[Craig Reed]

Thanks for your reply, Jeremy.

By my research of Apple help and manuals, they do not mention restrictions and I should be able to work in clusters for both non-chained and chained jobs. So it is really not moot.

Yes, this is a Quick Cluster of six instances of the 8 processors on the Mac Pro. The cluster works fine for non-chained jobs.

And yes, while there is a slight improvement in quality in the final output when using the chained job, the biggest improvement is in output speed. That is the main reason I am pursuing this workflow.

[Craig Reed]

This allows for very fast transcoding of files to an intermediate file using frame controls to deinterlace and resize, then run that intermediate file through the encode process to H.264 in a multi-pass mode very quickly, because it does not have to process the frame controls aspects on each multiple pass.

According to the Apple Pro Training series book on Safari, multipass encoding engages the slow frame control processes on each pass. If you do a straight encode-only pass of an intermediate file that has already had the frame control passes completed, you can turn frame controls off for the encode-only step in the chain for a faster output.

https://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780321514226/ch04lev1sec3

Larry Jordan is including a demo of this in an upcoming fee-based webinar.
https://www.larryjordan.biz/sem/webinar_2010b.php#oct13

[Craig Reed]

Excellent!
That was very snappy. Thanks so much.
-Craig

[Craig Reed]

Thanks for the response, Ed. We ended up eyeballing the font for a match on that project. But if it comes up again, I will try opening the project file itself, rather than the XML version. Though I have no idea why the XML would have the info bin-hexed, while the project file would have the same info in plain English. That is the reverse of what I would expect.

The bottom line is that we need to do more thorough record-keeping when we archive the projects. Thanks again for your help.

[Craig Reed]

Thanks, Daniel.
The site you referenced mentions that if you resize video down to 1/2 or less, the effect is the same as using a blend deinterlace setting, (though all their work was done with Virtualdub, a tool we do not use on Mac).

So I did my own tests, just to see for myself.
See my test results here.

The results were very revealing. I scaled the video down to half size, as I proposed(320×240).

Interlacing artifacts were very evident if you simply resized the video. The best deinterlacing settings I found in Cleaner were “Automatic” with “Adaptive” turned on. Adaptive means it only applies deinterlacing were it is necessary. Blend mode merges the two fields and gives a sort of double-image. but it doesn’t look anything like the simple resize results.

Thanks,
Craig

[Craig Reed]

The best info I was ever able to get was, in order to capture 4 channels simultaneously from DV tapes, we’d have to get a really high-end deck with AES or embedded SDI audio output and SDI video output AND a good capture card with 4 channels digital audio in or an AJA IO box. That’s if I want to keep everything digital. Otherwise, I could have the camera convert to analog and send it to an AJA IO box to convert it back to digital (not desirable.). Several thousand $ which we can’t afford at the moment.

So at that rate, I’ll just keep capturing my audio in 2 passes.
:^(
-Craig

[Craig Reed]

Thanks Matte, control devices would be nice, down the line, (next administration, maybe).

What I’m looking for, and the Apple site doesn’t seem to give any details on this, is real world answers with identified hardware as to how to capture multitrack from DV into FCP 5 in one pass.
Thanks,
Craig

[Craig Reed]

Which speakers are you expecting to hear audio come out of during capture? The computer speakers?

It is my experience when capturing in FCP via firewire, that the Mac’s built-in audio device does not pass audio through during capture. So we always monitor the audio during capture via concurrent analog audio outputs from the camera/deck to speakers or a mixer.

Hope this helps.
-Craig