[Alan Okey]

Chuck,

What model of Mac do you have? Does it have an AGP or a PCI express (PCIe) graphics card slot?

[Alan Okey]

[Dave LaRonde] “….and the elaborate process you describe is also a good argument for using a chroma key background to get the shot, and why chroma key exists in the first place.”

That’s also why it’s critical to know what you’re doing when setting up a chroma key shoot in the first place, to make sure that you don’t spend hours in post trying to pull a key from a crappy source plate. If only I had a dollar for every clueless low-budget producer who thinks that all you need to do is throw a green sheet on a wall, stick talent in front of it and shoot it with a DV camcorder…

Anything can be rotoscoped by a competent compositor. As you correctly state, the whole point of doing it right to begin with is to avoid doing roto. It sounds like the O.P. didn’t have the luxury of being present for preproduction meetings and now has to extract the talent from a white background that may never have been intended to be removed in the first place.

Any way you slice it, there’s no magic bullet to do this shot without at least some roto or garbage matting and/or combining multiple keys. Fortunately, Motion 3 now has spline-based roto masking tools.

Good luck!

[Alan Okey]

[Dean Stapleton] “I was looking on the Apple site this morning and configured what I thought would be a nice system for FCP. Can you comment on this setup?

(Processor) Two 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
(Memory) 8GB (4x2GB)
(Hard Drive) 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
(2nd Hard Drive) 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
(Graphics Card) NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB “

You’ll want to get a different graphics card, especially if you’re interested in doing any work with Color. The ATI cards are better optimized for Apple’s Pro apps. The ATI Radeon HD 3870 will be a much better fit for Final Cut Studio 2 than the nVidia card.

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/ATI%20Technologies/100435928/

If you’re into 3D gaming on Windows, the nVidia would be the faster card, but for FCS2 that’s not the case.

Details here:

https://www.barefeats.com/harper16.html

[Alan Okey]

Unfortunately there’s no free ride. MPEG Streamclip performance will be largely dictated by the system upon which you run it, i.e. a Mac Pro will be faster than an iMac.

As for drag and drop, not likely. You could go with newer solid-state recording formats like Panasonic’s P2 DVCPRO HD or Sony’s XDCAM EX formats, but I think they are probably out of reach of your budget.

Regarding the MPEG-2 to DV conversion (or whatever other Quicktime-supported coded you choose), no, it won’t be unwatchable. The converted footage will look fine, but the speed of conversion will be proportionate with the speed of hardware upon which you run the software. No way to know exactly how fast the conversion will happen without doing some test clips first.

[Alan Okey]

Mike,

Here’s a cheap and dirty option:

Connect an external drive (Firewire, etc.) to the Mac Pro and boot from it as your system/apps drive. Create a software RAID 0 volume using the 4 1TB drives in your Mac Pro (no RAID card necessary). You’ll have enough disk bandwidth to output uncompressed HD, but you’ll have no redundancy. If you can live with that, then you’ll be able to do what you want pretty cheaply. Just make sure you have backups of any important files, because if one of your four internal drives goes down, you’ll be hosed.

As for your long range RAID plans, Fibre Channel isn’t necessarily the best option anymore. The newest technology RAIDs use a PCIe expansion card (external PCIe) to connect to the external enclosure. External PCIe has a much higher theoretical bandwidth than Fibre Channel, and it’s cheaper. The only advantage Fibre Channel really has anymore is its ability to use fiber optic cable to connect the host system to the storage system over a great distance. If you’re going to keep the RAID in the same room (or same house) as the host computer, external PCIe will work just fine.

[Alan Okey]

Put all of your money into a new Mac Pro and keep your PowerBook if you absolutely have to have a laptop. An 8-core Mac Pro will give you much more bang for the buck than a Macbook Pro. You can use the Powerbook for offline or proxy editing.

What type of HD are you working with? HDV? DVCPRO HD? XDCAM EX? Uncompressed HD? Some specifics about your workflow would be useful in helping forum users to make relevant suggestions for an optimum system configuration.

[Alan Okey]

Autodesk Smoke can do what you want:

https://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=10247363

Final Cut Pro can’t do what you want, nor is it designed to. It’s an editor, not a realtime finishing system like DS or Smoke. If you want realtime performance with playback from disk and no RAM caching (like AE or Combustion), you gotta pay the big bucks.

[Alan Okey]

[Andy Mees] “see if CHV’s Clone and Paint collection can help
https://www.chv-plugins.com/cms/Fx-Script/CloneAndPaint-collection/CloneAndP…

“

Yep, that’s the same link I referenced in my answer to the OP’s dustbusting post the day before this one.

[Alan Okey]

[jason mckee] “we have automatic duck but we do not have autodesk’s combustion. is it real time or is it like after effects?”

It’s RAM-based playback like AE. You might also check out Apple’s Motion, which has paint tools as well. Motion may have better playback performance as it’s heavily dependent on the graphics card for realtime performance.

I came across this plugin set for FCP that includes clone and paint tools:

https://www.chv-plugins.com/cms/Fx-Script/CloneAndPaint-collection/CloneAndPaint-collection.php

Perhaps it might do the job.

[Alan Okey]

Autodesk Combustion has powerful vector-based paint tools for dustbusting, and it’s cross-platform.

https://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=5562397

Another useful tool is Automatic Duck’s Pro Import Cmb. It will allow you to export an FCP sequence directly to Combustion, keeping all layers and effects intact in the composite’s timeline.

https://www.automaticduck.com/products/picmb/