Brett Sherman
7
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Not only adequate, but better. It’s easier to see volume changes with a rectified waveform and the level adjustments better match what you see on the screen. Since up is louder, down is quieter. Plus it’s a good way to save screen real estate. You have to ask yourself, would you like to have double the height of the waveform just to see a mirror image? For me the answer is no.
What can you see with a full waveform that you can’t with rectified? DC offset, that’s about it. I don’t know the last time I’ve had a DC offset issue. Or in really exceptional cases, weird electronic phase issues. I’ve never seen this.
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No you’re not wrong. It is editable in Motion though. If you want to change colors, you could put a tint on the Components track and publish that parameter. You could add parameters to change the opacity of each element.
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[Mitch Ives] “In FCP 7, I had a lot of options for these things. In FCP X I get really nice animated titles, but usually can’t turn off individual elements. For instance, if it has a glow, being able to turn off that part, while leaving the rest of the title would be nice. By that, I mean quick adjustments in FCP X.”
You should be able to alter the look of all text on a character by character level. Just go to the text tab and adjust the glow, outline, drop shadow, etc.
But really, you should get Motion and get somewhat familiar with it, how to publish paramaters.. It is extremely powerful especially with text. And you can make templates so you can re-use them without having to reinvent the wheel. I’ve made my own lower third templates for our organization with tons of controls for modification available right in FCP X. They are static, cause I HATE animated lower thirds, but you could animate them too. I just wish Motion templates didn’t make FCP X sluggish, but that’s another story.
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If you really want to drive yourself batty, hook up an HDMI monitor to a new Mac Pro in addition to two monitors. FCP X seems to randomly assign what the second monitor is if AV is ever turned off. It’s so bad I stopped using the HDMI monitor.
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[Tim Wilson] “Oh wait, I forgot. You bought a Mac Pro. If you’d bought an HP, okay, about the same price. But if you’d have bought a Dell (maybe not great advice in 2009, but I’m genuinely impressed with them now), you’d have saved the very real Mac Tax — potentially wiping out EVERY DIME of savings vs. your all-Apple scenario!!!!”
Is there a “real Mac Tax”? Look here: https://www.futurelooks.com/new-apple-mac-pro-can-build-better-cheaper-pc-diy-style/
Granted this may be slightly dated info, but it seems you’re doing an Apples to Orange comparison. (pun intended). I just don’t buy that Macs are more expensive considering quality of components and actually specs. Yes you can buy cheaper PCs, but often there is a component of lesser quality that gets you that price cut.
Also, wouldn’t it make more sense to look at 6 years in the future? The past is the past. Over the next 6 years FCP X would create substantial savings over Adobe, period. And I don’t know how you’re going to edit with Photoshop and After Effects alone. So really you should only be looking at $50/month. Over 6 years that totals $3600 versus what would seemingly be $400 for FCPX, Motion, Compressor.
Do I think price should be the primary comparison between the two? Nope. But FCP X does have a substantial advantage in that area.
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[Craig Alan] “But what I am hearing from you is that raids are less reliable than individual drives. I wonder if I can format one of these raids as just a bunch of drives. If so I could treat them as four independent hard drives.”
Over the long term, I would not want my backup on a RAID. There are fewer points of failure with a single hard drive than an array. But if it’s for short term backups I think RAID is fine (so long as it’s RAID 5, not RAID 0). Depending on your enclosure you could use them as JBOD (individual drives), but unless the drives are easy to remove I don’t think I’d go that way.
[Craig Alan] “Do you use some kind of dock to swap out bare hard drives or do you use individual enclosures?”
USB 3 drives work, but I like standardizing, since I have so many drives, so I use bare hard drives. This enclosure seems to be working decently for me now: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1128873-REG/oyen_digital_3r2_eb3_m_mobius_2_bay_raid_enclosure.html. I set it up for JBOD. It’s trayless so I can swap drives in and out. But trayless enclosures can be a bit finicky.
[Craig Alan] “Are you saying that individual HDs are reliable for 5-6 years? I though more like 3-4 years. Do you use enterprise class?”
