[Ben Holmes]

[Shane Ross] “Does that MacBook Pro have the Express34 slot?”

Nope – he says it’s the SD card one.

The simple fact is that by removing the expresscard slot from the 15″ MBP, Apple have rendered it useless as a video machine – as Shane says, you cannot use the FW bus for an IOHD or V4-thingy AND for a disk array.

However, the 17″ MBP is much better value than it used to be – I purchased one for little more than a 15″, and it’s not the ‘riot shield’ of old either, I think the extra size is not that noticable, and little extra weight either.

However, if I’m honest (and I use a laptop system with an MXO2 for some outside broadcast work) I use a tower whenever I can. They’re so much quicker, and a video card for one far cheaper than the laptop equivalent, which wipes out some of the price difference.

If you tell your boss you will be twice as productive on a tower as on a laptop (which is not MUCH of an exaggeration), you should be able to swing it. Shop around for an ex-demo unit for even better value, or a last gen Xeon machine – they’re just as quick in most instances, and much cheaper than Nehelem machines if you can still find any – I wish I’d bought a couple more when I had a chance…

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[Ben Holmes]

You could try Motion (although I suspect it will reject the format as well). Motion also has an object size limit of 4000×4000 pixels.

If you need esoteric support of Adobe products, you’d be much better off working with these items in After Effects – it will probably do a much better job of compositing the moves anyway.

If you have a recent version of Photoshop, you may not be aware that there are options within the video sections of it for animating and rendering video directly within photoshop – RTM.

If you only have access to Final Cut and older Photoshop, you will have to cut your cloth accordingly, and reduce the object sizes – FCP is not a compositing tool.

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[Ben Holmes]

All 3 of my tower systems are running Leopard with latest FCP updates – working week in and week out without a single problem. Can’t remember the last time I saw a crash.

Absolutely no reason to upgrade to SL.

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[Ben Holmes]

There are really only two upgrades you can perform:

1) Fit more RAM (I think you’ll see the system run better when you have multiple apps open) – 12Gb is recommended, but must be fitted symmetrically and ideally in matching sets (so fit 3x2Gb sticks in each riser for example).

2) Upgrade the GFX card if you have the stock one – the 4870 is a good bet, and probably the best value for money.

Buy RAM from a third party like OWC or Crucial.

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[Ben Holmes]

You will need to ensure that the Mac mini is recent enough to handle 1080i h.264 files – they need a fair bit of processing – my home 1.66 Ghz one (which is a few years old) will only do 720p.

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[Ben Holmes]

What codec are you exporting as? Animation codec? What drive array are you playing the video off? What system? What other applications do you have open as well as quicktime player?

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[Ben Holmes]

Again, I’m on the ‘not a deal-breaker’ side of the fence here, but I do occasionally miss this option when I use the MXO2 with a tower, for example when I want to audition music from a CD or iTunes through speakers (and in a fly-away setup, I usually don’t have a mixer, so just rely on the video card output) – I do get this with my Blackmagic Multibridge Pro, which works on the same basis as the MXO2, via a PCI tether – so it would be nice if the Matrox box did this.

However, I would note it’s kind of hard to use a Kona LHi with a laptop (where I most often use my MXO2), so the comparison is not very fair…

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[Ben Holmes]

You can install individual components by right-clicking on the FCS package, and selecting ‘show contents’. However, it may be better to just re-install all the apps (un-checking all the content) again, in case your problem is with a shared component. A clean install is even better… Re-installing just the apps will not take long.

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[Ben Holmes]

You might get a more detailed answer in the RED forum here, but I’d suggest you follow the steps in the RED FCP Whitepaper which is downloaded with the FCS installer from RED support. It will take you through the options for re-linking media for in order to use Color with the R3D files for grading nirvana.

Other options include the excellent Clipfinder (which is good at relinking media) and Monkey Extract.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

If the source is progressive, Compressor will create interlaced video with two identical fields for each original progressive frame, each with half the vertical resolution. As such, the video will not ‘look’ interlaced, as it lacks the temporal information you would need to achieve this. This may be a problem if you are trying to blend 1080p with existing interlaced footage. You may want to make an ‘artistic’ decision to de-interlace any 576i footage you have to match with it.

You may well get aliasing with any downconversion of this type – caused by the detail in the original. You will find settings in Compressor to alleviate some of these issues – but it’s inevitable to some extent. Test your own presets in Compressor on short sections of the original – the correct settings will vary depending on the source material. Be grateful you’re not going the other way – upconverting and going to progressive.

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