Bill Lee
Forum Replies Created
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A big factor that you haven’t considered is the addition of Goods and Services Tax (GST) levied on (as the name implies) goods and services in Australia. This tax must be included in the quoted prices, so A$349.99 is thus A$318.17 excluding GST, still above US$299 (at today’s prime exchange rate US$299 = A$277.86, an A$40 difference). As the price is usually determined using a conservative exchange rate just in case the A$ falls against the US$, this would account for a couple of points difference. The last item and by no means insignificant is the concept of price points, where items are usually priced at $319.99, $329.99, $339.99 or $349.99 for marketing reasons. As you can see, a price of $319.99 is probably too close to the actual converted currency rate, so the choices were realistically one of $329.99, $339.99 and $349.99.
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Unfortunately I too own a Griffin iMic, and a friend of mine has an iMic too. Both now lie unused, since we too had the same problem – unfixable low volume.
A couple of years ago I bought an M-Audio Firewire 410 to do the audio properly, and this has been used by me and my friend to do voice-over in FCP thereafter. I also own an Mbox2 Mini that works really well too.
Save your time – and give up on the iMic. Get something that works better – I haven’t looked recently what is cheap and good value – but we supply Mbox2 Minis to our students for this type of work. The down side is that you are paying for a copy of Pro Tools LE that you might not want if you can do all your audio work with Soundtrack Pro.There are some other USB audio capture devices, but sorry I don’t have any experience with them.
I feel for you.
Bill Lee
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Fred,
Try: Switching off your computer and camera, connecting up camera and computer with your FireWire cable, then switching on your camera then switching on your computer. Once the computer is up and running, go to Apple-Menu>About This Mac. Click on the More Info… button, and you should have the System Profiler window open in a second or two. Open up the Hardware list if it is hidden on the left column, and click on the FireWire item. On the right side you should see FireWire Device Tree and FireWire Bus with disclosure triangle. Your camera should appear in this list. If it does not, then it is possible that you have blown up the FireWire port on your camera or that on the computer.
Do you have any other FireWire devices that you can use to check that the computer FireWire port is OK?
Warning: Most of the time, a blown FireWire port won’t kill stuff plugged into it, but it can. So don’t plug critical stuff like your only external hard drive into this port when checking.
Bill Lee
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Tony,
Thanks for the replies to my questions.
Hmm. Running out of suggestions myself. The bottom line is that the Mac Pro might not be up to the task. of scaling your 720p to 1080p without visual glitches. If the new video card is working for you then obviously that’s the way to go for now.
Have you run Activity Monitor and viewed All processes by Kind and by %CPU just to make sure that you don’t have anything in there that is slowing down the computer?
I gather that you need stutterless video playback since you are recording from your FCP playback?
Bill Lee
I must be getting old: I can remember editing offline SD at 320×240 in FCP. -
Oh, and of course you have to disable all of the remote buttons while it is playing for more of the “Anti-piracy” warning look and feel. 😉 Oh, and your warning should be at least three minutes long, so they really, really, really know and understand that this DVD is a rough cut. 😎
Track Inspector>User Operations:>Disable All.
Bill Lee
You could also put some previews of your coming video projects before the main menu too, and make them unskippable too! 🙂 -
I’d have to agree with Steve – a VCR/DVD burner combo drive is the best option, otherwise you’ll be mothering the process far more than you want to do. The trick is to make most of what you do when capturing an automatic process, and one that only requires mental effort when you absolutely have to.
Just remember: VHS is very low quality, so copying to DVD and ripping it off the DVD if you need to edit won’t damage the quality significantly. Old VCR video often is off poor quality, and missing frames.
Workflow:
Load up VCR/DVD with tape and blank DVD. Set up monitor to keep an eye on where the VCR is up to. Burn VCR to DVD – don’t worry too much about cueing up – just rewind and start burning. When you notice the VCR has stopped playing useful video, stop the recording, change tapes, rewind and continue burning as long as you think the DVD has enough space for the new VCR video. If you run out of DVD, don’t worry, just finalize this DVD, change to a new blank DVD, rewind the VCR and burn some more VCR video to DVD.After a while, you’ll have some burnt DVDs containing video, and you’ll still be burning VCRs to DVD. Take the burnt DVDs and copy them on a computer on to a large hard disk by drag copying the VIDEO_TS folder (each one will be up to 4.3GB). Once you have some copied, use MPEG Streamclip to open the Video_TS folder, select one of the video streams, then set In and Out points and either save the video as an editable format for FCP, or Demux it if you just want to trim and arrange the videos in order and burn it using DVD Studio Pro. Here’s where you can quickly set In and Out points and export the video without having to do this trimming in real time like you would otherwise have to do. While you are doing this, keep an eye out for when the VCR playing finishes, so you can change tapes. I would recommend Export to DV… if you need an FCP editable format, since it isn’t going to require a higher quality codec since the original VCR quality will be so poor.
In MPEG Streamclip, when you select File>Open DVD… it will ask you which stream you want to open. Each separate stream should be another VCR tape you have captured. You will almost certainly need to fix frames when opening a video stream in MPEG Streamclip.
