Brett Sherman
Forum Replies Created
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[Bret Williams] “And how would you transition from a clip on track 3 to a clip on track 2 in legacy? It functions exactly the same. Add a dissolve to the clip on “track” 3 and it fades to the clip below. In fact, in X, certain effects will actually pull the background (the clips below) into the effect. Something legacy can’t do. So I really don’t understand the comment.”
I understand you couldn’t do it in legacy either, so I’m not making a comparison. However, nothing was organized in Legacy. The idea of X is that it is organized so you can work in sections and move those sections around easily. With X I like to organize content. Interviews go in primary. B-Roll and Actualities go in the secondary. I find I have to move clips around to get a transition between them, often putting them in a secondary storyline, which then also makes it harder to reorganize.
Now I understand with a dissolve the clips don’t need to be in the same storyline. However with a two-sided effects such as a push they do. That’s the problem I’m talking about. It seems X should be smart enough to see okay you’re trying to add a push, the A side is the clip you apply it to. The B side is whatever is below the clip. It sounds like you’re saying some effects do what I’m suggesting. Is that new? Or are there only specific effects it works for? I haven’t seen it happen that way.
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I think the bottom-line is if you need tracks then FCP X is not for you. I don’t think they are going to bring back tracks. If they do, it will be something like organizing clips by role which is not exactly tracks.
For me, I don’t miss tracks one bit. Where I used to have to have a minimum of 10 audio tracks in FCP 7. Now I have a couple audio tracks below the primary. Every once in awhile I run into a conundrum with the connected clips, but not very often. There are different conundrums you run into with a track-style editor. I’m not sure you could say one is better than another in that regard.
What I wish they would allow is transitions between clips not in the same storyline. It would be easy to do. You would just add an transition to the clip on the top. It would transition to whatever is below it. Right now they have to be in the same storyline which I find requires me to break the organizational structure of the video. If I want to transition from section A to section B of the video, I don’t want their clips in the same storyline.
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[Darren Roark] “It’s good to know that the legacy mac pros still do quite well with a pair of newer GPUs.”
On renders. I wonder how much better realtime performance is on the new Macs. I wonder why no one seems to try to quantify this. How many Gaussian Blur filters before it starts dropping frames.
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My workflow is that I put a clip above the Motion Template in the timeline. Get it to the right length. Then I make a compound clip out of it. Then I navigate to the compound clip in the event and select that as the drop-zone clip. I don’t know if it has something to do with compound clips or not. And I was not being careful about where I clicked thinking it would take the whole clip.
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The clips were all long enough and I thought I was selecting a range, not a specific point. So you’re saying I have to click the right frame in the source clip, not just select the range?
What’s weird is that the clips started frozen and then started moving at some point, not the opposite where it freezes at the end.
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What I’ve done hasn’t been 100% reliable. I did on template where I had four drop-zones for video. Sometimes the video would be frozen throughout the clip. Sometimes it would be frozen for the first few seconds then start up at some point mid-clip. I could never figure out the cause of it. Sometimes replacing the clip in the DropZone would fix it, but sometimes not. For this particular project I just went with it and called it good enough once I got it playing through most of the clip. But it didn’t fill me with a lot of optimism for using multiple video dropzones in the future.
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Under 15K – C300 rocks, but you need lenses and shotgun which might blow your budget. C100 is a good option for much cheaper. I’d consider the Sony’s new line – PMW-100, 200 or 300. Not as good in low light, but not bad.
For under $1500, you’re looking at DSLRs. I’d probably go with the Panasonic GH3. Not great at low light, but respectable picture. It actually has a headphone jack which is critical.
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A lot depends on the speed you need. One of the simplest systems is JBOD USB 3. An enclosure like this. Get an eSATA card for your Mac Pro and then if you upgrade use the USB 3.
USB 3 is plenty fast for individual drives.
Before we had centralized storage we used bare drives. We never deleted anything from the drives just added new drives when they became full. We basically have the same system now, but with partitioned drives on a NAS system backed up to individual drives. We are now up to drive 60. The advantages of this are simplicity, unlimited expansion and instant recovery if anything goes wrong.
So each drive has two mirrors, one stored off site. We run nightly backups on the active drives so they stay the same.
If you want a thunderbolt RAID 5 enclosure then I would partition logical drives, say start at Drive01 for 4 TB. Then have two 4 TB bare drives for backup. Run a synchronization each night to one of those drives. Store the other one offsite. Then swap the two periodically. Chronosync is a good program to handle synchronization. Once Drive01 fills up, make sure both drives are synchronized, then delete the partition and add a new partition, say Drive02. Continue the process. So active projects are always on the RAID. Older projects are on two backup drives that you can mount with a USB 3 enclosure. One is always stored offsite.
Hope this helps.
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It may not be a factor for you, but one reason I waited to get the 2013 model was the new screen. The previous version is extremely glossy. The newer one less so. I find the glossy screens really annoy me. But I think you’re right, the processing power difference is inconsequential. I think both have USB 3 and two thunderbolts so no difference there.
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Depends on the cost. If the tower with PCIe slots and twin processors ended up adding $4000 to the price, I’d definitely go with the tube.