[Al Bergstein]

Given what you are asking in your OP, I would save up and buy a SD or at least get an Edirol 4 channel. I am in the same boat, small market, low budget, and sometimes I run my own mix, and learned how to do it, and often I get the client to pay $200 to $300 to hire someone that does audio and I can train in how to do field sound. Not optimal at all, but real world. Yes, I do get clients to pay for sound engineering.

You would be far better off getting yourself the right gear to begin with, like the SD 5 channel, since you already have spent money on the entry level and found out you needed the higher end. Now go buy the higher end and learn how to use it. It appears you are needing it, with all the labs.

good luck!

Al

[Al Bergstein]

Those are both great pieces of feedback. It supports my notion that I told the co-writer this AM that we should go to the estate and try and negotiate with them in advance, since we are doing something that is complimentary and not something that would be viewed as negative. The story is about the friend, and they had a good relationship in life. The only down side is, of course, that the estate will likely want money for any approval. That would be something to deal with in getting the funding for the production, I would assume.

But it would be better than going way further down the road before finding out that our insurance won’t allow us to do the film then.

Am I correct in assuming that?

Al

[Al Bergstein]

Thanks Thomas, very odd. Oh well, I’ll give it another try then. I don’t use it that often anymore anyway, but when it didn’t install, I just gave up.

Al

[Al Bergstein]

The question I have is whether this one runs Lion or if it is the one running something prior to that. If this came out post Lion, then you might have a problem, as I have been unable to run FCP 7 under Lion. Just want to make sure you are clear on that, if in fact that is the case. I could be wrong. Maybe they have fixed that problem? But when I tried to install FCP 7 on my Lion based machine, it said it would not run on it and refused to install.

Al

[Al Bergstein]

Thanks. That helps a bit. Not sure about why the render to the OS drive would not complete, but do try rendering out to a separate drive, any drive. Once you can complete it, you can then decide what’s faster.

There are a lot of factors affecting speed, beyond the internals of Vegas. While I’m not saying that it isn’t Vegas, you need to make sure you can create similar results on similar machines, then focus on speed.

Since you are on Win 64, and I assume you have properly downloaded Vegas 64 bit on both machines (this isn’t a sure thing, as the default download usually is 32 bit! I’ve made this mistake once myself).

After putting both machines renders out to external drives, look at the actual settings of the exact same render templates on both machines. Something might be off there. Some setting. With all the discussion about altering the templates for best rendering, if you have been messing with these at all you could have screwed something up. I have before!

Al

[Al Bergstein]

For some bizarre reason, since I have gone back to a single monitor, most of my crashes have vanished. I also pulled out my CUDA based nVidea after moving back to a single monitor and replaced it with a non CUDA ATI card, as the single monitor stuff was working, but a new upgrade to my nVidea drivers (the latest non beta version no less) totally corrupted my video drivers and caused me a 4 hour recovery process. I removed all trace of nVidea and replaced it with standard ATI (without any of their additional software) giving me a stable platform again.

I completed a mulitcamera project yesterday with no crashes. Of course, I stayed away from any NewBlue as that has caused crashes as well. But now I have to see whether the crashes were related to nVidea drivers or not. My next experiment.

I think personally that nVidea is very buggy software, perhaps Vegas is too, and that Vegas likely works well with specific combinations, probably the higher end products, and likely requires dual cards rather than a single card with dual monitors. I wish that Vegas test bed people would clarify this to us. My guess is that they are not telling us about these issues due to marketing concerns and their relationship with nVidea. That is only a guess, but from my experience in the software industry, that could be very close to the situation.

The fact that now my multicamera work is not crashing, after reducing my system to a simpler setup, is indicative of a problem out there in these higher end configurations. I have not changed my core footage, nor any other variables. Single monitors, no New Blue, and ATI non CUDA is seemingly stable, all other configs have caused me nothing but problems.

Al

[Al Bergstein]

Jeroen. First off, I’m making some assumptions, as your technical specs aren’t complete, and neither is your technical specs filled out in your profile. It helps to be complete. Why? Because I could assume you are running either 64 bit or 32 bit Vegas. Or 32 or 64 bit Windows. I can’t even tell if you are running Windows 7 or XP, or even Linux with a Windows emulator.

You also don’t mention whether you tried other settings, such as rendering to ‘standard’ rendering targets, such as 1920×1080 or 1280×720, or even SD. Do any of these work, or does this clip fail with all of your rendering targets?

For 64 bit Windows 7, your memory is minimalistic for video work. I highly recommend you boost to at least 6 GBs of RAM and more likely to 8.

Also do you have enough disk space on the drive you are rendering to? I always render to a separate 1 TB drive that is about half full, it’s a Sata drive inside my desktop. On my laptop, for remote work, I now have both an eSata drive that contains my footage, and a USB 3.0 drive that is where I render to.

Do not render to your OS drive. Nor to a drive that is almost full.

Try these and let us know. And also please fill out your technical specs on your profile page for future faster troubleshooting.

Thanks! Happy shooting! Happier rendering!

Al

[Al Bergstein]

While I tend to agree with most of what has been said, a minor nit. David, I’ve been working on both platforms, still doing a bit of FCP 7 work, and I’ve found that Windows7 has improved the cloning, etc. quite a bit over earlier versions. It’s really quite trivial and not any harder than doing it under the Mac OS, but maybe I’m more technical than most. And copying programs for underlying backups of certain increments seem to be much more easier and flexible.

But I think the graphics card issue of the OP has been really less of an issue than CPUs and the underlying code for efficient use of 64 bit and endless RAM. But maybe I’m missing something.

I agree though that perhaps this is a better discussion on the Adobe boards,to get a sense of what’s the difference. There was already one article recently that pointed to great advantages of speed when changing platforms on Adobe to Windows, but hey, this is a FCP board, and there really is no way forward with FCP7 projects other than to bail. Maybe Apple will announce a new tower soon??? It is January after all! If so, we can only hope it runs an older version of the OS!

And yes, I’ve found that stability under FCP/Prores/AppleOS is better just staying put on projects where I can. But that’s fewer and farther between.

Al

[Al Bergstein]

Since no one has figured this out, Here’s what it looks like.

This does not show up when I render in standard SD (with letterboxing) and does not show up in HD renders. I have compared the two render settings, but nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. Anyone seen this? I used to render a lot of SD but never had this happen, but I wasn’t using these formats of MXF and AVCHD before.

To be clear, this runs through the whole render. Not just this one frame.

Al

[Al Bergstein]

Are you shooting in the field or in studio? Are you looking to get it for more theatrical shoots or something else? I ask because I have a SmallHD larger monitor (8.5″) and I’ve not used it as much as I thought I would. The larger size in the field is pretty hard to mount effectively on top of the xf305, but in studio where I’m locking it down for longer periods, it is fine. Either way, you might find that buying a mounting arm is worth the money, to get it off the camera to the right or left. Zacuto makes such a thing for their rigs, as do some others.

Any reason you aren’t looking at either SmallHD or Marshall? Both seem to make pretty good monitors.

And lastly, if you were interested, I’d likely part with mine because of lack of use. My clients haven’t really cared much about viewing things through the monitor, so I’ve stopped bringing it into the studio for our shoots. It’s just another thing to worry about that hasnt panned out as planned. It has 1280×768 resolution. I’d sell it for a price that likely would be somewhere around 500, as I have a bunch of accessories for it, like an extra battery. While the unit is now discontinued, the batteries are still readily available from SD. The link for looking at it is here
https://www.smallhd.com/Products/DP1x.html

Contact me off list if you wish.

Al