Cameron Clendaniel
Forum Replies Created
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Not sure what “cheap enough” constitutes or what kind of hookup capabilities your system has, but I rely on the CalDigit HDOne (RAID 5). They have a range of options. If you don’t want redundancy and just speed (since you’re archiving your raw material), a less expensive option would be to create a RAID 0. I’ve had good success with Firmtek products in the past – or if your system allows you could set up an internal RAID 0 with several SATA drives. If you give more specifics people can reply with more specific options for your needs.
Cameron Clendaniel
film editor, NYC
http://www.camclendaniel.com -
Matrox has products that will allow you to connect your laptop to a broadcast monitor (a search on this forum will surely turn up lots of options).
And even if your final deliverable is only going on the internet, correcting your colors using a properly calibrated broadcast monitor at least gives you a baseline to work off of. The reality is that pretty much everyone’s computer monitor is going to display your colors differently – so you do the best you can.
A more immediate approach: do some trial and error tests on short clips, correcting in FCP and seeing how they look as H264 compressions. If you’re finding that the colors in your H264 compressions are not satisfactory, then make the necessary adjustments in FCP according to how they’ll look in the final H264. Not ideal but you should be able to develop a sense of how the adjustments need to be made.
Cameron Clendaniel
film editor, NYC
http://www.camclendaniel.com -
Try FCS Maintenance Pack (has a few apps that could potentially diagnose and fix the issue). And there\’s always a clean install of FCP and even your OS. Time consuming but effective.
Cameron Clendaniel
film editor, NYC
http://www.camclendaniel.com -
Disk Warrior is a life saver. But note that in order to repair your system drive with the downloadable version (rather than an actual Disk Warrior DVD), you need to be able to boot from a Mac OS X install disk and then run the Disk Warrior software from a drive other than the one you’re repairing. The latest downloaded version apparently doesn’t include the files necessary to make a startup disk (earlier versions did).
Cameron Clendaniel
film editor, NYC
http://www.camclendaniel.com -
What are you using to create the text scroll? How are you monitoring the scroll (ie. in FCP Canvas window or on external monitor)?
Cameron Clendaniel
film editor, NYC
http://www.camclendaniel.com -
Not necessarily – depends on the respective speed of the drives. But your description of the playback issues you’re experiencing does not indicate to me that the speed of your playback drive is the problem. But you need to indicate your export settings, in detail, for anyone to be of much help.
Cameron Clendaniel
film editor, NYC
http://www.camclendaniel.com -
Yes, the risk of RAID 0 is that if one drive in the array goes down, you lose everything. And it does happen – and I’ve lost system drives too so backups are of course critical in any workflow. I use my internal RAID 0 for media only – footage, stills, outputs, etc (and only if I have backups elsewhere) – and as a scratch disk for FCP renders, etc. Anything that needs speed. Project files I would not put on a striped RAID and I doubt you would see any speed boost doing so. The speed of Motion is largely dictated by your video card.
Cameron Clendaniel
film editor, NYC
http://www.camclendaniel.com -
I’ve used Disk Utility to setup many internal RAID 0 arrays – never had a problem (although of course RAID 0 carries obvious risks).
Cameron Clendaniel
film editor, NYC
http://www.camclendaniel.com -
You’re going to have to give more details.
Such as: sequence settings and codec? Original footage specs? Why are you needing to render (ie. what have you added – filters, fx, etc – to or what are you changing about the original footage)?
You could have the fastest computer on the market and if you drop certain footage into certain sequence settings or add tons of processor intensive filters it could take hours to render just seconds of footage. Too many variables.
Cameron Clendaniel
film editor, NYC
http://www.camclendaniel.com -
You could add an inverted 4-point garbage matte (in the “video filters” folder of the “effects” tab in the browser) to the layer of video above the layer you’re trying to crop.
Cameron Clendaniel
film editor, NYC
http://www.camclendaniel.com