Barry Green
Forum Replies Created
-
[joshwallacefromnz] “Has anyone had success / problems with a workflow based on one of these programs making simultaneous copies to two locations?
I do it all the time in Windows, it works fine. Don’t know about the Mac though.Is there any way to achieve the same result using Finder in OSX – an actual simultaneous dual copy?”
In Windows you can just drag and drop the contents to a hard disk, and then go back to the card and drag and drop the contents to a second hard disk. I’d imagine OSX would allow the same, wouldn’t it? -
[JeremyG] “I can’t figure out how raylight is going to save me any time at all. The rewrapping to quicktime goes really fast, renaming everything is what takes so damn long
And here’s where Raylight can help. Not only can it eliminate that whole rewrap step entirely, but it can eliminate the renaming step — but it’s up to you to prepare the metadata to allow it to do so.Look at my dvxuser article on User Clip Name, and you’ll see how you can prepare the camera so that it automatically names the clips with an ascending numeric value (so you could name a clip “Car Commercial Take 1” and the next clip you shoot would automatically be named “Car Commercial Take 2”, etc). You’d change metadata between scenes, so you’d pre-load metadata files for each scene you plan to shoot that day.
Then when you go to the Mac, Raylight will scan your drive and create quicktime files that use the user clip name. So instead of coming in as “0014RF.mvx.mov” it’ll be “Car Commercial Take 2 0014RF.mxf.mov”. Automatically.
You can’t use the User Clip Name with FCP in any other way, IINM. I think Raylight is the only tool that allows access to that field.
-
Hi Robb,
Any FCP-related questions should go to Noah Kadner; I don’t use FCP.
Strobing is going to happen when you use a slower frame rate and move the camera too fast. That’s a given. 720/60P will be completely strobe-free (but will be larger file sizes, of course). If you want that glass-smooth look, you’re not going to get that with 30P. 30P is more like the film look, closer to 24P, and will give you strobier motion than 60P will.
-
P2CMS lets you edit the metadata on any clip after it’s shot, and it also lets you prep a metadata file to be loaded into the camera so that any new clips that get shot will have that metadata automatically attached to them when they’re created.
-
[Noah Kadner] ”
Also strangely enough I sometimes find the transfers go incredibly faster if the lastclip.txt file is copied by itself and then the rest of the P2 card contents dragged over in a separate copy operation.”Well known, documented and proved. Definitely copy the lastclip.txt separately from the CONTENTS folder. Don’t know why this happens in MacOS, but it does; embrace the speed potential you get by copying the lastclip first, then dragging the contents folder separately.
And, yes, excellent suggestion about the RAID 1, that’s another way to get duplicate copies done with no speed penalty.
-
Understand that an HPX500 is no more subject to CA than any other camera is. If the lens you’re talking about produces clean imagery with no CA already, then it’ll produce clean imagery with no CA on an HPX500.
-
Okay, looking back on your workflow, here’s what I’d say:
[Jesse G] “Currently the Pansonic AJ-PCD20 is connected to a MacBook Pro, along with a FW drive.”
This is probably slowing you down quite a bit. Don’t share the firewire bus between the PCD20 and the external drive, you’re probably congesting the bandwidth. Get an ExpressCard Firewire 800 adapter and use that to connect to the drive. So use the MBP’s internal firewire bus for the PCD20, and an external FW800 bus (attached through the ExpressCard slot) to the external drive.Or, alternately, ditch the PCD20 and use the Duel Adapter instead. That way you can plug the P2 card into the Duel Adapter, the Duel Adapter into the ExpressCard slot, and leave the FW bus for the external drives. And get FW800 drives.
[Jesse G] “Step 1) Copy P2 card folders to Drive A
Step 2) Copy P2 card folders from Drive A to Drive B
I’d identify this as a big waste of time. Copy to both drives simultaneously and you should see both copies done in the same amount of time as it used to take to get one copy done.Step 3) On Drive B, Import/convert to FCP compatible Quicktime files using Final Cut’s import window.”
As already said, you can ditch this step entirely.
If all works out as I outline, you should be able to at least triple your workflow, if not quadruple the speed overall.
-
Copying is not the same thing as importing and unwrapping/rewrapping though, so let’s separate those out.
What I’m saying is the whole unwrap/rewrap phase can be eliminated completely from your workflow. Any phase of the workflow that used to be spent doing that, just disappears.
As for copying: the fastest you’ll get data off the cards is through a PCD20 using FW800, or through a desktop computer (not a Mac) using a PCI->PCMCIA adapter, or through a laptop going directly through eSata or FW800 to a fast hard disk.
The thing to manage here is your bottleneck; the cards are capable of up to 80 megabytes per second, so you want to identify any element in your chain that’s not up to that speed and change that out. A PCD20 with FW800 is potentially capable of 100 megabytes per second, and a direct PCMCIA bus is capable of 133 megabytes per second, so those are the systems you want to be using to transfer with (i.e., forget USB2 or FW400, those will slow you down). But the biggest bottleneck is in the drive you copy to; most modern hard drives can handle maybe 40 megabytes per second or so, last I checked. So if you’re copying to a regular hard disk, that’s the bottleneck and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it other than to copy to something other than a regular hard disk. Something like a G-RAID should show a notable increase in transfer speed.
Another thing you can do is multiple copies from the card simultaneously. If you need two copies of the footage, don’t wait for it to finish copying to one drive before you start it copying to another, just drag ‘n’ drop to both drives at the same time. I do this all the time (in Windows, at least) and it executes both copies in barely any more time than it takes to copy to just one drive.
-
The fastest way to speed up the import/ingest process is to not do the import/ingest process. Run, don’t walk, to dvfilm.com/raylight/mac and get the trial version of Raylight. It eliminates the need to do any ingesting at all; it lets you edit right off the cards or right off the hard disk where you’ve copied the footage.