Al Bergstein
Forum Replies Created
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Well, I could not find the 2.0.3 available. A google search did not turn it up, but I might have missed it. (I didn’t try all the usual links). I have already upgraded to 2.0.5 and was unclear if I could even downgrade without messing the camera up.
Al
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Yeah, I suspected as much but I have not enountered that on Vimeo, and have encoded to their specs for hd. The funny thing is, my output from Vegas titling seems to be more prone to this on Vimeo than from adobe Pr. I encode both to the same standard and notice it more on vegas projects. I’ll try and point up some examples. I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t something unusual about Vegas titlingthat I didn’t understand.
For example: This video did not have problems with the titling. https://vimeo.com/mountainstone/ptmscmsnn
neither did this one
https://vimeo.com/68974934
Neither did this one.
https://vimeo.com/34117278So it is confusing about what is at work in this…
Al -
Heidi, I’ve owned an xf105 and the 7D, along with other cameras. I think that you are being forced into picking one tool to do all the jobs, when you need a couple of tools to do them right.
The 7D is not a great camera for events, as it cannot shoot long continuous filming without overheating, and it only goes 12 minutes to a clip. I’ve had mine overheat when pushed on an hour long presentation. It is not ‘broadcast’ acceptable, if you mean BBC standards. Check with your local tv station to find out what you need to do to make it so. You could shoot with an external recorder to get that quality. It does have a great Depth of Field look to it. It is good in very low light, but even then the footage is not great in low light. In fact the video footage is not as good as other cameras, and, I became quite unhappy with the look to the video after a while. I never use it for video these days if I can help it. It’s really a still camera with an ok video ability if needed.
The xf100 is a pretty good all around camera that does shoot a broadcast acceptable format. It is not great in low light, but does have an infrared mode I used on occasion. It is lightweight and likely would be good for live performances. It has xlr’s so you can easily hook up good quality microphones to it. It is somewhat more complex to shoot with, but has ‘simple’ automatic modes you can use until you are ready to get better. It can shoot all day long, has double card slots so you can have it either copy to both simultaneously, or one at a time, so on long performances you can change cards without stopping the camera. I would still have it but upgraded to a much more expensive camera, the XF300, so I sold the xf100.
I think it would do you well, it does have shortcomings, but there is no perfect camera out there. You can always pick up a 7D later to shoot closeups, etc.
Another concern I have is that your Mac might not be powerful enough to work with MXF footage. I don’t use FCPX so I can’t help you understand it’s issues, but check out the Final Cut X forum to get a better understanding. You might need to substantially upgrade your Mac to edit the footage without issues. It’s not just RAM and disk, but your machine, if it’s old, could be too underpowered. I run some very powerful Macs to do Adobe Premiere, and have used the old FCP in the past.
I have a short ad piece I shot with the xf100 on infrared mode, here:
https://vimeo.com/47690375Al
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I agree with Ty. I’ve shot a lot of live bands, and it takes a lot of practice to get it right. Get a recorder, like a Zoom, Sony or Marantz PMD661 that can plug in XLRs directly as line in from the soundboard. Get to the venue early to work it all out with the sound person.
You will be lucky if your rode gives you good results up close, unless the band is acoustic. I’ve been in live venues where the band is playing at over 120 decibels! There is very little likihood a mic on camera up close can handle it. It’s really the wrong tool for the job. Or at best a backup. I have the same mic and would never use it as you are planning. Maybe borrow some other gear? Got a friend with a Zoom or some other good recorder?
Al
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There are so many choices. Look at canon vixia g30, the panasonic tm950 etc. they all take great video when the light is good.
Al
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Ken I use a W7 machine for Vegas, and right next to it is a MPro early 2008 with 16 GBs RAM, and 4 TBs of hard drive space, and it still runs just fine. I might not be able to render stuff quite as fast, but with Adobe on both machines, I can unmount a drive on the Mac, plug it into the W7 and render it over night there, if I’m really in a hurry. I can also run W7 on both the Bootcamp or inside a Parallels folder, though until my W7 machine dies, I don’t bother.