I don’t use enterprise class. There is no defined longetivity of a drive. Bear in mind I have two of each. So if one fails I have another one. So I feel relatively certain that both drives aren’t going to fail in that time period. But, by all means, if you sleep better replacing them every 3 year – why not.
Here is a study Google did on their hard drives (consumer class), but remember these are online 24/7 – https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf
[Craig Alan] “I don’t quite see how partitions helps all that much? If the drive fails then you loose all the partitions but the structure of a partition can also go bad so I guess it helps there and does provide a level of organization. Or does the partitions just allow easier cloning?”
Right. Easier cloning. Consistency in drive naming. So my backup has the same volume name as the partition on the server with “Backup1” or “Backup2” tacked onto the end of it. It just makes finding stuff in the future easier.
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How do you have four versions? Two RAIDS = two versions. Your RAID 0 array is at least twice as likely to fail as a plain old hard drive – each drive only stores half of each file. Assuming your backup RAID is a RAID 5, it only provides you protection against a single hard drive failure, so I wouldn’t consider it a tertiary backup. If you lose two drives it’s gone, if your enclosure fails it’s gone, if you accidentally delete a file it’s gone. And RAIDs add a level of complexity where something can go wrong with your data. For online storage they work great, for backups not so much.
This is what I do. I partition my video server (or RAID 0 volume in your case) into hard drive size chunks (4 or 6 TB). Then each partition is matched with two backup hard drives. Synchronization is run nightly to one. The other is stored off site. Every few days they are swapped. Once a partition on the server is full, it is retired and not used for new media. Then a new partition is created, deleting the oldest one on the server (I still have the backup hard drives). Then after 5 or 6 years, I combine old backup drives onto new larger backup drives. That means as media gets older, I now have 4 backups. Eventually they will get put on SSDs when the price comes down and capacity increases. This will be much less volatile storage.
I’ve heard and experienced too many horror stories with tapes or compressed archives, It relies too heavily on the software vendor. Will they still be in business 10-20 years from now? Will you still be on the same platform? Without the software (and tape hardware) you can’t access the data. I’m currently storing probably about 150 TB with data as old as 15 years, and as far as I know haven’t lost a single file.
Now I’m doing institutional storage in which long-term is very important. You may not need to store stuff as long. But, bottom line is that hard drives are cheap enough, you really should be backing up everything anyways.
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I’m guessing phase issues with multiple sources of audio. Disable all the audio tracks except one. Make sure audio is set as mono or stereo as appropriate.
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[Neil Goodman] “IMO the only thing FCPX did to “change the workflow” for the future is implement their lame timeline which is obviously still up for debate. “
Filmstrip browsing is huge. Add to that skimming and I find my shots faster than I every have with any other program. This is more critical for people who condense hours and hours of footage down to minutes.
“Lame timeline”? Really? I thought we were passed that kind of crap.
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[Oliver Peters] “Aperture was originally developed by a pro design team that’s no longer in place at Apple. Same for Motion to some extent. This was all before the iPhone. With iPhone and iCloud, photography creation, sharing and archiving has become a basic component of the iCloud ecosystem. When that was fully in place – and without internal champions for Aperture as a pro tool – Photos became the more suitable and streamlined app to replace both Aperture and iPhoto.”
Photography is becoming more of a niche market. I know our organization rarely hires photographers anymore and we used to hire them all the time. I think Apple rightly predicted there is an increasingly small number of professional photographers out there. Now, there still remain a lot of hobbyists that would use Aperture. And whether Apple was wise to give up this market is subject to debate.
I just don’t see this happening to the video/audio world. Why? Because these things are just simply a lot more complicated than photography is. This is not to take away from the artistic skills of professional photographers or say there is never a use for a professional photographer. But, if you’ve ever tried sending out a camera with a non-professional (I have) you get somewhat salvageable photos, and totally useless video. Photographers often only need one moment to capture something. As a videographer, you need, at a minimum, dozens of shots plus interviews because you have a narrative to build.
What the future holds is hard to say. Certainly a concentration of more tasks on a single video professional (of course, I’m already there). But I don’t see it on a parallel track with photography.