David Smith
Forum Replies Created
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[Jumpytunes] “Canon cameras don’t work with FCP if you have external FW drives all plugged into the same FW bus”
That’s not really recommended for any camera. Sometimes it works, sometimes you’ll be dropping frames. It’s not recommended to capture to your boot drive either, so the iMac has a lot going against it. (I know some folks are using them just fine, but I sure wouldn’t want to purchase a system and find out you’re not one of the lucky ones.)
[Jumpytunes] “My other option would be to get the bare-bones Mac Pro tower: 2.0GHZ, 1GB RAM, 250GB HD, all else stock.”
Or….. the way you’re proposing to outift the iMac, it comes to over $1800. For less than 200 more you could get the 2.16 GHz Macbook Pro, which would give you Firewire 800 AND the Express card slot for adding a second Firewire or an eSATA connection. No worries about choosing a Canon then.
You could also keep checking the Apple Store for refurbished 2.33 ‘books (no pro books at all listed today, but they’re usually there)
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[jasonlel] ” For me – the value of the tough tech is that it also has firewire 800 in addition to esata. This makes the transfer of the media from our G5 that we use for digitizing cheap and easy as it already supports firewire 800.”
Excellent point! I have a four bay, hot swappable Firmtek box attached to my tower, so I can just slide disks in/out between systems and don’t need the firewire connection. But the dual interface makes perfect sense with your hardware.
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[Bob Woodhead] “and my Ampex 2″ Quad inflated the tires on the production trailer..”
Hey Bob, I tried that feature once, but then we loaded in the three modules of an HS-100 slo-mo machine so we could get a whole thirty seconds of slow motion…. and the the tires went flat again….. 🙁
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[s_oboyle] ” I’m working on a Mac G5 with a firewire cable going from a vcr deck to the computer. I’m also using Final Cut Pro HD. The Operating system is OS X 10.4.9. i think thats all you need to know”
Actually another thing we’d need to know is what disk drive you are capturing to?
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[jasonlel] “The 15″ doesn’t come with firewire 800, only 400 – so I figure if I am going to get a card, might as well get the express card and go esata. ……….
I’m leaning towards starting with a single drive and seeing if that meets my needs before investing in a RAID. I’m thinking of going with a 750GB drive in a wiebetech ToughTech XE enclosure.”
The newer models do include Firewire 800. I was wondering why Apple returned to it, until AJA announced their new ioHD box. I think that ‘splains it. Of course that won’t help you, so I think you’re idea to go eSATA is a good one. The only caveat is the SATA cables I’ve bought aren’t nearly as flexible as Firewire.
You might want to take a look at the Firmtek enclosures. Direct to backplate design and a fan with three speed settings. Mine’s been working great.
Regards,
David -
Can’t speak to these particular lenses, but I’ve always been a Fujinon fan. Also, the Fuji at 7.6mm will have a slightly wider FoV, as well as an extra 6mm on the tight end.
Canon makes nice glass, my old F1 with it’s lenses was my favorite 35mm camera, but I’ve always found their video lenses to be….. ergonomically challenged. They’ve gotten a lot better, especially with hand held type lenses like these, but Fujinons still feel better to me.
(Don’t get me started on studio lenses. Every time I have to take my thumb of off the zoom rocker on a canon rear control to press the return button I just want to scream “What’s the matter with you guys! Haven’t you ever talked to a camera operator?”)
Let us know how you like the 500. I’m really interested in this one.
Regards,
David -
Ben,
I’m guessing that you’re attempting to capture to your Powerbook’s internal drive…. right?
If that’s the case, that’s most likely your problem. Sometimes it works, and for some people it always works, but it’s not recommended. Your trying to run your OS, run FCP AND write to the drive at the same time.
Hopefully your Powerbook has a card slot. What you need is an external drive with a Firewire 400 or 800, or eSATA interface. You also need a pcmcia cardbus adaptor for whichever of those interfaces you choose. Even if your machine has two firewire ports built in, they are on the same buss so don’t try to use them for both the camera and the external drive. The pcmcia adaptor will give you a seperate path for one of those signals.
The drive gets connected to the adaptor, the camera into the built in firewire. (You can reverse this if you’re using a Firewire 400 adaptor, it doesn’t matter). Keep in mind that many drives come formatted as FAT32 so they will mount on both macs and windoze machines. Reformat the drive as HFS+ NOT journaled.
You should use the DV Easy Setup in FCP, then capture away, your dropped frame problems should be gone.
Regards,
David -
I don’t think youtube corrects for anamorphic footage, so you’ll have to letterbox it first.
I’ve recently put some letterboxed material up there like this:
edited anamorphic sequence.
dropped the edited sequence into a non anamorphic sequence. FCP letterboxes it.
render
export a reference movie of the 4:3 letterbox sequence
import ref. movie into Compressor
in Compressor I kept the codec the same, but scaled the video to 320×240
changed frame rate from 29.97 to 30 (that’s what youtube wants)
also changed the audio to mp3, mono, 22.050 KHz (also what they want)You can upload the resulting file, but they will recompress it to flash, which is the codec they use. I believe it was Shane Ross (thank you!) who pointed out recently that if you encode a flash 7, Sorenson Spark file with the above settings, they don’t recompress. So I imported the file into Flash Video Encoder, compressed with those settings, and uploaded the resulting .flv file, which is 7′ 42″ long, and 25MB in size.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziqVMz9WR38
I’ve also tried scaling files when exporting from FCP, and scaling them with the Flash Encoder. The Compressor method was MUCH faster.
Regards,
David -
[Bob Cole] “editing time will be really tight. I’d like to minimize the editing grunt work so I have more time for actual editing. (And operator inexperience is a factor: I’ve only edited multi-camera once, several editing platforms ago.)”
Bob,
I’ve shot a LOT of tennis and this sounds like a great deal of work with such a time constraint. Any reason you’re not using a small truck or flypack so you could switch the games live? I would think all of the extra post time would eat up most if not all of any extra production costs, and I think you’d get much better coverage with someone being able to see and direct what the operators are doing.
What kind of cameras are you using?
Regards,
David -
You could do a software downconvert of your HDV timeline to SD, then output via your io to beta SP.