[Alisa Placas]

I got the HD deck to work with Final Cut.
I’m assuming that I need a converter to digitize from a Beta deck analog to the HD Decklink card SDI.

Alisa Placas
Lucid Animation
Cambridge, MA

[Alisa Placas]

I got the HD deck to work with Final Cut.
I’m assuming that I need a converter to digitize from a Beta deck to the HD Decklink card.

Alisa Placas
Lucid Animation
Cambridge, MA

[Alisa Placas]

Thanks, Steve.

I remember accessing the secret prefs before, but I can’t seem to get them to show up now.
I’m holding down the shift key, but nothing but the regular prefs show up.

I am also getting a weird error message. I try to delete something out of the render que and it tells me “You must have at least one output module per render item.” There is no reason for this dialogue box to show up. ???

Does it sound like my application or my project is becoming corrupt or something?
I’ve been running Scripts and resetting the Permissions via Cocktail and Disk Utility. I also rewrote the drive not too long ago with Disk Warrior. Is there any other maintainance stuff I could be doing?

Alisa Placas
Lucid Animation
Cambridge, MA

[Alisa Placas]

I’m really not getting how this works.
I just got rid of all the unused media on the striped drives (quite a few gigs), reoganized it and reordered it with Disk Warrior.

Now, when I ran the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, it says my read and write are around 98 MB/sec.
Why would I have LOST speed after cleaning out the drive?

Alisa Placas
Lucid Animation
Cambridge, MA

[Alisa Placas]

Thanks, Kristian.

Yikes. I thought uncompressed HD was around 100MB/sec.

What do I need to playback 8bit?
How much do I “lose” in 8 bit vs 10 bit? If I want to check for general image quality, color, motion and artifacting in these animations, could 8 bit be sufficient?

Alisa Placas
Lucid Animation
Cambridge, MA

[Alisa Placas]

Yes, I tried that also.
Since it’s worked in the past and it works in AE and Blackmagic Deck Control, I can’t understand what I’ve changed in FCP to make it not work now.

thanks for your help

Alisa Placas
Lucid Animation
Cambridge, MA

[Alisa Placas]

I’m on FCP HD, version 4.5.
Under “View,” I don’t have a “Video Monitor” option. I DO have a “Video Playback” option and it is already set to Blackmagic NTSC 8-Bit.

And again….I see my computer desktop on the broadcast monitor. I don’t see black or a “no signal” sign or anythiing, so it seems like FCP isn’t even looking for the monitor.

Alisa Placas
Lucid Animation
Cambridge, MA

[Alisa Placas]

Thanks for the info, Robert.

I am definitely not in the market to buy at the moment. I have money in the budget to rent drive space. I won’t have another HD project that would require this kind of disc speed for quite a long time, so that is why it isn’t the right time to buy for me.

I just see the XRaid server as the simplest solution, but I can’t find one for rent in the Boston area.

I am not totally clear what my other options are.
I can buy the blackmagic recommended ATTO scsi card and rent drives to hook up to that.
Is there a third option that does not require me to buy a scsi card? A scsi card is a $350-400 purchase….and again, I won’t have a project that would utilize it again for quite some time.
Most of my client base is no where near ready to go HD. AND I am having a baby after this project, so I will be cutting back on large scale jobs (and decreasing my chances further that another HD gig will come up soon).

I am sure that these are obvious questions. It’s just that I tend to work on a need-to-know basis when it comes to hardware. I don’t know all that is out there.

Again, this is for a small job. I am really more in need of a disc speed solution rather than disc space. I just need to be able to play back HD animation to my HD monitor to check for motion jitter, moire and clarity.

Thanks, again.
Alisa

[Alisa Placas]

yes, yes. Exactly!
Just make sure when you render, you pick the preset “Lossless with Alpha” from the Output Module pulldown menu in your render que.
After selecting it, if you click on it, it opens a window for its settings. You’ll see that the Channels is set to “RGB + Alpha”. If you click on Format Options, you can set the quality of your animation codec. “Lossless” is the Animation codec and it is…..lossless……so it makes a BIG file. You may be able to bring down the quality to High instead of Best if you wish.

Alisa

[Alisa Placas]

I guess I’m not understanding WHAT you graphic actually is.
Are you creating something in after effects and animating it onscreen?
Or is it a pict file or a jpeg that you’ve imported and are animating in after effects?

Is it one item that you set keyframes so it moves across screen?
Or did you create a series of graphics (like a flipbook) and you just play one after another to create the appearance that it is moving?

The easiest way to do any of it is to create your object in Photoshop on its own layer and import just that layer. Animate it in your time line and unless you physically put a background in place in your comp, then no background actually exists and you can render it out with an alpha channel.

Are your letterboxed top and bottom supposed to be transparent over the video….or is that what you want to be opaque so that you are actually creating a letterbox look OVER your video?

sorry if we are confusing each other!
you can call if it would be easier to explain. 978-369-3268