Boyd Mccollum
Forum Replies Created
-
Well there are different ways to achieve the same result.
The beginning part of this thread talked more about limit effect and the workflow for that – which Andy did a great job describing.
From the description you gave, what you actually ended up doing was to remove the color cast from the Whites and Blacks. The difference between that and limit effect may be negligible in your situation, but they are doing different things. Your corrections were applied to the entire image. A limit effect would only be applied to the specific region you wanted.
To see this in action, take a clip and make a copy of it. Apply the 3 way corrector to each one. On one clip, as an example, limit Luma to everything over 90 IRE. Bring up your waveform monitor. Play with the luma slider under the Whites. You should see the difference in how the image is affected between the two clips.
One way I might use the limit luma effect is when I’ve corrected the shot to where I want it but still have areas that are over 100IRE. If I readjust the luma slider for whites, it will change the look of the entire shot, and I’d need to readjust the mids and blacks again, and may not achieve the look I want. So I apply a second filter, limit luma to over 90 or 95, and then bring those values down. The rest of the shot is unaffected.
-
Add a second filter to do the limit effect.
-
How long did you let FCP 6 try to open it? I went through a similar experience with a project file that was 200MB. It’d get to about 48% open, then ask if I wanted to update. Then it would just work and work and I would need to force quit FCP to stop it.
I finally decided to let it run, and went out for a few hours, had dinner, etc. When I came back it had opened. It may be that it might just take a while to update – for sure it took longer than my patience allowed.
-
[Jeremy Garchow] “My MBP has a 250 Gig drive fwiw.”
thanks, I didn’t know that. I just took a quick look at the Apple site at their stock MPB.
I was going to mention those STP loops, but couldn’t find them right off hand on my main edit computer. When I rant, I like to be at least accurate 🙂
I find iTunes takes up huge chunks of space as well.
BTW, is there a way to put the loops, templates, and the like on a separate drive and still have the different apps access them? I haven’t RTFM on this yet, and will, just wondering if anyone knew. If worse came to worse, I guess I could replace the folders with aliases and point them to a different direction.
-
MBPs come with either 120G or 160G hard drives.
I don’t know why it’s so hard to understand that it’s easy to eat up Gigs in a big way WITHOUT media. I have an old G4 Powerbook that has an 80G drive. I had trouble upgrading to FCS with it. It’s all the templates in DVDSP, Motion, and LifeType that take up a lot of space. The themes in iDVD ’08 take 1.77G.
Over the next few days I’m going to be looking to see how I can upgrade it to FCS2, or some paired down version of it. A quick look at the application support shows 10.93G for LifeType and 16.25G for FCS. I’m going to upgrade to Leopard at the same time and that takes 20G. That’s over 60% of my available space, and with no apps actually installed.
On a small drive, memory management, as these apps get bigger and bigger, is an issue.
So for the OP, depending on how much you use them, trash iDVD themes. Do you use Life Type? If not, there’s 10G you can lose. Same with Motion or DVDSP. That’s what I’m looking at doing so I can use my laptop as a remote edit station. Oh yeah, I’ll have an external drive to go with it for media.
-
you may want to post this on the FCP forum with it’s own subject heading.
-
I believe the P2 cards are hot swappable. But then you have the issue of downloading them which you can’t do directly to a hard drive, you’d need to use a laptop computer (or a desktop, depending on your set up).
There are Firestore drives that you can mount directly on the camera and record to. I believe they run 100G. That should give you the 2 hours you need, and probably more cost effective then buying enough cards for each camera.
If you are capturing during a show, you should have a dedicated person doing that, and come up with a way to ensure that cards are being captured and you don’t accidentally overwrite footage that hasn’t been captured. You should also have that person backup all the footage at the same time (writing to 2 or more hard drives).
As for standalone drives they are getting rather inexpensive. You could look at Newegg or someplace like that (I don’t work for them) and you should be able to pick up some drives fairly inexpensively. I’ve been seeing 1.5 to 2 TB drives in the $500-600 range. Everyone has there own preferences for drives manufacturers and YMMV.
Boyd
“Go slow to go fast” -
The Panasonic HVX-200 captures in 4:2:2 and I think they are currently offering a deal to get one 16GB P2 card free with your purchase.
Before you purchase, do some research on the tapeless workflow. You’ll probably need to have at least two P2 cards during production, not to mention additional hard drives to capture your footage to and back up drives for all that footage as. Also, DVCProHD requires ~4 times the storage space as DV/DVCpro, so you’ll need to account for that.
The other thing you should look into is long term archiving of the footage you capture. While hard drives are cheap, they are not a very robust media for storage. Even a year or two of just sitting can cause them not to work. I’d consider a more IT solution, such as LTO3 tape drives for archiving and even as a back up for the footage you are currently working on.
You should be able to find some very useful information on the Cow on the P2 workflow. And while the camera is well priced, you could double the cost easily with the initial investment in the workflow.
-
FCP 6 works with BWF. There shouldn’t be a problem, though there are some considerations if you are working with a 29.97 sequence. Page 325 of the manual talks about that.
-
[Christopher Tay] ”
However if we do a long render, it very often crashes. Another customer who was doing another feature film told me that when he tried to render the entire 1 and half hour sequence, FCP reported a “Out of Memory” error.”You may want to delete all your render files and then rerender from scratch. You could also use FCP rescue to trash your preference files
As for the out of memory error (or the crashing for that matter), this is something that needs to be explored more in-depth and a simple statement about rendering giving the error message could have multiple causes so it really doesn’t say much without more information, including what system he’s working on, what his sequence and render settings are, or even how full his boot drive is and how he’s managing his files on his hard drives, etc.
I’m working with a 45 minute project that is close to 200 MB and I have 9 nests on the timeline, and while it takes a little longer to open, I don’t have any problems with it. I also recently did some online work for an 80 minute documentary on a single processor G5 with no issues, except for long long renders, as well.
One thing you need to check is to see what your render settings are. If you are rendering out at a higher codec for filters/graphics/color correction purposes you could suddenly be eating up tons of Gigs really fast.
Another suggestion, especially at a fine cut stage is to render as you go along. On the old G5, I worked in Safe RT and rendered as needed. Sped things up at the end.
[Christopher Tay] ”
Is it a bad practise to set FCP to render a long sequence, say more than 1 hour long ?
“Not that I’m aware of or have experienced. I’d really look to make sure there aren’t any outside issues/bad practices going on before I would make a statement like that.
Boyd
“Go slow to go fast”