[Cal Thorley]

Thanks Eric.
Time to jump into a project and start making rookie mistakes in a new program!

[Cal Thorley]

Thanks Joe.

I’ll load it up a bit and see how FCPX goes.
I’d like to be working in 4K (or even 4K on a 1080p timeline – scaled down rather than transcoded to 1080)
If FCPX can handle 4K XAVC-I without being a slug then it’ll be doing better than PP.
I know H.264 isn’t much fun to unpack so if I need to transcode any footage off my Sony A6300, drone, or gopros then I can live with that. It’s always going to be a small percentage compared to the FS7 material which is still my main camera.

If I have to transcode the XAVC-I then I may as well just stick with Premiere.

Fingers crossed.

Thanks again.

[Cal Thorley]

[Oliver Peters] “I would add, based on my daily experience with Premiere and a lot of experience with FCPX and Resolve, that mixed codecs on the timeline will always be an issue depending on your expectations.

Premiere in particular has issues with the BMD i/o hardware. You might consider turning off Mercury Transmit playback, which feeds your external display, and see if that helps.”

Hi Oliver.

Thanks for the reply.
Interesting re the BMD i/o. I have tried it without but not too much difference. It was a similar experience with my last Matrox i/o too so I still wonder if a lot of my gripes are with Premiere’s performance on the mac. Especially as the experience seems to change every second PP update!

I’d hoped I’m not expecting too much with mixed formats but maybe I am. 4k in any form is unusable once you get over 10 min mark or so. And in 1080 any H.264 is the same. It just starts acting up any time the playhead gets anywhere near it.
It’s frustrating when you watch multiple streams of 4k clips on youtube playing flawlessly on what I think are lesser machines. And I can’t get it to do fairly simple 2 track edits without wanting to throw it out the window.

I guess I’m at the stage where if I still like what I see at the end of these tutorials. I’ll just have to pick a project and dive on in.

[Cal Thorley]

[Joe Marler] “While FCPX is a lot faster on XAVC than Premiere is, that is simply a difficult codec. XAVC-S and XAVC-L are Long GOP and just difficult to decode. XAVC-I is faster and smoother. Of course ProRes is lightning fast.”

Hi Joe. Thanks for that.
I use XAVC-I and that’s been the one PP actually does seem to get on OK with. Well, in 1080 anyway, not so flash in 4K.

Thanks for the feedback re the timeline. Yes, certainly a different means of approach although I can see it working for me from what I’ve seen on those earlier posted tutorials.

[Cal Thorley]

Awesome, thanks. Will check it out!
A lot of the videos I watched weren’t aimed at more long form editing so this looks ideal.

Cheers.
Cal

[Cal Thorley]

More info.
I formatted a drive using the imac (mountain lion) and the Mac Pro (snow leopard) gives the message “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer”
Are the format methods between OSX versions not compatible??? That doesn’t seem feasible.

Thanks

[Cal Thorley]

Well, a bit of an update.

I’ve downconverted all the short films separately to SD ProRes. Most look ‘ok’ but a couple are proving to be problematic and doesn’t quite add up. Both I believe were shot on an old Panasonic HVX202 and although the master looks fine in ProRes, when I downconvert to SD it looks really blocky.
Out of interest I’ve converted to a 1920 x 1080 square pixels pro res my end just in case there was something weird going on with the 1440 stretch, and also while that looked ok in HD, that too looks awful converted to SD. If anyone has any ideas?

I’m now in the process of trying to compare a DVD encoded straight from HD ProRes master (2 pass VBR, 7.1 target, 8.3 max, best motion, and best everywhere in frame controls) with the same settings from the SD ProRes version. Will see what I get.
The HD encode is saying 10 hours for a 4 minute clip!!
And annoyingly, the tutorial advises to set anti aliasing to ‘6’ but I get a “failed” everytime I add an aliasing value. I’ve followed lots of advice, uninstalled and reinstalled FCS (and in the process stuffed up all my I/O drivers, plugins, etc!) but no luck. I actually suspect it’s too much for my old Mac Pro.
So I may be compromising that encode anyway.

If anyone has anything to say regarding BitVice, I’d love to hear it?

Thanks a lot again for the advice.
Cal

[Cal Thorley]

I guess so. I’d really prefer to leave my already stressed system minus windows though!
If it’s at all possible to get a good result with OSX friendly applications.

[Cal Thorley]

Thanks, Bill.
Yes, certainly seeing improvements with the SD downconvert and max quality compressor settings.
Not perfect but we are talking SD DVD and lower end compression programs.
Cheers,
Cal

[Cal Thorley]

Thanks David.
I did see those links but my access to windows machines is zero. Unless I buy one!
I think it was in relation to one of those threads that the BitVice app came up for mac.

Appreciate the suggestion though, thanks.
Cal