Alan Okey
5
COW Coins
2
DaVinci Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[John Pale] “any benefit of working with DV captured as ProRes or Uncompressed will be lost if you master back to DV tape”
“Mastering” to DV tape is an oxymoron. It would be far better to master to a ProRes file and either archive it to a Blu-ray data disc or wait for the opportunity or budget to lay it off to a higher quality tape format like Digital Betacam or DVCPRO 50.
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The Sony PXU-MS240 Mobile Storage Unit is a portable and lightweight recording device which makes it easy to transfer and store footage recorded on SxS cards. By using proprietary mobile drives, the PXU-MS240 can transfer XDCAM EX footage and extremely high rates, making it ideal for field archiving. With the ability to store up to 11 hours of footage on one drive, the unit is versatile enough for shooting documentaries, indie films and weddings. With the ability to connect to a PC or Mac via both eSATA and USB 2.0, the drive is both fast and flexible, no matter what your workstation requires.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/659880-REG/Sony_PXU_MS240.html
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[glen Berdan] “Shame on me sir, but i have a problem with my PVM 20L5 monitor…i accidentally turn that AGING mode on the service menu..now i dnt know a way to exit it manually, i am hoping someone here can help me.
many thanks.”
I’ve been there myself. Just press and hold the front panel input selector for whichever input is selected when you started aging mode, i.e. LINE A, LINE B or RGB/COMP.
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[Shane Ross] “Poo is poo.”
Quote of the month!
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[trevor ambrose] “Any suggestions as to what the best 4TB Raid drive there is for the money? “
Ask 10 people and you’ll get 10 different answers. Just click on an of the banner ads on the Cow for reputable, reliable storage solutions from proven, trustworthy vendors including CalDigit, Dulce Systems and Maxx Digital.
My personal recommendation for best bang for the buck is the CalDigit HDElement:
https://www.caldigit.com/HDElement/
Some general truths:
-SAS or eSATA RAID products offer much higher performance than any Firewire 800 product.
-RAID arrays with dedicated hardware controllers are preferable to software-based RAIDs.
[trevor ambrose] “Also, just to clarify…
If one drive within the raid goes down the other drives will rebuild the media…
that’s the way raid drives work, is it? “Only if it’s RAID 5. RAID 0 has no redundancy. You won’t likely encounter RAID 3 or RAID 4 products anymore, and RAID 6 is most likely out of your price range.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
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[josh litle] “Regarding the monitoring question, yes I am monitoring on the desktop. That is why I tried creating RGB Tiff files – so I could compare the processed images in the same format in the same app (Photoshop). “
Your video files are not RGB. Uncompressed 10-bit and ProRes 422 are both YCrCb codecs, not RGB. By viewing them on a computer monitor in RGB colorspace, you’re at the mercy of Quicktime Player’s YCrCb to RGB conversion, plus Quicktime’s notorious gamma issues. The inconsistencies you see are most likely the result of how the files are being (incorrectly) displayed in RGB colorspace by Quicktime Player, not necessarily a problem with the video codecs themselves.
Keep in mind that the only way to accurately view and evaluate the color of your video files is on a proper broadcast monitor and/or hardware scopes fed by a proper video I/O device like an AJA Kona card. Trying to compare them in Quicktime Player on a computer monitor will not yield accurate results for a multitude of reasons.
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[josh litle] “I recently had a film color corrected in Scratch and rendered out to Quicktime Apple Uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2 codec. I then made a ProRes HQ export of this movie. Guess what? They don’t look the same. There are definite and obvious color and gamma shifts between the uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2 and the ProRes-compressed 10-bit 4:2:2. “
The most important piece of information that’s missing here is how you are monitoring these two files. Are you monitoring the output on a broadcast monitor by doing an A/B between the two different files in FCP, or are you looking at them in Quicktime player on your computer monitor?
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Let me offer an alternative opinion. I don’t see the logic in scaling up in an HD timeline, then scaling down the entire sequence to fit in an SD sequence. That’s introducing two iterations of scaling, and FCP’s scaling algorithm is not that great to begin with.
As an alternative I would suggest simply cutting in an SD timeline and dropping your HD clips into the SD sequence. The HD clips will automatically be scaled down to fit the SD frame. If you click on the motion tab in FCP’s viewer, you will be able to see by what percentage the HD frame has been scaled down to fit the SD frame. You should then be able to increase the scaling back up to as much as 100% with no loss of quality on any shots that require tighter framing on the talent.
Will your SD output be anamorphic or letterboxed? If letterboxed, you’ll need to superimpose a letterbox matte for any shots that you scale up or they’ll extend into the letterbox area.
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[Charlie Kosheff] “Is there any added benefit to using Compressor if I am not doing any deinterlacing, resizing, etc? “
Speed.
If you have Qmaster set up properly on your system, i.e. as a virtual cluster, Compressor will make much greater use of all available cores on your system than Quicktime Pro. For longer transcoding jobs, this can make a big difference.
When you submit jobs to the virtual cluster in Compressor, it cuts up your source file into multiple segments so that each available CPU core in the cluster can process the separate pieces simultaneously and in parallel. Once all of the pieces are transcoded, Compressor reassembles them into a single output file. This all happens transparently in the background. All you really need to know is that this can really speed up transcoding and compression tasks.