[Alan Okey]

[david bogie] “On a personal note, I ride a recumbent for the same reasons I use Macintosh and play go instead of chess: comfort and uniqueness. “

Don’t let anyone give you s**t about riding a recumbent… I have Windcheetah recumbent trike and it’s sublime!

😉

[Alan Okey]

[Nicole Haddock] “The best way to get web anything out of FCP, in my opinion, is to export a self contained file of your timeline, “

If your timeline is fully rendered, it’s often not necessary to export a self-contained Quicktime movie. Instead, you can simply export a Quicktime reference movie by unchecking the “make file self-contained” dialog box when exporting a Quicktime movie. You can then open the reference movie in Compressor and use it as the source file for your encoding. For long projects this is often a faster way to work, as the Quicktime reference movie merely refers to existing media rather than requiring it to all be copied into a new file.

[Alan Okey]

[Ben Brodbeck] “My only question left (forgive my ignorance) is what does the RAID 0 config do for me. What is the advantage? “

Speed, speed, speed! RAID 0 configures the drives as a single volume in which data is striped across all three drives simultaneously, greatly increasing the read/write data transfer speeds of the volume.

The downside of RAID 0 is that if one of your drives fails, all data will be lost. A good rule of thumb is to not store anything on a RAID 0 volume without first backing it up on something else.

Other RAID levels like RAID 1 and RAID 5 offer redundancy so that if a drive fails, data may be recovered.

RAID 1 is also called mirroring, and simply involves having one drive become an exact duplicate of the other. There’s no speed advantage to doing this, and in fact performance may suffer slightly. Since a drive is duplicated, RAID 1 requires an even number of drives. Storage space is half the total of all drives.

RAID 5 uses 3 or more drives, and distributes parity information across all of the drives in the array so that if one drive fails, data can be recovered by replacing the drive and rebuilding the RAID. Due to the increased processing overhead required for parity data calculations, RAID 5 is typically performed in hardware by a RAID controller card. RAID 5 offers both speed and redundancy. Total storage space is slightly less than the total of all drives in a RAID 5 volume, as some space is dedicated to storing parity information.

In short:

RAID 0 = speed, no redundancy
RAID 1 = redundancy, no speed advantage
RAID 5 = speed plus redundancy, hardware controller usually required

For best results, all drives in a RAID set should be of equal size.

[Alan Okey]

The only thing I can think of is that there might be some type of permissions-related issue because you’re using a custom user-generated compression profile versus a default profile. Go through this checklist to see if you’ve followed all of the relevant steps:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1043558#1043581

[Alan Okey]

[David Roth Weiss] “Sorry Bogiesan, but ripping a DVD with Streamclip is faster than realtime and requires no cable or camera hookup. So, exactly how does analog capture qualify as “easiest?” It’s certainly not faster. “

It sort of reminds me of someone sticking a microphone in front of a stereo to record a vinyl LP onto tape, or setting up a camera to shoot a TV screen to record something off of the air. Definitely the long way around, and far from the best quality.

[Alan Okey]

[David Roth Weiss] “But, keep in mind, it took years of R&D for Autodesk to discover their “holy grail” of performance.”

The real irony is that there apparently isn’t a large enough market for Autodesk to profit from keeping Toxik as a standalone product. Autodesk recently announced that Toxik is becoming “Maya Composite,” and it is now only available bundled it with Maya. All of that R&D money, and for what? A bundled companion product for Maya.

There must be a reason that Autodesk is doing this, and I’m sure that it simply comes down to money. There simply must not be a big enough market for a $3K compositor to justify its continued development as standalone application.

[Alan Okey]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I really wish Apple would ditch the studio and roll Motion and STP right into FCP.”

Oh man, I am so right there with you on this.

From one of my past posts:

“I can’t help but think that Apple’s whole Final Cut Studio strategy is driven by a marketing focus group rather than actual video professionals. It’s as if they believe that having more separate applications makes people think they’re getting more value for their money. In my opinion, all of the separate applications and need for round-tripping is extremely cumbersome and unnecessary when it’s easily possible to have a much tighter and more seamless integration of tools in fewer applications. I realize that FCP can’t be all things to all people, and that one application is rarely the solution to every problem, but I think Apple’s insistence on separating the tools so much is holding back the potential of the FCS suite. Adding a few of the most useful tools to FCP from other apps in the FCS suite would be a huge timesaver and help to streamline workflow.”

Taken from:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1045063#1045063

I still think that Color should stay a standalone app, though.

[Alan Okey]

For a client monitor, I wouldn’t recommend an LCD. I’d recommend a Panasonic Professional series plasma. Walter Biscardi, a prolific poster on this forum, swears by them.

[Alan Okey]

[Michael Lansdell] “this is where the Media Manager causes problems, it can’t deal with footage that’s had it’s speed changed. “

What are some competing applications that can deal this scenario better than FCP? Would AVID be an improvement in this regard?

I have not had the luxury of working on AVID systems before. I hear constantly about how much better AVID’s media management is than FCP, but I’ve never had the opportunity to find out for myself what the differences are. Could someone post a few bullet points explaining why AVID’s media management is superior? I’m not doubting that it’s true, I’m just curious to know what the differences are.

[Alan Okey]

[Jakob Mortensen] “I might have gotten it all wrong but the quality of the capture isnt greater in prores422 compared to HDV right ?? “

If you mean capturing HDV footage into Final Cut Pro from tape, then you’re correct – your footage won’t magically get better because you transcode it to ProRes. The data that is thrown out from the original video signal when the camera compresses and records the signal to HDV tape is gone forever.

However, if you capture video from a camera directly to disk using a video interface like an AJA Kona card, etc. then ProRes 422 is a far superior codec to HDV. That’s why for green screen shoots or other applications in which the highest quality signal is important, it’s much better to bypass the camera’s internal recording method and record the live video signal from the camera’s video output direct to disk using a high-quality codec like ProRes 422 or Uncompressed 10-bit 422.

New devices like AJA’s Ki Pro or the Convergent Designs Flash XDR allow you to record a much higher quality signal from the camera than is possible by recording to the camera’s built-in recording system (tape or memory card), with the benefit of not needing to tether the camera to a computer system for capture.