[Ben Holmes]

Hi Patrice

Many thanks – sorry it’s taken me so long to respond. Yes – I’ve now spoken to Mike Davis. He was concerned about the Xsan specifically (probably due to the problems you mentioned) but the spec I have is for an ethernet connected SAN, with potential for management via MetaSAN – although the ingest and logging would be handled via IPDirector. Mike seemed to think this would be ok.

Although FCP lacks the media management features of Unity systems, I seem to have come up against a good deal of well-intentioned ignorance about FCP and shared storage (ie. it just can’t be done). I regularly consult for a facility I part-specced that uses Editshare with 6 FCP suites very successfully. I was hoping to get direct experience of someone who had added IPDirector into the mix – good to hear it’s ok.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

https://www.larryjordan.biz/app_bin/wordpress/archives/1365

Hmm.

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[Ben Holmes]

Although this was posted below, I thought I’d add a little confirmation – after all, why would Larry Jordan lie about this:

https://www.larryjordan.biz/app_bin/wordpress/archives/1365

Between this and Light Peak / Thunderbolt (can that name REALLY be true) I think this MIGHT be the most exciting three months in FCP circles for a very long time.

BTW – If you don’t like rumours, fine by me – I choose to believe this one, read into that what you will…

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[Ben Holmes]

The preferred route would be to make a 25fps master (1080i50) on HDCam via a tape out (using Kona or Blackmagic video card), then pay for frame conversion at a post house, using something expensive like a Teranex.

Your other option is to use Cinema tools to convert the file from 25p/50i to 24p. This would cause a 4% slowdown on the transfer, but is commonly done in reverse for all movies transferred for TV in PAL countries – so not as noticeable as you would think.

Once you’ve generated a 24p master, you can output this as 1080i60 using a Kona or BM video card, which can utilise a process called ‘reverse pulldown’ to generate the missing fields.

Since you will most probably have to rent a deck (and find one if you live in a PAL country, which is not easy sometimes) I recommend you take this to a post house if you can handle the cost.

Brn

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[Ben Holmes]

Hi Wendell

This is issue has been reported here before – a search for ‘out of memory’ should turn a few up. It appears to have nothing to do with RAM, drive space, other processes etc. It just seems to be an issue with some projects. I’ve noticed over the years that nested sequences make it more common. I’ve always imagined that it must be down to bad data somewhere (in renders, or project files) causing a sort of ‘divide by zero’ error for FCP.

Fortunately, whilst this used to kill a project completely, now (as you say) a restart generally cures this – rather than having to roll back to a previous autosave. It seems Apple have improved the robustness of FCP surrounding the issue.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

I started laughing at ‘animation’ and didn’t stop til the end.

Sadly, I answer questions along these lines all the time…

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[Ben Holmes]

Change your sequence settings to match the original material. Reset the size of the first clip to 100%. Reset the ‘distort’ tab to ensure there is no aspect change remaining from your original sequence. The clip should now be full frame and undistorted in the timeline.

Now copy this clip, and select all your clips in the timeline (using the track tool or lasso) control-click (or right-click) on these clips, select ‘paste attributes’ in the pop-up, and tick ‘basic motion’ and ‘distort’.

Export quicktime using current settings.

I’ll not bother (as you specifically mention it) going into how wrong both such a sequence size and uncompressed video are. I’m sure there’s a good reason in there somewhere.

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[Ben Holmes]

I don’t believe this is an XDCam problem – although I suppose it could be long-GOP related. I have a number of very stable FCP systems running latest versions on Leopard, for my money the most stable platform still. In general use, they crash very rarely. The systems are used most often stand-alone with external RAID5 arrays, plenty fast.

All, however, have issues with large projects. Mostly these use a lot of P2 rushes. However, I would add that in this case, it was rushes TRANSCODED AS PRORES on ingest.

My take on it, based on a lot of observation is that FCP does not like a lot of individual media files in a project, whatever the codec. This means that if you capture from tape, so have much fewer, longer (30 minute) clips, you will have fewer problems than if you have 100+ clips per hour of capture – even if you have the same hours of media total.

Think of this as the ‘database size’ of the media. Here, the project with 2000 10-second clips is far less stable than one with 50 30-minute ones. Note – this has little to do with either project size, media length or codec. It’s just the amount of different items FCP has to reference. I’d imagine (knowing little about software programming) this is due to the amount of limited memory FCP can use, and having to use plenty of it to keep a track of the media.

If this is the case, I suspect the issue will not be resolved until a 64-bit version of FCP exists.

A possible solution is to keep all your media in a reference project, with no sequences, and only open it to copy/paste the media you need into your ‘working’ project. We’ve used this work-around a number of times to skirt this issue.

FCP HAS to deal with this issue (and others) if it’s to close the considerable gap between itself and AVID in media management.

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[Ben Holmes]

As has been noted on this forum several times in the past, if you are working at 1080 sizes, you will gain nothing in quality terms by using ProRes HQ over normal ProRes. Both are 10-bit codecs, but the HQ bitrate is ONLY recommended for anyone using 2K frame sizes. This is based on specific technical tests done by forum leaders here (I think it was Gary, might have been Shane).

Good news – you can use 60% of the space and have exactly the same quality. No need to use Proxy etc.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

Use 1080i as your master format (note RED footage is progressive, so it will actually be 1080p).

When you have to make SD copies, use compressor to do high-quality scaling, or better, use a Kona or Blackmagic output to do a down-res. Both cards can be set to do the crop or letterbox as required.

There’s too much info here to reply in a single post. If you’re unsure of this, seek professional advice from a post house. Making commercial content from RED footage is not something you should undertake alone if you’re posting these questions – with respect.

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