David Jahns
Forum Replies Created
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Yes, you can use Compressor – but… Toast will re-encode it anyway. I’ve had decent results with just dragging a ProRes quicktime into the Toast “authoring” screen (ha!), and letting it to the encode. (Toast has an option for “Re-Encode – always, never, auto” but I haven’t been able to get Toast to recognize the Compressor BR MPEG-2 file as blu-ray ready, so it always re-encodes it on me.)
BUT – it will encode everything to 1080i 29.97 or 720p59.94 – 1080p24 quicktimes will get frames duplicated, which is noticeable on slow dollies, pans, etc…
You can change the background screen (Stills, no video), and choose a frame of video for the thumbnail on the menu button, but you’re stuck with choosing from their cheesy preset buttons. And you can choose auto-play, so it can skip the menu screen entirely if you want it to.
For me, Toast has been fine for presenting rough cuts, etc.. in HD, but I wouldn’t think of it as a tool capable of authoring/mastering client deliverable Blu-Rays.
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I don’t buy the licensing argument at all. Come on, ROXIO can afford blu-Ray technology for Toast 9 , but Apple can’t?
This has more to do with Apple TV competing with Blu-Ray for the home movie HD experience. Jobs & Co bet the farm (or least one cow) on digital delivery, and that all physical media is passe at this point. Jobs hopes Apple TV will transform an industry like the iPod did. Offering a Blu-Ray disc solution will only help the physical media movement stay afloat. Anyone else notice that iDVD doesn’t even make the cover of the iLife 09 box, or the iLife homepage? It’s still part of the suite, but it’s not even touted as a feature anymore.
So, will all content be streaming/download? 10 years from now, probably, but in the meantime it’s ProApps users who are caught in the middle.
I applaud Walter and the others that have forged ahead and found their own solutions, but I’m personally not interested in authoring on a commercial level, we just give our clients DVDs of rough cuts and videos, and it would be nice to upgrade to blu-ray disc without having to invest and learn a whole new system. Toast 9 does the trick for simply putting HD content on a disc, but the authoring is quite limited – menus are only so customizable, etc…
Funny how Pixar is still releasing physical discs, though, isn’t it?
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We just installed a sweet little SAN for 6 workstations here in our shop all running GigE ethernet and absolutely no additional software, like EditShare required.
So, Walter – with no SAN management software – can you establish separate media spaces? Or is everything on one giant drive space like an XSAN, with subfolders for each project? Do you have ONE Capture Scratch folder, and one RENDERS folder?
I’m trying to imagine our EditShare without the ES server tools, and it sounds like quite a headache – especially when the SAN starts getting full and you’re trying to figure out which projects are taking up the space.
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I read about issues with QT 7.6 and Color, so I did the ProApp update, but not the QT update for our systems.
We’re running FCP 605, QT 755, and OS 10.5.5, and also 10.4.11 – both Intels and Quad-G5s, and we have not seen any issues in about 2 weeks.
Personally, I would stay away from QT and the OS, but I’m a chicken-sh*t when it comes to updates…
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see, that’s the thing – we have dozens of different circumstances, with different formats/codecs, etc…, rather than have to trouble shoot every single circumstance, I was hoping there was a methodology we could adopt that could keep us out of trouble in the first place.
Basically, we have source footage in everything from DV to XDCAM to 1080p ProRes – and finish in everything from web delivery formats, to SD DigiBeta to HDCAM-SR 10bit Uncomp.
We’ll often send a scene to our After Effects guys for compositing, then bring it back into FCP for final layoff. But we often see shifts in color space, gamma, clipping, etc… – some of which is to be expected, but I was looking for words of wisdom for to minimize headaches that occur in that YUV to RGB to YUV chain. That might be special codecs, specific apps that do a better RGB conversion, legalizing colors before compositing, etc…
We also will offline in FCP, and online in a Flame across town, or down in LA. Back in the old days, we’d show up with an EDL and a stack of tapes, which they’d recapture – no problem. But now we’re showing up with P2 or XDCAM, or ProRes quicktimes, and the Flame artist bitches and moans about the FCP/Quicktime RGB shift, “damned consumer editing toys”, etc… Then other times, we’ll have the Flame artist composite a specific shot, but then give it back to us for final conform. He’ll give us a series of TIFFs, but then there’s another color shift when we convert it back to QT.
My hope is that if we can establish a YUV to RGB workflow that works for After Effects, it will also work with getting things to a Flame RGB space and back.
Does that help? I’m sure many of you have jumped through these hoops before, right? I realize it’s a lot to write out in a forum post – anyone know of any published articles that deal with this? Come on, show me some links!
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Yes, you’ll definitely want to use a SAN, but FC Server is a different beast entirely. It work with (and enhance your workflow) with a SAN, but it doesn’t require a SAN. Basically, if you have a fast enough to SAN to share media – great, FC Server acts as a media management & cataloging tool. If you don’t have a SAN, and need multiple editors to share storage, it will “push” copies of the necessary media to your local storage devices, which seems quite clunky and slow.
I would definitely recommend a SAN, and if you are using FCP, Avid Unity probably won’t work for you. They may claim it will, but – at least a year ago, it did not work for us. Maybe they’ve fixed it by now, but I would bet that it’s not truly stable. We’ve great results with EditShare, using a gig-E network, which has been fast enough to share 1080p ProRes material, or Uncompressed SD. (The 500m distance might be an issue, but there are workarounds for that – running fibrechannel instead of Gig-E, etc…) And we even run our Avids on the EditShare as well – bonus!
Check out the SAN forum, for sure, but tally up one vote for EditShare!
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Rich – I posted on this same subject (FCP scaling) a while ago as well.
It looks like my original post has been truncated, but here’s a link to my report.
https://www.jointeditorial.com/dave_tech/FCP_HD-SCALING-FINAL.htm
and the resulting discussion at:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/958052
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Hmmm, I’ve actually never dealt with 1080i source material.
Everything I’ve ever worked with has started with progressive frames, 1080psf24 or 720p60 or 24. The key there was using a progressive timeline to do the scaling, but if you’re staring with 1080i, that won’t work. I honestly don’t know.. except “Use a KONA card!”
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I have used Toast 9 to burn Blu-Ray format 1080p shows to a standard DVD-R, and had successful playback on a Panasonic Blu-Ray player, DMP-BD30.
Toast is quite limited in it’s capabilities, though – and even re-encoded my 24 frame video to 30 frame by duplicating every 4th frame, so the motion isn’t as smooth as it should be.
This happened even when giving 24frame Br-compliant streams to Toast and burning to a BD-R, so it’s not the ideal way to go for 24p material – but if you don’t have a BR-burner, and you can live with 30 frame 1080i, it’s worth a try to see if it works on your setup.
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Sad to say, but OPEN TIMELINE is simply marketing hype. FCP does a terrible job of downconverting footage – at least if your are working in NTSC interlaced. If you can work in NTSC 23.98 progressive, you might have better results, but it also depends on what footage you’re starting with, of course.
I did a fairly thorough research job on this when FCP 6 came out, then I posted my results here on the COW, and no one really had a solution, other than “use a KONA card to downconvert your footage”.
Check out this link:
https://www.jointeditorial.com/dave_tech/FCP_HD-SCALING-FINAL.htm