If you haven’t yet bought one or for other readers, David is spot on. If you are going to put out the cash, you might as well buy the highest end machine for your needs. Get the RAM at the lowest level you can in the config you want and buy the upgrade from OWC. I would get the Fusion drive and the highest end graphics card. I don’t think the video is upgradeable in the iMac. You might regret not having the best card in that box.
MacPros and iMacs last longer and do the job better. I bought this MPro when I got back into video editing in 2009. I saved about $1000 off list price by buying it used 1 year old, and here it is, 4 years later and it’s still working just fine. I intend to use it until it dies, if that’s possible, and then upgrade to a used new MPro after someone pays the new freight on it. I run FCP 7 for legacy jobs, and Adobe’s suite for newer jobs. I still have some legacy of Vegas on Windows, and occasionally fire that up. I don’t do a lot of fx in my work.
Windows is fine, I’m not a fanboy of any OS, it’s just a damn tool, like the engine in a truck. I don’t like W8 and have no intention of ever using it, but the MacOS has proven to be more stable, and frankly, when my 4TB NTFS RAID array died, I found that I could more likely recover files that were on it using the MacOS. I needed to copy about 2 TBs of files off the damaged array. The MacOS read and saved files that the W7 machine, with all the latest tools, could not read. Not sure why that is. When I got the RAID back, (one drive had died but it didn’t recover as it should have), I installed the MacOS onto it.
good luck…either way.
Al
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Thanks for your feedback guys. David, that was the link and info I was looking for. I had not loaded Qt7 on my newer MBPro before installing FCP7. Now it all works. Not that I use FCP 7 all that much anymore, but I hav legacy jobs on it, and sometimes I need to work with others. Thanks guys. Case solved.
Al
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You don’t mention if you were on a Mac or not. Did you happen to upgrade the OS or components like Quicktime lately?
Al
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See this thread. I hope Apple is working with Adobe to fix this. Not good news and i will certainly be holding off on upgrading.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/24121531#24121531
Jon Walker Burlington County, NJ
Re: Mavericks Quicktime Player converts everything to ProRes??
Dec 14, 2013 8:54 AM (in response to Navarro Parker -)
How do I stop this unwanted and super annoying behavior?
The simple answer is to not open the files in QT X v10.3 under Mavericks. Basically, Mavericks has two embedded structures. One (AVFoundation) supports QT X based apps while the other (the 32-bit QT structure) supports classic QT (QT 7) apps. Basically, when you open a file in QT X v10.3, it checks the codec and if it is not one that is compatible with the AVFountation, then the file is sent to the Movie Moderizer structure to determine whether or not the content is conversion compatible. If it is, then the content is forwarded to the Convert structure for the actual conversion. Most content is converted to H.264/AAC but when a codec like Apple Animation is recognized, it switches to the Apple ProRes 422 encoder. Additional codecs like MJPEG video in an AVI container may be sent through the moderizer but the data is simply passed through to an MOV file container without any conversion. The ProRes 422 encoder is now a codec included in the basic Mavericks system codec configuration and appears to be the default “Intermediate” codec replacing AIC as the “poor man’s” intermediate codec. AIC, PNG, DV stream, and a number of other codecs commonly used for editing codecs are not supported by the AVFoundation. However, all such formats still function normally in the QT 7/QT 7 Pro Player apps under Mavericks which is supported by the 32-bit QT structure still embedded in Mavericks. I simply use QT 7 as my defualt player for MOV files so they will automatically open in QT 7 rather than QT X when I double-click the file icon. Basically, if a file icon in the Finder is not QuickLook compatible, it will trigger the conversion routine if loaded to the QT X v10.3 Player, so you know what to expect in advance.iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9), 3.4 GHz Quad Core i7, 12GB 1333 MHz
Like (1)Al
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Philip Bloom was. You might see what he would say. He did fly very low and quiet under the radar, i read.
Al