[Chris Borjis]

My beef with FCP 6 is not being able to render .motn files in a reasonable time.

12 minutes to render an 8-second, 2 layered, animated slate that took 4 seconds on FCP 5.04

I use After Effects mainly, so nothing different there.

[Chris Borjis]

Ben, just wondering when VC-1 will be an option for the current crop of windows media encoders out there….mac or pc.

I thought that flip4mac pro did decent wmv hd encoding, if I work purely from digibeta or hdcam uncompressed material, flip4mac ($179 version) I’ll be good to go right?

[Chris Borjis]

[bantonj] “for a SD DVD you can safely average 8 Mb/s,”

That probably works 90% of the time, but I’ve had customers have issues with stuttering occasionally if I let it go beyond 7mbps.
If your GOP structure is low (around 6) you can stay low and it will look great. You will also have to do your audio as .ac3 since pcm takes just over 1.2mbps added to your video rate.

[Chris Borjis]

I have run into this myself, I used to nest an hd sequence into an uncompressed 10-bit sd sequence and it looked ok but not great.

I have no idea why anyone would nest a high quality hd timeline into a dv one. Makes no sense as it could possibly make things look worse. you don’t need a fast disk array to do this, just takes longer.

anyways, what I found works best (i would argue it looks as good as an expensive hardware down converter would) is to duplicate your sequence, go into the one you just duplicated, switch the codec to uncompressed (if it was dvcpro-hd or hdv, also delete your renders so they don’t carry over) and export with quicktime conversion, in those options set it to uncompressed or prores if your on fcp 6 and designate the size as 720×480, 16×9 (for anamorphic) 4×3 if you don’t want anamorphic, then take THAT exported file and use compressor on it.

I double checked the SD file on a sony pro crt and the small text that looked bad before was perfectly sharp!

This was higher quality then having compressor do the HD to SD work even with the downsize setting on best quality.

[Chris Borjis]

I’m on G5 quad hardware with 4gb of ram to a multibridge extreme and everything is working with fcs2 just fine except for 2 small things related to motion 3.

1) .motn files (8 second slates) I always render in fcp used to take
just a few seconds to render with fcp 5.04, in fcp6 it takes 12 minutes.

Definitely a flaw there.

2) video output from motion 3 works well in all modes except 10-bit.
I get no signal to the monitor, so its on RGB right now to make it work.

[Chris Borjis]

That would be cool and i suspect you would not have to use CS3 to get it done. Though I don’t know how they could do that being that the bm stuff is all quicktime based.

My graphics/3D/Compositor guy has a matrox parhelia that came with plugins for 3dsmax, photoshop and after effects to output the signal,
works great.

[Chris Borjis]

[sammyg] “What is your set-up (BM card type? FCP version? Drivers version? Computer type?)?”

Multibridge Extreme

FCP 5.04 & now 6

black magic drivers 5.x to the current 6.2

Mac G5 Quad with 4gb ram and an atto 4gb fibre channel card coupled to a ciprico 4210.

My cable runs are pretty short. The multibridge, sdi-router, digibeta deck and G5 are all within 4 feet of each other. The ciprico disk array is rack mounted in our machine room 50ft away.

[Chris Borjis]

I just want to say for the record that my insert ett has worked perfectly and I have randomly tested from time to time to verify.

I have had no 1 frame off issues at all,

What I have had, once in a blue moon (this morning it happened) is where you ett and it is a whole 3 or 4 seconds off (behind).

I can always tell when it happens because the pre-roll begins at the wrong time.

I know its not my deck because my discreet smoke* never did this in the 5 years we used it.

[Chris Borjis]

just an idea, but couldn’t you set your insert timecode on the ett window to be one frame back?

example:

you ett and set the timecode insert time for 59:59:29

would that work?

[Chris Borjis]

I believe its an apple thing.

You just have to check/change that everytime.

I was really hoping apple would link the video output with the easy setup but its not doing that yet.