[Bret Williams]

I have a Sony PVM 20M4U 20″ that was built in 1998. It looks great, but at the exact same time this year, every PVM I’ve seen that was purchased around then has developed think red, green, and blue lines across the top of the screen. Only visible on black or dark images, generally.

2 facilities I edit at, and at my own suite. They all got the lines in the first few months of this year. They were all purchased in 1998. They all differ on how long they’ve been on, how much use, etc. Mine doesn’t stay on all the time, and is still sharp as a tack, the colors are still almost perfect in the preset positions, etc. Some of the others are getty blurry or dark. But weird they all got the lines at the same time. I figure it has something to do with a part like a capacitor that breaks down at a set rate due to the chemical inside. Too bad.

But I love the PVM series tubes. If you can get a 14″ or a 20″ used that is a few years old you’ll be happy for a good while.

[Bret Williams]

DVCam

[Bret Williams]

SATA is 3 times faster than FW 400. 50% faster than FW 800. I think it’s twice as fast as ATA. ATA is faster than FW 400. SATA trumps everything but faster scsi.

At CompUSA I bought the Acomdata external SATA 250 gb drive for $199. It came with a PCI SATA card for my dual G4, and a cable. It just formats with the Disk utility. So far it’s flawless. The power is supplied by the sata card, so when your computer sleeps, so does the external sata. Very nice. It has no fan and an aluminum enclosure so it is super quiet. Seems to stay perfectly cool. Feels solid and has it’s own power switch on the back as well.

I’m not sure what brand drive is in it. Either hitachi or samsung from what I understand.

I’ve only had it a week or two, but I’ve filled it half way full and been using it heavily for FCP and DVD Studio Pro without a hitch. So far I’m extremely happy with it.

[Bret Williams]

You’re asking that question here? You’ll get just about as unbiased an answer in the Avid forum. But why was it a nightmare? Avid and FCP are both very capable programs. Usually the argument for one or the other is based on personal taste, a particular need, or cost.

[Bret Williams]

Are you equating exporting with playing back on an ntsc monitor? Just sounds like they need to be rendered to me. There aren’t any green lines in your timeline, right? The IO will play lots of stuff in real time it claims. But stuff like jpegs always look like junk until renered.

Why aren’t you using a better format like tif? Everytime a jpeg is exported or saved it gets uglier.

[Bret Williams]

[videobiker] “Thanks HTH, I’ll check th”

HTH just means hope that helps. 🙂

[Bret Williams]

You’d still have to map the tracks to 3,4 or at least set up a dual stereo 4 track audio output. I think he misspoke when he said “mixdown” because an audio mixdown in avid is simply rendering all the files into one clip which then is automatically imported for you, but is a bad idea (like rendering out a quicktime and reimporting) in the fact that you lose all TC and batch capability from there on. In Avid we did it because it only had 8 real time audio tracks at the time, but you could put 24 in the sequence. FCP’s audio mixdown is the same thing, except it renders in place without creating any tracks.

He then asked how to map them particular tracks like a virtual patch pay and I realized he was talking about the audio tool in avid and how you can patch sequence tracks to particualar hardware output tracks. It’s a mixdown in the audio world, but it’s not called that in Avid or FCP. Unless they use the term for internal mixdown and for external output. Outputting is in a sense a mixdown of all your audio tracks to a stereo output.

[Bret Williams]

What? No no no. There is a virtual patch pay. It’s just a hidden cool feature. Just like all the cool features on Avid are hidden and undocumented.

Actually, it’s probably in the manual, but where does one start with those things!

Here’s how it works in FCP5. Open user prefs and in the audio outputs tab create a new 4 channel output preset.
Then, for your current sequence settings, make sure you’ve chosen that in the audio outputs tab there too.
You should now have 4 audio meters in the audio tool under MASTER.
Back in the sequence, right click in an audio area to the left of the timeline, like speaker icon, solo icon, etc. Just not the track patches. It’ll give to the choice to patch the track directly to an audio outptut.

So once again, the FCP way is more powerful, but more complex. In Avid, unless it’s changed recently, the patching is directly related to the audio output tool, which is an overall hardware function. Anyone who opens a sequence after you might not realize you’ve changed the patching. In FCP, the audio outputs and the audio mixer are directly connected with the sequence. So you could open one sequence and output a discreet mix. Then open another and output a stereo master. You could flip between the two instantly. It’s really nice. But it would be nice if the patching were visible in the audio tool somehow.

Wait, I’ll be damned. You can. Open the little panel on the left that lists all the tracks in the audio mixer. You can right click on them and patch the tracks.

Oh, and I can say right click now beause Apple has a new 2 button mouse.

HTH

[Bret Williams]

Well, my problems WERE on a dual G4 with FCP 4.5. 🙂

[Bret Williams]

I had the same problem a month ago. But it was version 4.5 running QT 7. I tried upping the still cached to 50, 80, 100, didn’t matter. The minute I placed the playhead in a particular sequence, the project was done for, wouldn’t open, etc. I had to do the same thing and export the seqeunce as a QT. Thankfully the project was simply a bunch of clips with slates between them and everything faded up and down from black. But it was the first 20minutes of a 3 or 4 hour project.

I think the issue was similar, but different. I was using a nested sequence for a slate that got repeated every clip. I figured if they change that slate I didn’t want to change it 40 times, just once. But after a certain number of uses, I guess the system just couldn’t handle it. I’ve got 1.75 gigs, but it didn’t matter.

I imported the QTs, started a new project, dragged the raw clips into a bin and quit the nested sequences. 40 hours of work later and I haven’t had an issue. I did however rebuild my entire system and upgrade to FCP 5 during the project.