[David Jahns]

Thank you all for your advice.

I seem to have a working system. For those who are curious, changing the deck’s SYNC to come from the incoming video rather than the Sync Gen seems to have done the trick.

I’ve laid off 12 spots today, each one accurately.

Thank you to the power of many….

[David Jahns]

I’ve figured out to route a downconvert with TC burn-in to my DigiBeta, crash record before the slate/countdown, then rewind to check the 2-pop to see if it’s right at 59:58:00.

It works, but it’s a pain, and I have to use both decks, etc… PLus – I just want FCP to work every time!

(The deck’s owners say they never have a problem with their Avid or Flame, so there shouldn’t be any reason FCP would be any different…)

[David Jahns]

Yes, we’ve checked the REF signals, and deck control settings. I started with the FCP’s preset for Sony 23.98. I’ve tried different frame offsets, but since it’s inconsistent, that doesn’t do much good.

I’ll try upping the pre-roll to 6 sec, and then try the Input Video Ref if necessary. Thanks.

[David Jahns]

We’ve had an EditShare at our facility for about 10 months now. We’re using FCP/Kona systems in 11 rooms, and 4 of the rooms are dual-boots, with Avid & Mojos – all running off the EditShare system, using just a Gig-E network.

We had an Avid unity system before, but with all of the FCP work we’re doing, we needed to get a shared solution for those projects. It works pretty well – I won’t say flawlessly, but compared to local storage or firewire drives, it’s made a HUGE difference for us.

We’ve got a pretty big system, with 24TB of storage, 48 drives in 2 chassis with a 10-GigE switch, lots of hardware, so it wasn’t cheap. We regularly work in DVCPro HD, ProRes HD 1080p24, Uncompressed SD – and usually don’t have problems with bandwidth or dropped frames. (I used a Quad G5 for 9 months, and could count on one hand the number of times I had a dropped frame. Oddly enough, I just got a Quad MacPro, and I’ve had a few more dropped frames – not many, just enough to be a little annoying when laying off a master tape… Haven’t had time to trouble shoot that yet.)

The Admin tools are functional, but a little clunky – at least compared with Avid Unity.

Tech support is fantastic – e-mails are returned within an hour, and I once spent Saturday morning on the phone with the president of the company. (Turns out our system wasn’t set up properly from the get go – which he troubleshot for us remotely. You have to completely separate your regular network from the EditShare, otherwise your mac may try to connect through your regular network and whatever 100Mbps switches may be in the way.)

It’s a little complicated to get set-up, especially since we needed Avid compatibility. All of our systems can regular clock read/write speeds of 60MB/sec or so, which has been fine for the formats we’re working in. Using FCP only, you should be able to get 90MB or so (FCP only systems can use AFP protocols, but Avid-Compatible systems use SMB and another networking program called DAVE.)

Does that help? Feel free to ask me anything else if you’re interested…

Dave Jahns
Joint Editorial
Portland, OR

[David Jahns]

Take that same HDQT that you’re transcoding and drop it on a 10Bit Uncompressed SD timelime FC should add the appropriate field filters but you should check just for piece of mind – export out at current settings and transcode it Compressor.

Fred – what format HD are you talking about? I have had horrible results when scaling a Progressive HD file into an interlaced SD timeline.

[David Jahns]

Wow – thanks!

If it actually works, i’ll donate $40 to the guy who wrote it as freeware! (Maybe I should give you a 10% finder fee, eh?)

[David Jahns]

$39.95 to anyone who writes a script that does this procedure for you!

I had to re-install Compressor 2 a few years back using the above procedure, and in Compressor 3, I did all that and it STILL wouldn’t launch from FCP’s Export using CMP command. Eventually, I created an entirely new Admin User, and it worked fine. But of course, I had to spend a half day reconfiguring all of my other stuff to the new user.

Pain in the %&#!!!

[David Jahns]

Yes, try to recapture them as individual clips.

If that doesn’t work, Export the clips at 29.97 individually, then re-import them and use the Tools –> Remove Advanced Pulldown.

(I don’t think Cinema Tools works for Advanced Pulldown removal, but I could be wrong.)

If you view your windows at 100%, you should be able to see any pulldown artifacts, and this will also help you detect the cadence inconsistencies. You should see a blended frame once every 5 frames – 00, 05, 10, 15 or 02, 07, 12, 17, etc…

When that blended frame changes from a 00 to a 01 (or whatever), that’s where your cadence break is. Put a marker there and use it to break it into individual clips.

Tedious, yes – but it should work.

[David Jahns]

Sometimes, you just hate the way Apple does things…

I’m really getting sick of my edit system getting broken so that AppleTV & iPhone can watch movies.

It kind of makes you wish there was software designed for media PROs – something that gets tested with Pro Apps before release.

Great idea, eh? We could even call it… Quicktime PRO!!!

😉

[David Jahns]

Brilliant!!!! Thank you.

I love the manually changing extensions trick.