Bill Lee
Forum Replies Created
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Name: Ed Stevens
Date: Apr 24, 2005 at 17:56 gmt
Subject: Re: Send clip to another program from FCPEd says:
“Also I am puzzled about which board to buy. I have a Decklink Extreme and I think it’s defective. The audio capture is distorted.
I cannot get anyone to respond to my post in the Decklink section. ”Some of the Decklink guys were over at NAB, or coming back from NAB, and for others there was the long weekend caused by the commemoration of ANZAC day, combined with a problem with the mail script on the Decklink web site. Kristian Lam on the Decklink forum has asked that support emails to a particular support address (not reproduced here to avoid spammer spidering).
“I was thinking of the AJA io for now and the Kona2 whenI get a demand for HD. Some say the IO has a delay in editing. Can you tell me what works for you?”
My testing has shown all three seem to work fine. If you already have the Decklink, then why spend more money (assuming that the Decklink card is not faulty)? Which is best for you depends on your setup and the type of video you will be working with.
Bill Lee
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“I really appreciate the reply. I am very new to a MAC and FCP, about 2 months. How do you do the tasks that you spoke of?
ED”There are two ways of editing clips/material outside of FCP:
1) External Editors,
2) Export and Import.An External Editor allows you to edit a clip in an external editor and when you save it from your external editing program, FCP will recognise the file has been updated and automatically update it in your timeline without you having to reimport it and reapply Motion effects, Filters or Transitions. Setting this up is described on p184 of the online manual for FCP 4.5.
Exporting a clip, working on it with another application, reimporting it and reapplying effects works, but is so much more complicated than using an external editor. One way of doing this is to use the Batch Export command, which is the easiest way to export existing individual clips for further processing, or to mark a selection in the timeline and export this from the File menu.
Could I suggest that if you are new to FCP, you will get so much more out of the program and become productive so much faster if you take a FCP training course. The standard book used in FCP training is part of the Apple Pro Training series, and can be worked though as self-paced training or as leader-led training. You can buy the book, work through it and if it seems beyond you then you can look at the leader-led training. You’ll be able to find out the shortcuts to productivity from the trainer: questions that appear in this forum on a regular basis. Final Cut Pro allows you a huge amount of freedom to create your workflow – but it can be a freedom that allows you to work very inefficiently or very efficiently. In addition, there is a Prometric test at the end of the training that passing makes you FCP Certified, quite useful if you are trying to sell yourself as a freelance editor to new customers and clients.
Bill Lee
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“How is the upgrade handled? Do you give proof of ownership when you purchase? Is there an upgrade version and a full version?”
It will probably be like the existing upgrades: when you install it, you will need to type in the serial number that comes with the upgrade. When it verifies this serial number, it knows from this serial number that this is an upgrade, and if it is it will then ask for your serial number from your previous installation. If you try to give it an invalid number, or FCP version which did not qualify for the upgrade, your old serial number will not be accepted and your upgrade will not work.
So, you will be able to buy the upgrade even if you don’t qualify for it, but you won’t be able to install this upgrade successfully.
Bill Lee
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Eric,
It’s a really good idea to have a couple of seconds of good timecode before the marked In point and after the marked Out point before capturing. This is to allow the deck/camera to overrun the In/Out point when cueing the tape, since if – during the cueing – the head leaves good timecode, then you will get that message. You can adjust these Pre-roll and Post-roll amounts in Final Cut Pro>Audio/Video Settings>Device Control (page I-140 of the manual), but if you cut it too short, you may get dropped frames at the beginning of your batch capture. If you absolutely have to capture an event at the very beginning of a tape (or start of valid timecode), then Capture Now might allow you to capture it where batch capture won’t. See page I-159 for managing timecode breaks inside a captured video segment.
It’s also a really, really, really good idea not to have timecode breaks anywhere in your tapes. There are ways of dealing with timecode breaks but they are not pretty and require a certain amount of dedication and attention to detail when loading your tapes. Most of the time, if these tapes are likely to be batch captured a number of times is to digitally copy the tape from deck to deck (or camera to deck) via FireWire cable (which may create problems if you need to have the original time code it was captured with).
