[Ben Holmes]

Sherwood

FCP sure ain’t AE, or even Motion – but if you do choose ‘smooth’ on the keyframes, and have the wireframe view enabled, you can adjust the bezier points of the keyframes to adjust motion. It’s possible with a little fiddling to get a decent result depending on the move required, although if it’s just a push in, smooth is ok – the problems come when you have a position move as well, causing ‘wobbly’ motion.

You MAY find using the bezier handles helps with this – just don’t expect miracles…

Ben

PS – Motion is a quick and easy way of achieving this if you are a FCS owner. Just don’t bother with the FCP/Motion integration (dropping Motion projects into FCP) as it sucks.

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[Ben Holmes]

Can’t agree enough with everything you have said about Mobile Me – I never had any problems with .Mac

However, I’m not sure what the point of a MacBook is now for video – the USB2 format will not support a decent media drive, so it’s no good to users on the Cow…

Thanks for the info. I have read in other places that migration can be achieved via a Time Capsule (or possibly another Time Machine drive) and this can be done wired. Not sure what the exact deal is, but it sounded fairly easy…

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

[Jeremy Garchow] ” I don’t think it should run FCP.”

Ah – Betcha it will. And – neatly wrapping up this thread – betcha that’s why they dropped the FW….

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

I like this discussion! Have at it….

[Jeremy Garchow] “Like I said before, it is now cheaper to get a Macbook with firewire. It’s $999:”

Yup – a Macbook that won’t run FCS. That’s why they hobbled the new ones – it’s essentially a lot closer to a MBP in terms of power, as I said before. Why haven’t Apple updated the tech specs on FCS to state whether or not the new MBs will run it?

[Jeremy Garchow] “They get heavily discounted equipment and from the sounds of it, there are more and more students buying macs”

They get heavily discounted SOFTWARE – on the Apple education store, a MBP is $100 cheaper at $1899, the basic Macbook $50 cheaper at $949. Or $1245 for the new MacBook ‘Bricked’. Wow. More students have Macs because a) they can use all the cool software on them (or at least they could…) and b) because colleges now require students to have a laptop for their courses and c) because Mac is a cool brand.

Final Cut Studio is listed on the UK Apple store for £548.73, £400/$700 less than the normal retail price (for some reason I couldn’t see it on the US store). I imagine institutional prices will be a lot lower – it’s still not going to mean they stump up for MBPs. iMacs all round I guess, until FW disappears on those, or they bring out an iMac Pro.

Honestly Jeremy, it’s hard to say what the impact of Apple’s new direction will be – but you cannot convince me that producing what every reviewer so far has referred to as a 13″ MBP, then equipping it with nothing more useful than USB2 is anything other than a cynical and calculated move by Apple. I imagine they have costed the impact of this decision, and made it for the best business reasons possible, but I think they underestimated the value of the goodwill already lost by their actions.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

A Gen-10 is a lot cheaper than a camera – assuming you have one knocking around whenever you need one.

I can see where you are going technically, but I’m not sure that’s technical advice I could subscribe to – any old video camera’s composite output is not a stable sync source IMHO. It might be, in the same way as the camera with a lens cap on MIGHT be generating video black…

Why do people cheap out on Genlock, then complain about bad edits to tape? Not aimed specifically at you, Matte.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

Actually this applies to all students – many of whom purchase FCS at considerable student discounts. At a single stroke, Apple have cut off a generation of laptop toting FCP learning students, who now have no way to connect a video drive or DV camera to their personal computer. Even if they’re using a newer HD camera, they still have NO WAY to play the captured video reliably.

If you think this is hyperbole, then think again. If you were heartened as I have been by a new generation of students bought up in FCP at college, now making their way into production and post-production, helping in no small part to tip the balance in broadcast towards FCP away from AVID then wonder how many of them will buy a $2000 MBP. To say nothing of the film industry directly sourcing talent from film schools, using DV and HDV cameras. If you watched the Apple launch stream of the new laptops, you would have seen the emphasis they put on students – including the now famous shot of a lecture hall full of journalism students (I think it’s from North Western) all toting Macbooks.

All this from the lack of a port? Yes – really. It’s not good enough for Steve Jobs to make a glib response about HD camcorders using USB. Not only does it ignore DV users (still the vast majority) it totally ignores the storage issues removing the FW port causes. Many PC alternatives at LESS price than the MB have Expresscard other interface options.

I suspect Apple will either u-turn on this on pay a heavy price a few years down the line.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

Please try to avoid double posting – this isn’t a helpline, and people will be back to you pretty quickly. It just makes it harder for people to help when there are two threads open.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

Is this a random 1-3 frames? if so you have a reference issue. If it’s always a certain number of frames out (in which case you will have the same number of frames missed at the start of the edit) you can adjust the edit offset in the device control preset.

It’s a common mistake to this that ANY layoff to tape, especially when you need to insert edit, does not require genlock. All decks need something to lock up to during preroll, and if you have no genlock between the deck and the computer, the deck will just find it’s own lockup point – where the control track is synchronised so the edit happens on the start of a frame.

There is a cheap way of achieving this now – the AJA Gen-10 I think – which every edit suite should have, or house genlock equivalent.

Coming from a tape background this was drummed into me a long time ago….

