Dean Sensui
Forum Replies Created
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Hope your editor has recovered well from his illness.
I think when you did the finder-based copying that might have fouled it up since FCP is looking for media on specific hard drives. By pointing at different hard drives it might have connected to media with similar names but with radically different content. Just my guess.
I’ve used media manager a lot with FCP 5.1.2 and hadn’t had any serious problems with it so far.
Here’s some possibly helpful suggestions:
Use Media Manager to make the copy to the new drives.
Make sure all the original drives are mounted and that your project is working properly.
Then use Media Manager to consolidate all the material to the new drives. Base the new file names on the old file names and not the clip names.
You have the option of deleting unused media, but in your case you might not want to do that yet.
Also, I’m using hot-swappable SATA drive systems from Firmtek for all my storage. Initial price is competitive with Firewire drives but in a very short period of time that gets a whole lot cheaper. Especially if you need to store a LOT of data.
Dean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii
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Depending on your mixer’s design it’s possible to send a monitor feed from the board to the voice talent.
However, there might be a small problem with how it syncs up with what’s coming out of the edit system.
Some analog I/O cards put in a slight delay in the audio signal so that it matches up with the processed video signal which sometimes has a slight delay.
Dean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii
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Overall, it sounds like an interesting and challenging assignment.
Good luck with it all!
Dean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii
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To edit our fishing show, which consisted almost entirely of non-scripted material, would take about two to three hours of work to finish a minute of program.
Two guys, working 60-hour weeks each, would get the hour-long show done in time for each week’s airing, 26 times a year.
Dean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii
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Tony…
Doing the math, it’ll take 54 amp-hours to provide just the camera battery chargers and another LiIon battery charger for enough power over 6 hours. That will charge three camera batteries, and one small lithium-ion battery for an on-camera light.
109 watts divided by 12 volts equals 9.1 amps. Multiplied by 6 hours is 54.6 amp-hours.
Your solar power system can provide only 18 amp-hours of power, assuming a perfectly sunny day with no trees throwing shadows or clouds. Way short. You’ll need three systems like this, operating on perfectly sunny days, to charge three camera batteries and a small light.
To charge 10 batteries will take more than three times that in solar battery power and storage.
At which point a small gas-powered generator starts to make much more sense. It’ll cost less, weigh less and take up much less space. Take a look at the notes regarding estimated fuel consumption and the weight of the gas needed for a given period of time.
You might also want to re-consider the Firestore.
P2 cards proved their durability during the Iditarod. It’s easier to protect a camera against a rain storm than it is to protect a camera AND a Firestore. Also, the Firewire connector may or may not be rugged enough to tolerate a deep tropical environment.
The Firestore 100 I had also interfered with my wireless mic system (Audio Technica ATW-100). It was a problem that neither I nor Matt McEwen could quite figure out. The only solution was to get the Firestore as far away from the wireless receivers as possible. That meant more cabling and a complicated setup where I couldn’t just put the camera down and walk away. I had to unmount stuff from my belt first.
Less equipment means less to go wrong.
I’ve used both the Firestore and the P2 cards. I prefer the reliability of the P2 cards and the fact that I don’t have to keep another piece of equipment powered up all the time.
P2 cards are definitely not cheap. But sometimes cost is less of a factor than durability and/or reliability. And 8-gig cards have dropped in price.
You might also want to look at the P2 Store, which has the ability to hold up to 7 8-gig cards. Two P2 Stores is roughly the price of a single Firestore.
And a single battery will literally power a P2 Store all day long — it’s a real miser when it comes to energy consumption. And I’ve transferred cards into it while walking around — never lost a single frame of video. Porta Brace makes a custom case for it which makes it very weather resistant.
Just my 3 cents… 🙂
Dean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii
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Here’s something I came up with recently as there was a possible job coming up that would require field power. Some of these things can run off DC but most would require AC power. Either through an inverter or through a generator.
