[Alan Okey]

Sorry, it pays to read the original post thoroughly before responding…

I see that you’ve already sized your images appropriately. You might try using TIFF files instead, but apart from that I’m not sure what could be causing your issues.

[Alan Okey]

What size are the JEPG images you’re importing?

FCP will absolutely choke on any still images much larger than HD video resolution (1920×1080).

It’s a good habit to pre-process all of your still images in Photoshop so that they are 72dpi and their pixel dimensions are no larger than they need to be for the FCP sequence they’re being imported into.

[Alan Okey]

[Aaron Neitz] “it sounds like the infamous QT gamma problem(s) might be culprit “

Bingo.

Information on the codec and workflow used would be helpful here.

[Alan Okey]

I own the LHe and I’m familiar with its capabilities. Walter’s post gave the impression that the Kona 3 might be of help in the OP’s case where frame rate conversion was involved – it apparently won’t, and the OP should be made aware of that. I’m pretty familiar with the format conversion capabilities of Compressor, as outlined in my earlier post in this thread.

[Alan Okey]

I wasn’t aware that the Kona could do frame rate conversion on ingest. Does it do actual frame rate conversion, i.e. 29.97i to 24p, or merely remove 3:2 pulldown on 24p material shot over 29.97i?

[Alan Okey]

I just did finishing work on an independent DV feature that was shot in 24pA. Due to camera operator error, about 30% of the footage was shot as 29.97i, a pretty major screw-up. The editor had tried to convert the 29.97i to 24p using Magic Bullet in After Effects, and the results were simply awful. I was pretty sure that I could get better results using Compressor, so I did a few test clips.

To my astonishment, the Compressor-converted clips looked AMAZING, as if they had always been 24p. Out of around 60 clips, only one or two had slight artifacts that were only visible on very close inspection. I ended up batch converting all of the 29.97i footage to 24p using Compressor, and the client was ecstatic. The converted clips match the native 24p clips perfectly – no one would ever know the difference from watching the film.

The optical flow / motion estimation technology that Apple inherited form Shake works wonders in Compressor for format conversions. The devil is in the details – Frame controls need to be turned on in the inspector tab, and there are specific settings to use for the best results. It’s too lengthy to go through them all in this post, but feel free to PM me if you need assistance.

Compressor can’t make SD footage look as good as HD when scaling it up, but when it comes to conforming all of your source footage to a uniform frame rate, it works extremely well. Maybe not Teranex quality, but quite usable nonetheless. You may want to show 4:3 SD footage pillarboxed (black bars on the sides) to avoid the further degradation of scaling it up to fit the 16:9 frame.

[Alan Okey]

[Chris Borjis] “I don’t like clips all over the desk area. “

The edit desk view is fully customizable and has many more viewing options than the FCP browser. I wish FCP had the ability to custom resize thumbnails, for example…

Smoke edit desk UI tutorial:

https://area.autodesk.com/training-tutorials/ui_tour_editdesk

You’re right though, it probably just comes down to a question of familiarity. Smoke’s UI can definitely seem a bit strange at first when compared to the Premiere/FCP paradigm. Autodesk actually added a traditional source/record dual-up window display mode a year or two ago when it was requested by users.

[Alan Okey]

Nice to see that new tutorials are up as well:

https://area.autodesk.com/smoke-tutorials/about_smoke_essentials_tutorials

I’ve always loved the UI of the systems products. A UI should be clean, elegant and unobtrusive while making it easy to find the required tools at the proper moment. I’ve always found it strange that other developers haven’t copied this approach to UI design more frequently.

FCP and After Effects have terrible UIs, but they are cheap and powerful apps so we put up with it. Now that Smoke is so much more affordable, I think that quite a few higher end users currently finishing with FCS/AE will be a lot less willing to put up with the clunky UI and round tripping workflow that they’ve been stuck with.

Obviously Smoke can’t completely replace FCP or AE, but for finishing work it’s a no brainer. If Autodesk follows this up by eventually releasing Lustre for OS X at a similarly reduced price point, it will be a match made in heaven.

[Alan Okey]

[Peter Giffen] “Is the 59.94 footage 24p shot over 59.94 (i.e. 24p shot over 720p60 with a 3:2 cadence) or true 59.94 (720p60)?

Honestly I am not sure “

Open one of the 59.94 clips in Quicktime player and step through the clip frame by frame. If the image changes every frame, it’s true 60p. If you see a repeating pattern of two duplicate images followed by three duplicate images, it’s 24p shot over 60p. If that’s the case and you want it to play nicely with the native 24p footage in the sequence, you’ll need to use FCP’s DVCPRO HD frame rate converter to remove the duplicate frames so that the 24p over 60p clips are conformed to true 24p.

Although you can mix formats and frame rats in an FCP timeline and have it play back, it’s only meant for preview purposes. FCP doesn’t do proper format conversion for rendered output. You’ll need to conform all of your clips to one format and frame rate prior to editing for proper output without artifacts.

[Alan Okey]

[Pasi Koivisto] “I am getting write speeds about 320MB/s and read speeds about 250MB/s. I was pretty close to this with just 1 PM enclosure “

Something doesn’t seem right. RAID-5 does rob some speed vs. RAID-0, but it’s nowhere near 50% slower. Each of your eSATA ports can deliver up to 3Gb/sec., which translates to a theoretical maximum of roughly 300MB/sec. With twin 5-drive arrays on separate eSATA ports I would expect you to be getting closer to 450MB/sec. reads, even in RAID-5.

Check out the results of an almost identical setup on BareFeats:

https://www.barefeats.com/hard89.html

I suspect a problem with your RocketRAID card or the RAID configuration.