[Dan Riley]

We used to do that sort of thing in the old One Inch days,
when you had a 3 or 4 deck system with an edit computer
where the computer was syncing all of them together.
But that was a very complicated setup and very expensive.
CMX editors etc. cost $50k and up. For you to “edit to tape”
even one machine, FCP is looking at the video sync
and the timecode frames and locking it’s own playback
to where the tape machine is, or it’s moving the tape
machine to where it needs to be. It can’t do that with
more than one machine at a time.

Now, you could take the SDI out and timecode out of the digibeta
and feed that to your other DigiBeta. Now if you rolled record
on the other digibeta (the one not connected to FCP)
you should see the same timecode and picture and
audio out of the FCP connected machine. For the timecode to be
correct you may need to turn off the feature on the
digibeta where it shows you confidence playback of
your recorded picture. This causes a delayed video/audio
output and I’m not sure if the timecode is also delayed.
I’m not even sure if the timecode is output at all
in this situation. But you could putz around with it
and see. Try doing a long preroll, like 30 or 60 seconds,
so the timecode on the other digibeta is continuous,
and it should work. Grant you, I haven’t tried this idea.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

Thanks Debe.
I’m so used to creating an effect on a switcher and downstream
dissolving to black from the old days, that I couldn’t get my head
around how to fix this.
Your second one, nesting it and dissolved the whole thing out
sounds like the easiest. But I’ll have to remember not to do that
with my offline, when I’m going to uprez and you can’t do any
nesting in a sequence you use media manager with.

Don’t you think there should be some kind of way to tell FCP
that those two layers are supposed to be one effect?
So it would dissolve down as one thing?

Thanks for your help,
Dan

[Dan Riley]

That’s great news. I guess multicam can do with less disk speed
than I thought.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

You are still probably going to get dropped frames.
I do 4 camera shows offline at DV and it runs fine
but I’m using my 4 drive SATA RAID, the same one
I use for my online at uncompressed. Even so,
I still get the occasional hickup and dropped frames
while running sequences with the “open” on (where
you see all your cameras moving in the viewer to the
sequence). So one 800 firewire drive is still pushing it
I think. Other than that, you will love the multicam.
It’s very close to AVIDs way, which is pretty good.
In one way I like it better. Making multiclips is
easier on FCP in my opinion.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

Dave,
Seems like there is trouble somewhere in my system,
if your experience is any indication.
My system with Aurora Pipe Studio had been pretty solid
up until Quicktime 7.0.2 and FCP 5.0.2.
But there is no denying your setup and others
that are working fine. I’ll do some more work
to track down what’s going on.

Thanks,
Dan

[Dan Riley]

One thing you might consider that would allow you to have
your cake and eat it too, as my mom used to say:

– Clone your OS/Applications (boot) drive to a firewire drive.
I use SuperDuper for that. https://www.shirt-pocket.com
You want nothing else to be on that drive but what you are cloning to it.
– Restart from your firewire drive.
– On your old OS drive, erase and create two partitions.
One will be for Tiger and one will be for your old OS/Applications
drive.
– Clone the firewire drive over to one of the new partitions.
– Restart from that new partition with OS 10.3.8 (your old system).
– Now do a clean install of Tiger into the other partition. During the install
process Tiger will ask you if you want to copy over your
apps and user info from the old OS and you will answer yes.
When it’s all done, you will have two completely separate
systems/applications drive partitions. On the Tiger one,
use software update to get the most recent files for all the
stuff you just installed. There are many many of them. Then
do your Blackmagic upgrades etc. Run FCP4.5 from that partition.
See what happens. If it’s trouble, restart using the other partition
with 10.3.8.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

You’re a fun guy.
If that’s what you care to read into what I said,
that’s too bad.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

I agree with Debe.
I wouldn’t upgrade to Tiger or Quickktime 7 in
mid project. As far as your system not working, if you could
post some details perhaps we could help you get it
running better. Let us know your setup.

My experience with Tiger and FCP5 tells me if you can
put off the upgrades for any reason, you may be better off.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

L isha,

About your RAID setup, I’ve never heard of them.
I’ll read their info. But SCSI controller with SATA drives?
I’ve not followed this developement area.
You may be blazing a trail here and I’m not so sure
that’s a good idea. But like I said, I’ll need to read up on it.

As for your editing style, everyone has their own way.
Mine is probably no better a style, just different.
But after thinking about your particular situation,
with the same audio track and 4 different takes,
I think I see why you might want to try the 16 screens.
But equipment doesn’t always allow us to do what our heads
tell us will work out. And having FCP display 16 at a time
is asking alot, even though Apple says it can do it.
Using the 4 camera, 4 multiclip approach,
it seems to me however, that if you started with a take
you liked, picked the shots you liked, then went back
and decided which ones could be better, then went back
and looked at your other multiclips of the other takes,
found a better shot and used it, that would do it. You’d be done.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

– Of track here for a second, but I must respond to a previous post.

Matt,
I’m the one who used to say all that about tape versus AVID
in 1991. I’m one of the first producers here in Seattle that moved
almost all his show production to AVID offline at that time,
then onlined from the EDL on One Inch or D-2 at the time.
I’m one of the first producers here to use FCP in 2000, version 1.25,
to do the same thing. My online friends were saying it’s junk.
We’ll in some ways it was at the time, but it made me more
productive and I knew it would improve. I was the first of my
friends to move to OSX, etc. etc.
You are way behind the curve making your arguments.

This is different. This is a company, Apple, who claims
to sell a product that is Pro. It is not. It is a good product
but Pro is something special. This is just a marketing term
to Apple. It means nothing else to them, and FCP5 + .02,
shows Apple did not do nearly enough testing of the software
before releasing it. My problems aside, just read any forums
you want and see for yourself. And I pity you if you have to
do an uprez with FCP. What a sham. Media Management is for crap.
This software was designed to do DV all the way through.
Apple has not fixed the basic plumbing necessary to allow it
to smoothly edit in one format and then move the project
to another.

As I’ve said in my other forum responses, I love my Mac and
most of the time I love FCP. But right now I’m pissed off.
They are using the user base as their beta testers.
Apple rushed this release out the door too soon.
This is not “pro” application behavior.

Dan