bandwidth” there’s another thing called “latency”. How long it takes to go from A to B (and back to B, in this case). Also, there is a signifiicant performance hit, since the Firewire port is not carrying information in one direction but in both, so you have “traffic” between what goes in and what goes out. The Express Card should work better (in the same way, PCI Express works better). By better I don;t mean just getting it to work (the daisy chain thing should work) but things like RT performance, for instance. I know people are using ExpressCards succesfully, so it must be a conflict with the partricular card model, a driver issue or a FCP configuration issue.
All the best!Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
The way I see it, Mike is right and Walter is wrong this time.
I don’t agree with Ben’s remark about moderators. They are many times right and many times wrong. Not to mention the unnecesary comment about reading the manual, since I think I will easily prove he’s wrong and making that kind of comment while being wrong….. 🙂Let’s see…
You connect a DV/HDV device and a Firewire hard drive to a MBP. You have to daisy chain them, since there is only one FW port.It is clear hat the information has to reach the CPU before going to the Firewire drive: FCP has to embed it in a Quicktime file container, flag it with metadata, even transcode it to other codecs in some cases (DVCPRO HD, AIC and Offline RT, for instance). In this scenario, this means going from the camera/deck through the hard drive (acting as a Firewire hub, not a hard drive, get it?) to the CPU and then from there again to the hard drive. The scratch disk setting only states that you want to use that hard drive, but doesn’t solve the bottleneck issue in which the hard drive has to act as a bridge between the video device and the CPU, given the lack of another FW port.
Express Card is essentially PCI Express in portable form. It has tremendous bandwidth, not just for Firewire 400, but also FW 800 and even SATA. These last two would be better alternatives. But the FW400 route should work. Maybe the drivers are too new or not well done, given how new the technology is?
Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
Let’s hope so.
Meanwhile, what prevents you from doing it in the AE way? I mean, in AE when you need a “shape” you create mask in a Solid color layer. In this cases, is there a specific reason why you couldn’t just copy your mask to a Color Solid generator object?Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
It’s the only game in town for the MBP until somebody releases an SD/HD card in ExpressCard/34 form (currently in development by an OEM provider, it seems).
It will work fine. The shortcomings are not specific to using the IO with the MBP, but rather limitations the IO has compared to the faster PCI-X/PCI Express solutions like Kona or Decklink. Among these limitations: more latency, no support in audio applications, random connectivity loss when working with AE or Motion, no Photoshop monitoring included, and above all, no HD nor HD to SD downconversion. A much bigger deal today than, say, two years ago. I have a hard time considering an SD only solution as a really great investment. Still, again, it’s the only working solution with the MBP today.
If you want to use the IO with your MBP, even with DV50 a 7.2 MB/s, you’ll want to take advantage of the ExpressCard port to add external SATA or FW800 ports (both available now). The internal drive is slow and the fact that you are already using it for system and applications make it even slower. This way, you could use a single external drive or even a small external RAID, connected through ESATA (ideally) or FW800. You could use this disk power to have more RT playback in FCP, or even for editing uncompressed.
It could be worth noting that, given the size of the IO and external drives, the idea of this combo being more portable than a tower is somewhat relative,isn’t it? Maybe going for the IO LD (sort of a half IO with just digital I/O and analog component outputs) could be a good idea since it’s half the size and you won’t be capturing Beta SP, which is the main reason for the other half!
Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
Unfortunately, that function doesn’t exist in Motion.
I imagine special case, a frequent visitor to these forums who wrote a little aplication which converts illustrator paths into Motion shapes, could write a script for that, maybe?
I totally feel your pain and remember I placed a feature request for that a long time ago. We should be able to convert, not just masks to shapes and viceversa, but also any of them to motion paths and viceversa. In motion design, the repetition of certain patterns is key. In this context, the ability to have an object move around the contour of another is very important, for example. Or have a masked object surrounded by equivalent shape, as you noticed.
All the bestAdolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com