I have seen problems with the tape deck not correctly reading the time code and thus FCP thinks you have a timecode break. These are unusual though.
Read page I-332 “The Importance of Avoiding Timecode Breaks”, and page I-335 for other advice on broken timecode.
Cheers,
Bill Lee -
I just checked this with a piece of PAL DV inside FCP 4.5. The variable speed plays back in real time, even outside the range 50%-200% (at one time it used to be real-time just within these limits).
So, it looks like you can do real time variable speed changes.
The manual for FCP 4.5 says on page III-156 says “All constant speed changes between 1 and 200% can be played in real time, even with frame blending turned on.” “Unlike a constant speed change, there is no limit to the speed range of variable speed clips that can play in real time.”
Page III-157: “… you can turn on frame blending in the Speed dialog. … Note: While clips using frame blendingcan play back in real time at preview quality, frame blending on a field by field basis are much more processor intensive, and is only performed when the clip is either rendered or played via a third-party capture card with real-time hardware processing that’s capable of field rendering.(Sorry, but one factor affecting my test might be me running a later version of system software and QuickTime than you are using.)
Bottom line is that speed changes can and do play back in real time. Whether this is adequate for your needs is unknown – see if you can get a sample of your media and try it out on a friend’s FCP or at an Apple reseller who has FCP available for demo. There is no one best way of interpolating frames in variable speed playback – Apple supplies a tool, but you might find that other third party tools provide a better end result. A friend found the Apple-supplied tool inadequate and bought another tool off the Internet that he thought gave better results.
Bill Lee
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Adolfo Rozenfeld said:
>”The problem with HDV is that it’s not DV – it has three times more compression than DV (this is, three times more pixels with the same data rate and a quite old codec).”You can’t just compare data rates, since DV is only intraframe compression and HDV uses interframe as well as intraframe compression. Both use DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) compression. Even though both have the same data rate, DV contains a certain amount of redundancy in data, which has been eliminated from the HDV data. This extra redundancy makes DV easier to edit since the data from one frame is all that is required to construct that frame, whereas HDV may require multiple frame data to reconstruct one frame (although these multiple frame data pieces are usually much smaller than the DV frame data).
Yes, MPEG-2 has been around a while, and is not as efficient as, say, MPEG-4 Part 10. The encoding artifacts left in the signal are well known, and have been improved over time compared to a relatively new format such as AVC (although the lessons learnt with MPEG-2 have also been applied to MPEG-4 in its evolution).
Bill Lee
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Matthew Brunn said:
“Chapter marks can only be output from the timeline!”I would like to expand on Matthew’s very correct statement. A very common problem with people putting in markers in their output is they put markers on clips instead on on the timeline. A marker on a clip shows up as a pink marker on the clip in the video track, whereas a timeline (or sequence marker) shows up as a green marker in the timecode area above the set of V tracks. No clip markers are exported when you export this sequence, only sequence markers are exported. When adding markers to your sequence, ensure that no clip is selected first, to ensure the markers go on the sequence and not the clip.
After you’ve exported the QuickTime reference movie from FCP, open it in QuickTime Player Pro and extract the text track and export this as a text track. you can then open this is TextEdit to see the chapter markers if they are there.
Bill Lee
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Dave Spicer said:
> “I don’t think you can really use FCP without having QT Pro, and it needs QT 7?”In all versions of FCP up to and including v4.5 you didn’t have to have QuickTime Pro installed to edit (but you may have needed particular versions of QuickTime installed), although some export operations may have needed it but I haven’t ever found ones that did. I’ve installed FCP many times without putting in the registration code for QuickTime Pro and its always been fine without it. Has anyone else experienced operations that have actually required the registration code installed before some feature is enabled in FCP?
Where QuickTime Pro becomes really useful is in preparing media for easy import and editing, especially using Applescript to automate conversions. Compressor could also be useful in managing media conversions for input into FCP.
Bill Lee
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I’m not sure – there is no explicit Flush Undo History, but maybe if you set the User Preferences>Levels of Undo [n] where n is the number of undos that are kept, you will limit the use of your precious RAM being tied up in the Undo stack. You can also quit FCP and restart it – that will flush the undo history buffer.
