[David Jahns]

Thanks for the advice, Mark.

We’ve been pretty happy with ProMax in Irvine, CA as a vendor for our FCP edit systems, and they have set up many XSANs around the country.

Does anyone else out there have an XSAN vendor or SAN consultant to recommend?

[David Jahns]

I re-installed FCS2, but it didn’t help.

Interestingly, if I create a new user account, Comp3 works fine for that user.

So – you would think I must have a corrupt preference file or soemthing right? I trashed everything I could find in my User folder – preferences, custom presets, etc… but nothing helped.

Apple Pro Apps Support is looking into it and says they will get back to me by Monday.

Luckily, I have Squeeze to fall back on – but the workflow isn’t as smooth.

[David Jahns]

Any luck? I’m getting the same error.

I will try to re-install…

[David Jahns]

OK, I can certainly see the advantages in that scenario. Especially since the MBPro’s don’t read the cards directly like the G4 PB’s did. When I shot with the P2 ayear ago, we used 4GB P2’s and a G4 laptop, and the ingesting directly into an FCP project seemed just about as fast as downloading the card to a P2 store or external drive.

But if you have to download MXF to disc, and then create another step for QT convert/ingest – that will certainly slow you down a bit with a lot of footage.

Thanks for the tips guys!

[David Jahns]

I’m curious about this, and why this is an advantage.

i’ve done a couple of P2 media jobs – but none where I was editing directly off the card. Is that common? Is it an advantage because it’s just that much quicker?

For 99% of jobs, I would imagine that even in MXF editing, you’d still have to copy footage from the P2, or the P2 store, or the Fire-Store to a media drive, right? If so, what’s the advantage in staying in the MXF format?

For that matter – is there an advantage to backing up/archiving the raw MXF files in FAT32 format, as opposed to the converted quicktimes? If you’re going to restore the media for FCP, won’t you just be converting them to quicktimes again? (unless editing MXF natively, of course…)

[David Jahns]

thanks for your comments, Mark. It’s good to hear from a happy XSAN user. My impressions were based on Apple’s touring dog & pony show, as well as hearing some first hand experiences from people with small systems.

Whereas the Unity admin tool is quite simple & easy to use for basic workspace management, the XSAN admin process seemed MUCH more complicated, and difficut to grasp right away.

And I attended a workshop at NAB 06 where a guy that has a 4 seat XSAN said he does about 10-15 hours of XSAN admin every week. And I know the post house in LA that cut the Zodiac/Fincher film on FCP – everything went smooth for them, but they have a full time IT genius that was literally writing UNIX code patches to solve their workflow issues.

But it sounds like you guys have a pretty smooth setup there. Do you mind if I ask who your XSAN vendor/designer is?

[David Jahns]

I was just at an Apple “hands on” event where we were test-driving FCS2 – and I noticed the exact same thing.

Imported 720p60 format (shot at 24) – set Prefs to remove dupe frames, yet the FCP file was 59.94 with 2:3 duplicate pattern.

I showed the Apple trainer, and he said, “Hmm… that’s not right.” I had a number of other tech issues to get answers on, and he said he’d refer me to an Apple engineer on Monday.

So – if you’re re-install doesn’t fix your problem, then we all have a problem.

[David Jahns]

Thanks, Barry.

I had never heard that PAL DVCPRO25 was 4:1:1 – interesting – thanks!

[David Jahns]

YES – Conduit is very cool, and powerful -EXCEPT for the fact that it doesn’t have any kind of garbage matte built in. I’m always having to crop out C-stands, etc… but if you have really clean and evenly lit backgrounds, Conduit is very sweet.

In fact, it’s worth downloading the demo and playing with it, just to wrap your head around the nodal interface. It will make Shake sees a lot less intimidating if you spend a few hours with Conduit first. Once you get the Nodal Workflow, it’s brilliant, and you’ll hate working in layers from that point forward.

[David Jahns]

agree with previous – of course, well shot, uncompressed is best, etc.. but the reality is we are often asked to polish a turd, right?

I’ve found DV Matte Pro (FCP Plug) to be a fantastic keyer – especially for substandard footage with DV compression. And for $200, it can’t be beat. Check out the demo & tutorial at dvgarage.com

It won’t give you Lord of the Rings quality, but anyone shooting DV or HDV better not be expecting LOR quality, right?

I’ve also heard great things about zMatte Pro by Digital Film Tools, but I haven’t tried it out, as I’ve been happy with DVMP.