If you never get around to editing the video from the burnt DVDs, then you at least have them on DVDs. Navigating around a handful of DVDs is far easier than trying to find some scene from somewhere in a box of VCR tapes.
Bill Lee
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Work supplies me with a 13″ MacBook Pro, plus a 24″ LED Apple Display because it’s cheaper for them to buy than a 17″ MacBook Pro. Overall it works really well, so I have lots of screen real estate on the 1920 x 1200 external, and extra on the internal 1280 x 800 display. You can get some pretty cheap monitors that do 1920 x 1080 – and that doesn’t matter too much (’cause you aren’t going to be color grading on this monitor, right?), and connect it up with DVI to the MacBook Pro. If you are going to be doing color critical work (Photoshop?) on that monitor, then you might have to spring for a better quality monitor.
If you have to work in the field, then a 13″ MacBook Pro is handy enough to squeeze in some editing (just!), yet when you connect up at home or at work, you get the benefits of lots of screen. You might even find it worthwhile having a big screen at home and another big screen at work, so you can get some productivity happening in both places.
Bill Lee
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In general, you select the clip you want to correct over time, then select the Color Corrector 3-way from the Effects>Video Filters menu. Once done, press the Enter key to bring that clip and filters into the Viewer. You should now have a Color Corrector 3-way tab in the viewer; click on that tab. Move the playhead in your timeline to the start of your clip; you should see the playhead in the Color Corrector 3-way tab also move to where the clip starts. Press the Ins/Del Keyframe button in this Color Corrector 3-way tab to lock down some initial color correction settings at this stage (don’t worry if they are not correct yet). Move the playhead to the last frame of the clip you are correcting; this should also move the playhead in the Color Corrector 3-way tab to the end of your clip. Press the Ins/Del Keyframe button in this Color Corrector 3-way tab to lock down some color correction settings at the end of this clip. Before you add any more keyframes, watch your clip. Note down any sudden changes in lighting, since you will need to keyframe these points. Keyframes will default to linear changes between two keyframes, so if your lighting doesn’t change linearly, you will need to change the default curve (i.e. straight line) between two keyframes.
Move the clip playhead to the first keyframe (also the first frame of this clip). Use the Color Corrector 3-way to tweak the color/luminance so it looks right. Move to the last keyframe in the clip and use the graphical interface tab for the Color Corrector 3-way to get this last keyframe right. Use the Match Hue feature to get things almost right very quickly for both of these keyframes. (Use the Help if you don’t know how to use this feature.) If you don’t have any keyframes except for the beginning and end frame keyframes, then great!, otherwise go to the intermediate keyframes and make their color ‘right’. Use the Tools>Frame Viewer to compare two frames to get a closer match.
If your lighting does not change linearly over the clip duration, you may have to tweak how the changes in parameters vary. Click on the Filters tab in the Viewer, then open the Color Corrector 3-way (numerical) filter. You should see a bunch of parameter names, their values, and on the right the keyframes and how these parameters change linearly as graphs. You probably want to get some more space for the parameters which don’t change linearly, so move the arrow cursor over the bottom line which separates a parameter graph from the next graph. The cursor should change into a one way resize cursor; click and drag downwards to make the graph big enough to work with. Now move the (arrow) cursor over one of the keyframes for that graph and it will change into a cross-hair cursor. Right-click over it; a pop up menu with Clear and Smooth will appear; select Smooth and you will get an adjustable handle from that keyframe that will let you adjust how the parameter changes near that keyframe. Usually if you do one keyframe, you need to also Smooth at the keyframe at the other end of what was the straight line before. Adjusting individual parameters via the numeric filter tab can be quite time consuming with unexpected results if you change some parameters and not others, so try to get it right with the Visual interface of the Color Corrector 3-way before delving into the numerical parameters.
Bill Lee
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…it begins to stutter during playback.
1) How many streams of ProRes are you trying to play back at once?
2) If you turn on the dropped frame warning in the User Preferences, does it give a warning of dropped frames?
3) Is it just a visual thing while you are working in FCP, or is it a stutter in rendered/exported files?
4) Does the stutter occur in the same place every time?
5) Do you play back video clips that match the sequence settings? What happens if you create a (non-matching) sequence, drop one of the clips into this sequence, then say yes to the dialog box that asks you if you want to make the sequence match this clip. When you play this sequence, does it stutter? (From your description, you are trying to play back 720p material in a 1080p timeline which is stuttering.)
6) How long are the clips that you are working with? How many timeline tabs do you have open at once?
7) Does it stutter if you are playing back a clip in the Viewer, instead of the Canvas/Timeline?
8) Is your Canvas window showing a scrollable part of the video you are trying to watch? FCP used to have (and probably still does have) problems in playing back part of a video – you need to set the Viewer and Canvas to ‘Fit to Window’ (Shift-z) to avoid this playback problem.
9) Does the problem still occur if you work in a 720p sequence with a mix of 1080p and 720p clips?Bill Lee
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I get a whole lot more reliable captures when the deck is switched to the appropriate format (DV or HDV) explicity, rather than relying on AUTO. Apple even suggests that you do so: https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302407
If people are reusing tapes and/or have mixed DV and HDV encoded material, then FCP doesn’t deal well with the format changing while playing back or during capture.
Bill Lee