[Dean Sensui]

BTW, Photoshop doesn’t work with Leopard.

So if you’re upgrading, you’ll have to upgrade that, too.

As for power, if I hadn’t upgraded to an 8-Core Mac, I couldn’t do our show. We depend a great deal on After Effects and Apple’s Color, and both require intensive rendering. Having all eight processors crunching away makes it possible for me to get things done within a reasonable time frame.

Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing

[Dean Sensui]

Do you have After Effects? AE makes use of all eight processors and it will pull off a render a whole lot faster.

You might check on your Qmaster settings and see if “options for selected service” is set to the maximum number of “instances”. In your case it should be eight.

Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing

[Dean Sensui]

Have you added any fonts lately?

I had a problem with Boris which perplexed me until I took all the fonts out and carefully replaced them.

I never did nail it down but at least it’s working again.

Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing

[Dean Sensui]

I have a Firmtek-based hard drive system. This card is teamed up with a removeable Firmtek housing which gives me a hot-swappable and expandable setup.

SeriTek/2SE2-E External PCI Express (PCIe) 2-Port Adapter with eSATA Connectors SATA-2SE2-E. $99.95

The bundle package is here:

https://firmtek.stores.yahoo.net/2ense2e.html

For monitoring I’m using a DeckLink HD Extreme card.

Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing

[Dean Sensui]

Any idea of how the footage was copied from the SxS card to the hard drive?

I’m just guessing but perhaps the person who provided the duplicates didn’t do a proper job of copying the folder contained in the SxS card intact and, instead, picked certain folders within the card instead.

Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing

[Dean Sensui]

[Mark Raudonis] “This is why we don’t let IT near our X-SAN! Our IT guys are smart, wonderful, and very talented… but they don’t understand squat about how video works.”

My prior experience with an IT “team” was that they looked at image data as simply “data” instead of “valuable history”. As a result a lot of that history was lost due to pure negligence.

I treat my own image data with a lot more reverence and keep backups of everything.

Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing

[Dean Sensui]

Sorry I didn’t make that clear. Yep, it’s the EX1.

And, yes, it was a surprise to me, too! I expected 4:2:0 to be less effective than 4:2:2. So it’s a good lesson: It’s ok to make assumptions, but base your decisions on actual tests.

Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing

[Dean Sensui]

Part of the answer is the camera. The rest of the answer is:

— Green screen background material.
— Lighting.
— Keying software.

Of the three above, keying software is a huge component.

I use Primatte and have been able to pull near-perfect keys from material that have been properly lighted and shot. That plug-in has a long series of controls that provide an artist the tools needed to tweak some very subtle parameters in order to get a key just right.

And of all the controls, the “Lightwrap” feature is especially powerful. It lets a compositor make background highlights bleed into foreground elements the way it would if a bright object flared into a foreground element in real life.

Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing

[Dean Sensui]

The other option is to capture them en masse, then rename the clips within FCP.

The clip media, and FCP’s reference to them, will continue to retain the obscure naming convention, but you’ll be able to see your assigned clip names in the sequence.

The only precaution I would suggest is when you media manage the project: Base the media names on media names and not clip names. That way the media will still have the original XDCam-assigned names which FCP can connect to should you ever need to re-acquire and re-link.

Hope this makes sense.

Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing

[Dean Sensui]

I ran into a similar situation when I had to re-acquire media for a project that had been edited.

The big problem was how to re-connect the clips that had been re-named during the original Log & Transfer process. Unless there’s a way to save that re-naming process as a permanent database FCP won’t know which media to connect to the clip in the sequence.

So I don’t rename clips and I let the XDCam software keep the original media names as the clip names.

Where a batch capture process relies on reel names and time code to redigitize media, it’s different with clip-based media. With clip-based media FCP relies on the clip names to connect clips with media, and timecode determines a clip’s in and out points in relation to the media.

Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing