[Andy Mees]

Hey Rafael

You know I hate jump in but I think although your theory is correct, in practice, given Pelai’s system specs, he is absolutely right. An iMac has only one FW bus and there is no means to add a second. Daisy chaining a FW400 drive for render files to his FW800 media drive will only limit the FW800 transfer speeds and so be detrimental to performance as a whole rather than improve it

Just my 2 cents
Andy

[Andy Mees]

Newer versions of FCP can open projects from earlier versions of FCP, but never the other way round … if you try to open a project saved with a newer version of FCP than the one you are using then you’ll get this General Error (41)

You need to run the software updates on your system to bring your FCP 5.1 installation back up to 5.1.4 (where you likely were before the reinstall) then try to open those projects again

See if that helps

[Andy Mees]

Warren, thank you.

I love the idea of the multi touch control strip … not your standard transport control for sure, but as someone who’s very used to a laptops trackpad it seems like it would be a quite natural interface. And its interesting in and of itself that shuttle control is working with this device? I worked for some time with a Tascam FW1802 back when control surface support was first introduced to FCP, but it seemed then the transport controls for shuttling was not yet implemented. I assumed it was a universally annoying issue with the Mackie Control Protocol in FCP, and so wouldn’t work for all such devices … I wonder now if that was just a Tascam issue, or if its now properly supported or perhaps Frontier Designs have just worked around it somehow.

Anyway, many thanks again for the excellent post, I really appreciate your taking the time to write that up.
Best Regards
Andy Mees

[Andy Mees]

frame reordering to improve compression efficiency, damn they’re fiendishly clever buggers!
thanks for the clarification Jeremy
Andy

[Andy Mees]

hey Rafael

I’d assume it simply reverses the existing field order (goodness knows i see enough footage that has been encoded with the wrong field order)

anyhoo, heres a link to way more than any sane person needs to know about H264, and goodness knows it made no sense to me!:

have you tried just toggling it on/off and analysing the difference?

cheers
Andy

[Andy Mees]

hey Warren
if you’ve time to post a personal reviews / your impressions of working with the AlphaTrack, specifically in FCP, I’m sure many here on the FCP COW forum would be interested to read it. how do you find the “unique touch-sensitive jog/shuttle strip”, what works well in this unit and what doesn’t, how has it improved productivity for you?

thanks for any extra info you can provide
cheers
Andy

[Andy Mees]

XDCAM HD in HQ mode (35Mb/s VBR) is gorgeous. All the advantages of tapeless field acquisition. A single button press to add essence marks during shooting, to note good shots/takes as you go. Install Sony’s free XDCAM Transfer software, then connect your camera/deck to the mac via firewire and the disc pops up on the desktop. Use the transfer software either standalone or from within FCP to browse and log the clips, then transfer only whats needed… any of those essence marks you added in camera show up as markers within FCP on importing those clips.

The XDCAM HD codecs are fully supported in FCP since v5.1.2. In FCP 6, Apple introduced the ProRes codec together with the ability to specify it as a render codec for Long GOP format timelines. It makes editing with XDCAM HD a breeze, with render times dramatically reduced using ProRes. Timeline performance with the native codec is snappy … but at the end of the day its still an MPEG2 Long GOP timeline which means that if you are mastering back to XDCAM disc then the interminable waiting to conform annoyance still applies.

If you do go with XDCAM HD then consider adding an Matrox MXO into the mix … with that you can monitor full HD from the timeline and/or output back to a suitable deck without the blasted conform wait. (Make sure its compatible with your particular Mac)

[Andy Mees]

You’re not wrong. The VO Tool is not the most robust bit of Apple

[Andy Mees]

the Quicktime codecs for XDCAM HD were added with FCP 5.1.2 so you should already be able to open and use these files …. or are these not quicktime files but just the raw MXF files direct from the camera ?

[Andy Mees]

This was an issue which first cropped up in the XDTv1.0 release and was subsequently fixed in version 1.1 … it appears to have resurfaced for some users, but not all, with version 2.1

It’s not happening to me, but it would be darned useful if we could figure it out what causes this for those affected … has anyone looked at any of the XML files that are used for import where these errors are occurring? You can set a preference to save the import XML files that are created/used by XDT/FCP by checking the “Write Final Cut Pro XML file” option in the XDCAM Transfer menu >> Preferences window >> Import tab

As i said, it seems to be working OK for me but I’d be happy to look at the xml’s from a bad one to see if theres anything obviously wrong.

Worth trying as a workaround is to create a brand new OS X user account (give it administrator privileges) … in the new account, open XDT2.1 and accept all the default locations for the setup (don’t choose new locations, just press OK)
Now try and see if you can duplicate the problem in this new account