But it’s a list of what each device required in terms of total watts. Watts is easily calculated:
Watts = Volts X amps
Amps = watts/volts
Portable production power requirements
MacBook Pro: 85 watts
Seritek 1SE2 enclosure: 48.5 watts
Dolgin battery charger: 25.2 watts
Panasonic battery charger: 24 watts
MyPower MP3400: 60.04 wattsTotal: 242.74 watts
(110VAC at 2.21A)
(12VDC at 20.22A)6-hour charge = 122 Amp-hours
West Marine 400 watt inverter, 8617482
$39.99Honda E1000i portable generator
120VAC 7.5A.
29 pounds
0.6 gallons = 3.8 hrs at rated load, 0.157 GPHAt 2.21A load probably get 6 -7 hours run time.
About .6 gallons/day to charge batteries & run laptop.
1 week = 4.2 gallons. 25.2 pounds.Generator rental rates, Hawaiian Rent-All (Dec 2006):
Honda 1000 $35/day
Honda 2000 $47/dayDean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii
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On a recent trip to Japan I used 4 8-gig cards and a P2 Store.
Worked like a charm. Didn’t lose a single frame even though these vacation videos were shot totally run-and-gun. It was an acid test before I took this system to a real job.
All the footage was transferred at the hotel using a MacBook Pro onto a mirrored RAID (Firmtek enclosure and Hitachi 500-GB SATA drives).
One of the reasons I’m not getting a Duel Adapter is that it takes up the Express 34 card slot which I need to run the Firmtek RAID. So whatever feeds the MacBook Pro has to go via USB or Firewire.
In my case it’s USB via the P2 Store. Either as a field storage unit or as a card reader.
Dean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii
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On my recent trip to Japan, I would dump P2 cards into a P2 Store. The P2 Store was in a bag slung over my shoulder so it was a good chance to stress-test the P2 Store and see how it handled real-life, run-and-gun file transfers.
At the end of the day, I used P2 Genie to transfer the contents of the P2 Store to a 500-gig dual-drive Firmtek system set up as a mirrored RAID.
Each day’s footage was in its own folder to keep it all organzied. And each P2 card was renamed by P2 Genie to reflect the date it was shot as well as the sequence. Since the date feature in P2 Genie doesn’t work, I simply assigned an eight-digit number as the date. For example the first card shot on April 28, 2007 would be 20070428_001. The next would be 20070428_002, etc.
We were on a bus tour so each night the RAID would be packed into a small Pelican case that was packed into my suitcase.
Didn’t lose a single frame of material.
This wasn’t an assignment, either. It was vacation home movies. So you know how important THAT is! 🙂
Dean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii
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From what I’ve inferred from the demo of “Color” it seems to me that this new application has the capability of creating a key.
There’s a clip that shows a woman’s blouse being selected as a key color and another clip where a yellow cab in a street scene was keyed for secondary color adjustments.
I don’t know how good that key is. It appears as though you can drag the selection crosshair through an area and Color will build a key based upon that range of tonal values.
Right now I’m using Keylight for chromakey and that works very well. But having another tool available is always welcome.
Dean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii
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This is just a guess on my part, but the potential for frying a firewire port is probably when a 6-pin plug is inadvertently forced into the 6-pin port upside-down.
There is a unique shape to the plug to help prevent that from happening but I have heard of one instance in which it was forced in the wrong way.
The 4-pin side of the cable doesn’t have any power and hot-plugging a 4-pin firewire cable shouldn’t be a problem at all since there’s no power to zap any circuitry. But then again, no guarantees. Nothing like being real careful when it comes to expensive equipment… such as a $25,000 Varicam deck!
However, I do recall watching in awe as Steve Jobs hot swapped a portable firewire drive while a Quicktime movie was playing. This was when Firewire was first announced at a MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. I don’t know how he got away with it, but when you own Apple Computer I guess you’re allowed certain freedoms.
Dean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii