Alan Okey
5
COW Coins
2
DaVinci Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Isn’t it necessary to turn on component out in the camera menu?
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Have you downloaded and installed the Sony SxS driver software? You need to install the SxS drivers before FCP will recognize the cards.
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I just checked out your older post in the Color forum so now I have a better idea of what they were telling you. They said “aging phosphors,” not “no phosphors.” The phosphors in a CRT lose brightness as they get older, so an older CRT is harder to calibrate properly.
They also referred to the fact that you don’t have a calibration probe, which is an optical sensor device used in conjunction with calibration hardware or software to measure light output from the screen and make adjustments to bring it into spec. All of this type of equipment is very expensive, not something you’re going to find on freecycle.
You’re going to have to face the reality that if you want proper color rendition, you have to spend some decent money to get it. You can’t use an old computer CRT, it doesn’t work like that. The bare minimum you could get away with would be a used Sony PVM series CRT for SD. To get into HD, you’re looking at $2500 or more for an entry level broadcast LCD like Flanders Scientific. If you really want an HD CRT, you’re going to have to spend $1000 or more for a used Sony PVM-14L5 or PVM-20L5.
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[Roli Rivelino] “I’ve been trawling freecycle for CRT monitors, I got one but was told on here that it wasn’t that great because it didn’t have phosphor (ps no idea what that is!). “
Someone was confused. All CRT monitors have phosphors. Phosphors are the small individual elements in a picture tube that light up red, green or blue when they are struck by an electron beam from the CRT gun/guns. What they probably meant was SMPTE-C phosphors, which are the standard for professional broadcast CRTs.
What’s your reason for wanting a CRT anyway? If you need a CRT just to check for SD field order and artifact issues, then any CRT will do. If you want accurate color rendition for color grading, then you’ll have to spend some money, even for a used monitor. Sony’s PVM and BVM series are the standard, but only the more expensive models have SMPTE-C phosphors.
At this point, it’s kind of silly to spend a lot on a CRT unless you happen to find a really sweet deal on an unused B-stock model or something used with very, very low hours on it. eBay always has some decent PVM and BVM monitors, so check there if you’re in the market.
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Are you editing on a laptop or a desktop?
It’s not always necessary to use an external drive, but it is necessary to use a dedicated drive. For example, if you own a Mac Pro, you have four internal drive bays. You could add a second, third or fourth internal drive and dedicate it to video.
With the exception of high performance external RAID systems, which can connect via eSATA, SAS or Fibre Channel, dedicated internal drives are potentially a better option for video storage. When using internal drives, there are fewer components to fail. When external drives fail, it’s often the case that the actual hard drive has not failed, and the external enclosure’s bridge chip or power supply has failed instead.
Additionally, with the exception of eSATA, an internal SATA connection is always going to be faster than Firewire 400 or 800, and there’s no danger of bus contention as each drive has a dedicated connection to the motherboard. Since all Firewire ports on the computer share the same bus (which defaults to the speed of the slowest device connected), it can be problematic to use Firewire video devices (decks, cameras, I/O devices) in conjunction with Firewire storage devices.
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Jeremy,
What size are your stills? FCP is designed to work at video resolutions, which would be 720×480 (or 720×486) at Standard Definition or either 1920×1080 or 120×720 at High Definition. If you want to make a project that matches the resolution of your stills, you need to manually change the project dimensions in the Sequence Settings dialog box.
If your stills are larger than HD resolution, or if you’re working in an SD project, obviously your project output won’t look as sharp as the original iPhoto slide show.
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Do you have a video I/O card like an AJA Kona or Blackmagic Decklink? Cards like these have realtime hardware downconverison on output. You could simply connect a DVCAM deck to the card via SDI or analog component and downconvert in realtime to tape.
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[Luka Kito] “Regarding video playback other than hard drive issue, does FCP use any graphic card’s GPU to help minimize the need to render ?? “
In Final Cut Pro, no. Color and Motion are heavily dependent on the GPU, but the only thing that Final Cut Pro really uses GPU acceleration for is FXplug plugins.
Realtime playback performance in FCP is directly proportional to storage speed. Buy the biggest, fastest RAID you can afford and you’ll be much happier. I can’t stress enough just how important storage speed is for performance in FCP.
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[Luka Kito] “will the Proress422 LT be (a). higher in quality (b). as responsive as DVCPROHD 720P ?”
ProRes LT is an offline codec, not meant for finishing. If you’re looking for a lightweight offline codec for editing and you’re going to reconform the final edit using full-quality media, then you could use ProRes LT. Otherwise, stick with DVCPRO HD if it’s working for you and you are happy with the quality.
If your system is bogging down with ProRes, you really need to consider using faster RAID storage. You mention that you are using a RAID-0 scratch for video. How many drives are in the RAID-0 volume? Are the drives internal or external? If external, what interface (Firewire 400, FIrewire 800, eSATA, etc.)?
Increasing your storage throughput speed will do wonders for your ability to work with multiple layers of HD.
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Two things that you mention are particularly troublesome: you’re shooting chroma key footage with a blue, not a green background and you’re shooting it on DV. That’s the absolute worst possible combination you could choose. You will have far better results shooting with a green background and using a better recording format than DV, preferably DVCPRO HD as it has 4:2:2 color sampling versus DV’s 4:1:1.
As for working with a proper finishing codec, ProRes 422 is the way to go. Definitely upgrade to the latest version of Final Cut Studio. If you don’t like rendering, then capture all of your footage to FCP as ProRes when you ingest, or transcode it after capture.