Every time to do something, it has to keep track of this in the Undo History buffers – the more that is done, the more state information must be stored away in case you want to roll backwards in time to a previous state. So, if you have 99 levels of undo, and you are making massive changes each action, then a huge amount of this state information has to be kept around in RAM. If you are short of RAM, then this amount of state information may cause FCP to run out of room in RAM. It then has to free up space to allow you to continue working (or finish the command you have asked it to do): Closing non-essential project frees up space, closing non-essential sequences frees up space, and truncating the undo history will also free up space. Tweaking the System Settings>Memory & Cache can free up more memory from the System RAM to use in FCP, and reducing the RAM available for stills and thumbnails will free up more space to be used for other things inside FCP.
Should you do this? Well, time is money, and the more time you spend managing this space, the less time you are being productive or creative. RAM is (relatively) cheap, and unless you have some limitation such as “All my RAM slots are full”, then I would buy more RAM. Setting FCP to use up all your available RAM might seem a good thing, but what happens if you want to open Photoshop or Motion to tweak a still or a clip? No spare RAM: must quit FCP then run the app, then restart FCP. Ugly – try not to set the FCP RAM use to 100% because that will give the system some room to expand if it has to.
You could set your Levels of Undo downwards, ultimately to a minimum of 1 undo, but that is also no fun at all. Every click of the mouse in changing parameters in the Motion menu counts as an action, so it is easy to use up many undos when you are adjusting these values. Being able to experiment is part of the creative process so tying yourself down with limited undos will restrict this. More RAM is the best solution, as well as managing levels of undo to reasonable levels is my suggestion.
Bill Lee
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Try:
0) Place a copy of the project that doesn’t work into the your Shared folder inside your home folder
1) Creating a new admin user in System Preferences>Accounts
2) Log out and log in as that new user. This creates a new set of user preferences without changing your existing set and allows you to check for the possibility of damaged user preferences. If the testing works with the new user and not with the old, then this would tend to implicate corrupt user preferences.
3) Open a new project and use the Easy Setup to select the appropriate capture and sequence defaults (DV-PAL). Set the System Settings>Scratch disk to save the captured media to a known good volume.
4) Open the Log and Capture window
5) Preview the tape and set In and Out points for a short (10 second) grab and log this clip (make sure that the clip plays back and there are a few seconds around each In/Out point so the capture can occur within good timecode)
6) Close the Log and Capture window
7) Select the logged clip (that has no media captured yet)
8) Select Batch Capture
9) If FCP does not capture, then it may be worthwhile deleting FCP and re-installing it (deleting instructions are found at <https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93811>)
10) I would not recommend “Capture Now” initially while testing (or indeed, for normal capturing) since the first thing the computer does when you click the Capture Now button is to allocate an amount of storage equal to about 230MB x n, where n is the value in (System Settings>Scratch Disk>Limit capture to [n] minutes) and then will start capturing. The larger the value of n, the longer the setup wil take and the greater delay before the first frame is properly captured. It sounds like your computer is hanging during this allocation of disk space.
11) If batch capturing works, then try opening the copy of your project you made in step 0) (it needed to be in a place that is accessible by another user which is why it was put in your Shared folder)
12) Try capturing a clip while you are in this project. If your project is corrupted, the capture may fail here.
13) When you are finished testing, log out, log back in as your original user and delete the newly created test user, and copy of your project in the Shared folder.
14) Boot from the Mac OS X install disk and select the Special>Disk Utility menu item. Run Disk First Aid on the boot drive and on the drive that you use to store your captured media on.
15) Reboot from your disk and run Disk Utility and run Repair Permissions to make sure that is OK.The symptoms of a crash are that the machine will be unresponsive, and the fans may spin up to full speed (sounding like a G5 wants to take off). This fan behaviour is caused by a watchdog routine that, deciding that nobody is in charge of the fan speed and not knowing how much fan is necessary to keep the G5 processsor(s) cool enough, decides to be safe and turns on all fans just to be sure. Same effect if you put your G5 into target disk mode – the fans will spin up since the processor load is unknown and thus the amount of cooling necessary is also unknown.
Bill Lee