[Dan Riley]

So, you all are saying that somewhere Apple has specifically said,
“FCP or FCS2 is not compatible with Leopard”? Where is that exactly?

If someone walked into an Apple Store last Monday (or for the last week
for example) and said “I want a complete FCS system”.
Are you saying Apple would tell them, “Sorry, our current shipping
operating system does not work with our current shipping Professional
editing system, therefore we can’t sell you an 8 core Mac Pro that would
have Leopard installed because FCS won’t run on it”. So we can’t make as
$8000 sale to you (Mac Pro, a couple of monitors, FCS).
Really? That’s what they would say?

Dan

[Dan Riley]

No, this would not be real time. You have to render anything with
drop shadows or transparencies. One of the shortcomings of FCP.
It doesn’t matter how fast your system or Drive array, FCP just won’t do
some things real time AT ALL. And even if it plays back the tracks
in real time, you’ll still have to render the entire sequence to edit to tape
or make a quicktime to export.

On the positive side, the rendering is much faster now with the 8 core machines. And if you are making a quicktime for internet upload for instance, once you drop that quicktime into Compressor, it will render 4 times faster than before by setting up a virtual cluster on your 8 core. It’s amazing to watch it render an h.264
clip now. One that used to take 30 minutes now takes 6.
So it’s not all bad, but FCP could really benefit from a new engine for
real time playback that is really real time.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

I have one of the better systems going these days. I get up to 500 MB speed
according to the AJA tests. I have an 8 core 3ghz per core system with
8 gigs of memory. I use an 8 drive Sonnet D800 RAID. KONO 3.

Yet, take a single video track, add a track with a drop shadow on a box,
BING, no longer even green RT. You must render.
Do a key with an alpha, BING, render city. Try to do any Chroma Keys,
BING again, render for many many minutes. CGM transitions, BING,
render again. Nattress film effects, MANY MANY minutes or hours of
rendering. Almost anything Boris, LONG waits for renders.

FCP, even after having 8 cores to deal with, still does not have Real,
realtime abilities. Even when the line is green and plays back, you can’t output
to tape or make a quicktime to upload without rendering. Thus any
efficiency of so-called realtime is lost when having to get the show
out the door any faster today than three years ago.
And I’ve got one of the fastest systems available.

The reality is you do not get all these multiple tracks of real time
in the real world, day to day of editing where, guess what,
you don’t just edit with one track of video.

If FCP can’t do real time editing playback with 8 cores,
what is it going to take? 18 cores?

Dan

[Dan Riley]

Thanks. I’ll bookmark the link.
It’s not like I’m in an all-fire hurry or anything, I was just wonderin.
I have to say however, my KONA 3 works very nicely.
I’m very happy with how FCS2 and your card work together.
I’m a recent HD upgrader from the SD world with Aurora stuff.
35 years in the broadcast biz, so not worried about how long updates take.
It took RCA years to go from Low Band to Hi Band 2inch Quad machines.
Then they tried to make a machine that would lock up in
2 seconds like Ampex. A weird machine called the TR-600 with flying arms
for tape guides. Have I lost almost all of the readers on the forum by now 🙂
You haven’t really edited until you’ve tried to move 2 inch tape around on
20 pound reels.

Later,
Dan

[Dan Riley]

Thanks Walter.
I guess I’m not on right email lists yet for either Sonnet or ATTO.
I’ll check into that.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

No, you misunderstood. I’ve had my setup for the past 30 days. (used to be
Aurora Pipe Studio etc. etc.)
I’m fully aware of the issues related to waiting for new FCP versions and driver
updates to go along with OS and Quicktime changes.
My question was only in regard to the best place to find the info about
when the new stuff is available from AJA. I’ve also got an email out to Sonnet
with respect to their RAID system we have, the D800, which uses an ATTO card.

Thanks,
Dan

[Dan Riley]

What happens if you import them into FCP6?
What does the browser say and what happens if you drop one on a timeline?

Dan

[Dan Riley]

Make sense. Please let us know if boot camp works for this.

I’m interested in trying boot camp for a PC only product that does
waveform monitoring. I don’t want to spend 24k for 2 new HD waveforms
for two suites so I’m looking into using Hamlet vidscope fx which is
only Windows software. It says it needs active-x to work.
Does boot camp have this?

Thanks,
Dan

[Dan Riley]

If you are into those products, why not just run them on PCs?
Why deal with boot camp?
Are there features and benefits with them that you like better than FCP?
Or do you not use FCP? Just curious.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

What does AJA make that will only run on Windows, so you would
need to do Boot Camp on a Mac?

Dan