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

[Jeremy Garchow] “As of right now, Apple cannot do BluRay in way that makes sense and that is ‘Mac like’, otherwise they would. As of right now, it’s a bit too complex for the consumer and it sounds like it’s pretty complex for professional application builders as well. I think that BluRay is still too new to simplify. “

Agreed – I think this makes a lot of sense – apart from the last part about it being too new – it’s just not that new a format, it’s so old in IT terms it’s about to be superseded by iTMS downloads (hopes Apple). It’s definitely a programming mess – ask Adobe. Still – this is the best argument right now for Apple’s reluctance to join in. Still not sure I believe they don’t already have this working in the labs however – Toast manages iDVD standard of Blu-Ray authoring already.

[Jeremy Garchow] “if this were the case, they wouldn’t put DVD drives in their computers either as DVDs still outsell BluRays by far. I just don’t believe that putting a BluRay burner in their computers would help or hurt iTunes sales”

Nice point – but misguided IMHO. The difference between Blu-Ray and DVD was the level of market penetration when this became an issue for Apple. When they started selling movies, DVD was already the default format for movies – and they had to support it. It also makes a great data format for software and archiving – which is what Blu-Ray could be – imagine the whole FCS install on ONE disk. Remember the piles of floppies we used to get before CD-ROM?

In the case of HD rentals/purchases, there is still a battle to be won. A much as Blu-Ray has won the HD-DISK war, downloading movies is rapidly becoming a viable alternative, which is why the likes of Netflix have also started offering a download service. Faster broadband will, eventually, render Blu-Ray disks pointless for movies IMHO, but it’ll take a while. I think Apple would rather sit it out until this point in time – but at the moment it’ll just take too long for this to happen. In the end, they will have to join the party.

[Jeremy Garchow] “And seriously, the Macbook shouldn’t be used as an editor anyway (in my opinion). You can get the new 15″ macbook Pro for $600 or $800 more and have a computer that really works instead of one that limps along”

Now, I was pretty clear at the start of the thread I didn’t want this as a main machine – just a travel machine for work and a little prep etc. I’m typing this on a MBP I guess I will be working with for at least another 12 months. But that’s not the point here: The new Macbook SHOULD (and – hey – this is only an educated guess) be able to run FCS just fine – even Motion. For many users, especially FC Express and iApps users, the MacBook is now a Pro spec machine, with one glaring omission….

Take a look at Gizmodo’s unusually good review of both systems:

https://gizmodo.com/5063492/macbook-and-macbook-pro-dual-review

Look near the end at this section:

“So Who Needs The MacBook Pro over the Macbook?

In one word, pros. (Suiting, we know.) Video professionals will need the MBP because the MB no longer has FireWire, still a big deal for video guys. USB is fast, but its speeds aren’t sustained. Those who use FireWire require predictable transfer rates, a connection that won’t drop during realtime video playback from an external hard drive or capture from a video deck.

Anyone who requires an ExpressCard, too, will need to spend the extra cash on a MBP. Many 3G peripherals use this slot—and some correct Apple’s willful memory-card ignorance by filling it with an SD/MS reader—but there are just as many USB peripherals, so its omission in the MB probably isn’t as damning as FireWire’s.

And then, of course, there’s the group that requires the MacBook Pro’s discrete graphics card with a half-gig of dedicated RAM. Large textures and massive Photoshop files require a level of performance that the basic MacBook’s integrated graphics, even Nvidia’s most boastworthy—just can’t replace.

In this regard, we see the line drawn in the sand between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. Similar processors, different graphics and FireWire and ExpressCard only if you pay up.”

Yup – the gfx aren’t as wiz-bang on the MB, but they’re not far off the last-gen MBP, and for all I know they’re better than the gfx on my own X1600 MBP. These ‘integrated’ gfx on the new MB are ‘integrated’ in system terms only – they suffer from nowhere near the same slowdowns as the old Intel integrated setup.

Look – Apple can do what they like. The world won’t stop turning. Just realise that where they used to court Pro users (and I’ve spent over $20,000 with them in 2 years) they now have a different focus. I have to look a few years ahead – and barring an amazing FCS update, I’m worried about the future support I can expect to receive from the single manufacturer into whose basket I put all my eggs. I think the Blu-Ray and FW issues ARE symptomatic of a change of direction from Apple. The next 12 months will prove if I’m right.

Feeling your jetlag – I think 10 percent of me is still out in Kentucky from the Ryder, and another 10 percent is in Dublin from last week….

Kind regards

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

Three hours of HDV is around 34Gb. You may well have a project with more than 100Gb in it, but that’s not what the size of an exported HDV file of the whole timeline would be.

Anyway – that’s not what’s important here. You need to export this timeline using compressor. Use a DVD preset, and select the longest time/higher quality setting – that’s BEST quality, 120 minutes. That will fit 2 hours of video on a standard single layer ‘DVD-5’, the DVDs usually with ‘4.7Gbs’ on the label. Then buy some dual layer disks and burn your mpeg/ac3 audio encoded movie using DVDSP. If you’re not comfortable with the DVD creation process, I can’t help you in a single post, so I’ll assume you’re happy with that.

You will not get any more than 2 hours of video on a ‘standard’ DVD at anywhere near acceptable quality – and don’t expect this 3 hour version to look amazing. If you have the time, tweak the bitrate in Compressor upward on this preset until your audio and video COMBINED is around 7-8Gb in size. You’ll only get 8.5 Gb on a dual-layer DVD, and you need to leave some headroom for the disk menus etc.

Ben

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