[Ben Insler]

Hey Tim,

For HDV you’ll need at least a Gig of RAM, but if you’re planning on doing HD the I’m sure you’re prepared for RAM costs, and I’d get at least 2 but wouldn’t hesitate to recommend getting at least 6 if you can afford it. You can get up to 16 in the mac pro, so go nuts if you have the funds. You’ll need a Kona 3 or a BlackMagic Design DeckLink HD card if you want to capture HD , but HDV can go through firewire just like DV. To be honest, I don’t know too much about the Matrox cards you mentioned, but I use a Kona 3 every day and it rocks – mostly DVCPRO HD editing, but we have also mastered out to HDCAM with no problems, as well as used the built in down-converter to master to DigiBeta.

Don’t forget, if you’re doing uncompressed HD, you can’t use FireWire 800 drives – you’ll need to spend some money on Fibre or SATA RAIDs and the necessary corresponding interface PCI card. DVCPRO HD, HDV, SD, DV will all obviously work fine through FW800.

Good Luck,

Ben

[Ben Insler]

Well sort of… the downmix button merges all your output channels down to stereo so that you can preview them. For example, if you have Dialogue on tracks 1-2 and music on 3-4 and you’re outputting 4 channels of audio, you most likely will only be able to hear tracks one and two (unless you have brought a mixer into this and are going through that with all audio channels). Downmixing witll send tracks 3-4 through your stereo mix so you can hear everything. To my knowledge, there’s no setting in FCP to downmix to mono, nor can you set your sequence to mono (essentially, mono would just be a stereo mix where channel 1 = channel 2.

If you want to preview your mix as mono, here’s what I’d do. Go into your sequence settings. Under the ‘Audio Outputs’ tab, set grouping to ‘Dual Mono.’ This will let you assign each individual track to a discrete channel, rather than assigning it to a channel group and determining L or R with the clip’s pan attribute (in fact, you will not have control over the pan attribute for clips in the timeline – though if you change back to stereo grouping, you will not have lost any pan settings you’ve already made). Then, set all tracks ‘audio outputs’ to use channel 1 (ctrl+click on each tracks audible button or in a track’s empty source patch area – ctrl-clicking on a sourch patch itself will allow you to change the source-destination linkage, not the output channel) This should play everything through channel 1, or Left.

If you need to hear mono out of both channels, I’d suggest creating a new sequence, again with ‘Dual Mono’ outputs. Nest your edit in this empty sequence. Your nested sequence will only have audio on track 1. Delete track 2 of your nested sequence, and then duplicate track 1 and move it down so that it is also in track 2. Now, make sure that track 1 is outputting to channel 1, and track 2 is outputting to channel 2, and you should have mono playing back in full, brilliant stereo… of course now the audio is doubled so it may seem louder than it actually is.

Tedious, maybe, but it actualy should only take you a few minutes to set all this up.

Best,

Ben

[Ben Insler]

PS All regarding the HMI lighting thing in Twin Peaks – it probably happened because one of the HMI ballasts (the big brick that handles the power) was broken. This causes flicker that we can’t really see too well, until of course you watch your footage… and it happens in all mediums. Just something to watch for with HMIs.

And yes, happy mistakes are great!

Best,

Ben

[Ben Insler]

You’re picking up the flicker from the lights, and that’s recorded in the image itself (on an exaggerated scale, imagine turning the lights on your set on and off repeatedly while filming). I’ve removed this effect somewhat successfully when doing timeliapse image sequences in after effects using some of the auto processes (like exposure, levels, contrast, and experimenting with some others), but I think you’re pretty stuck if you’re trying to solve this in FCP.

Best,

Ben

[Ben Insler]

Not sure why. I’ve never experienced that problem, but make sure that you’re on the arrow tool, and if you can’t ge the image+wireframe setting to stick, try using the “w” hotkey to cycle between image/image+wireframe/wrieframe only settings. “w” will work for both the canvas and the viewer, whichever is selected.

Best,

Ben

[Ben Insler]

I’ll check the premiere functions for exporting the batch list (I think it’s “export bacth list,” but not positive) when I get home later and post here.

However, the answer to your question re: batch capturing on PC and then taking the footage to FCP is no. They both use DV, but Apple uses quicktime to handle video, while PCs use avi to handle video (and avid uses its own codec). So, footage from one will not edit natively on another. You need to caputre on the same type of system that you’ll be editing on (so if you’re editing in FCP, capture on an apple, etc)

-Ben

[Ben Insler]

I’ve done this from Premiere to FCP before. You kind of need to work around the differneces between the software, but once you do it works fine. I’ll see if I remember it, and I’ll check my PC to confirm when I get home if this method doesn’t work for you as is. KEEP IN MIND though that you can only log footage if you want to go from one to another. Do not try to capture at home on Premiere/Avid and then bring your footage to FCP – you will regret the day you decided to try it. Here goes…

– Log footage like you normally would in premiere.
– Once you’re finished, Hide all the bin columns except name (don’t think you can hide this one), media start, media end, reel.
– Export a batch list from Premiere.
– Open the exported batch list in excel.
– Change the names of each column on the batch list to conform to FCP standards (you may want to export a batch list from FCP as well to confirm the names of each column – if the names are wrong, FCP will not import the column…or possibly the whole batch)
– Save the file in excel (just save/overwrite, not save as)
– Take your batch list to your mac, click on your project tab in the brower window of FCP and then select File::Import::Batch List.

That should do it for you. If it doesn’t work, post a response and I’ll check it out for ya.

Good Luck,

Ben

[Ben Insler]

I’m seeing that too, and then some. Once you razor a clip, this seems to happen on whichever is the second piece you attempt to make independent second. The first one seems to always work fine.

-Ben

[Ben Insler]

Can you try setting your render scratch folder to a different drive (like and external firewire 800)? If it renders fine, it’s a problem with your XSAN. That would be my guess. Usually Final Cut will give you more detailed errors (or exactly the opposite… no error at all… and just not do anything, as is usually the case with low disk space while rendering) when something goes wrong. In my experience, the General Error usually comes up when there are HDD issues. We get them a lot when if we have connected to another HDD over our network and then eject that mounted drive before quitting FCP. For some reason it is looking for that drive and gives the General Error when it can’t find it, even though that drive is in no way referenced by the project open in FCP.

Hope this helps.

Ben

[Ben Insler]

Well, I’m not going between motion and AE, I’m going between motion and Final Cut Pro (something that actually should work seamlessly, since they’re both made by apple and come bundled together… but you know). Final Cut Pro works differntly than AE, and image sequences are just not a good thing to use. You can, but this usually ends up taking some fun out of your day. I understand what you’re saying with uncompressed for AE, but Final Cut’s workflow isn’t the same and so I was hoping that there was a solution when exporting to quicktime. I’m also distributing these files to other editors, so it is best if the alphas can be embedded (rather than passing out fills and mattes).

Thanks again,

Ben