[Declan Smith]

Try this variation. This will loop over the array and build a string containing the random chars.

chars=["º", "_", "-", "•", "˙", "|"]
mystr=""
for (i=0;i <chars.length; i++) {
mystr+=chars[Math.floor(random(chars.length))]
}
mystr

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
FCPX / Adobe CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

\”it\’s either binary or it\’s not\”

[Declan Smith]

Try something like this

chars=["º", "_", "-", "•", "˙", "|"]
char_index=Math.floor(random(chars.length))
random_char=chars[char_index]

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
FCPX / Adobe CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

\”it\’s either binary or it\’s not\”

[Declan Smith]

A couple of approaches, depending on what you are trying to achieve.

1. Create a text object and add a slider
2. Use the following expression on the text which will scale the default 0-100 on the slider to 0-999999999
effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”)*999999999/100

Sliders have a limit of 1000000 as their top value I believe, so another approach isto use a point control as the source which has a higher a limit and link to just the x value for example, then use an expression such as below and keyframe the point control

value = effect("Point Control")("Point")[0]
if (value < 0) {
value = 0;
}
if (value > 999999999) {
value = 999999999;
}

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
FCPX / Adobe CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

\”it\’s either binary or it\’s not\”

[Declan Smith]

When you say “two wireless microphones into one camera”, is one speaker on the left channel and the other on the right channel or are they both recorded to the same mono track?

I would also suggest that after effects is not the tool to fix / balance audio. You may want to look at audition for levelling and cleaning up the track if you are using adobe suite products.

It all depends on whether you have separate tracks for each speaker and if you don’t, whether they speak over each other. If you have a single track and they speak over each other then you can tackle it but it will be apparent that audio is being changed.

If you have a single track and they are not speaking over each other, splitting up the dialog onto different track and processing them separetly and raising the levels may help but you may also have issues with your noise floor, so it depends on the material.

Your best hope is that each speaker was recorded to separate channels in camera (i.e. one to left, one to right) and you can process them separatly, but watch that noise floor when you raise the quiet speaker.

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
FCPX / Adobe CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

\”it\’s either binary or it\’s not\”

[Declan Smith]

So are you suggesting that animated masks is the way to do this effect, and just make sure it’s paced to “cover the joins” so to speak? I did search on here before and came across a thread about walking through a wall, but the podcast isn’t available, but I’m guessing it’s similar.

If I could create a ….. ooh I’ve just thought of something. Maybe convert the image (as it has alpha layers) into a black and white image and blobberise it, then use that as mask to the original.

Yep! Just tried it and it works, bit of scale as well, looks like it’s rising up through the paper.

Thanks Dave, always good to bounce ideas 🙂

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
FCPX / Adobe CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

\”it\’s either binary or it\’s not\”

[Declan Smith]

I must admit, I prefer working with polywavs, and the poly file generated from the F8 works fine. Polywavs give great flexibility under FCPX. I was running some tests on Mid-Side recording as I need to deliver separate files to a client on a location sound recording gig I will be doing. Having two separate mono files for MS creates a little more work, whereas having a stereo file lends itself much better to work with MS plugins such as MSED.

I have gone through some extensive testing scenarios with Apple to narrow down the problem and it appears to only affect stereo files. If, for example, I record 4 stereo files and import them into FCPX, only one will be imported and it will link to a different one on disk, regardless of whether they are safety tracks.

Good suggestion about marking the safety tracks differently at source to make absolutely clear what they are, although FCPX suffixes them with an instance ID, for example, I have labelled the tracks:

Ch1: Boom-Mid
Ch2: Boom-Side
Ch5: Boom-Mid
Ch6: Boom-Side

FCPX changes these to:

Boom-Mid-1
Boom-Side-1
Boom-Mid-2
Boom-Side-2

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
FCPX / Adobe CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

\”it\’s either binary or it\’s not\”

[Declan Smith]

Hi Bruce,

I had a similar type of use case a few weeks ago and I documented what I did here:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/49061#49305

This may be of use or may be irrelevant, but I wanted to share a project between my desktop and laptop and only have low res proxies on the laptop. This workflow, allowed me to ensure that changes went between both systems, but you need to be mindful of adding new media to ensure it’s available to both systems. One other word of caution and that is to make sure that if you use any custom plugins etc, that they are installed and available on both machines.

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
FCPX / Adobe CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

\”it\’s either binary or it\’s not\”

[Declan Smith]

Just when I thought I had things working by using FCPXML to transfer things around, another issue arose, namely Animated masks stopped working properly.

I have now devised myself a workflow that appears to work which allows me to edit on my laptop with proxy media only (for all video media, stills / images I take as originals) and then copy a relatively small amount of data to my desktop in order to import the changes there for work on the full resolution media (with no proxy files), and vice versa. I have posted it below for general interest and for review. For information, the project I am working on is a 4.5 hour multi camera conference. There are 8 mutlicamera projects contained in the main event and the whole library is 37Mb, which compresses down to 7Mb (mailable) using the Finder Compress function!

Laptop (initial Master)

[Declan Smith]

I have done a number of tests now and it does, as you suggest, seem to be linked to the XML export which appears not to export everything, rendering it only partially useful. I thought the whole point of the new fcpx xml format over the older FCS format was to include additional meta-data / fields & structure to be able to describe everything about the media and timelines, so maybe this is a bug, after all, the project, or timeline, is just a bunch of meta-data!

This now appears to be related to a previous question I asked on the board regarding desktop / laptop workflow (https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/49061).

I have posted a workflow that does appear to work for me, in that thread. Thankyou for your help.

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
FCPX / Adobe CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

\”it\’s either binary or it\’s not\”

[Declan Smith]

Hi Fabrizio,

I have a number of workflows depending on the project and how I will be working with it. The reason I am not using an external drive as the primary drive in this case is because of the fluidity of movement when I’m on the go and the time I can get to do editing. i.e. I am hopping on and off trains, into cafes, sat waiting for trains at the station etc. In these situations it is not wise to have an external drive plugged in for two reasons,

1. it could easily be pulled out or knocked
2. I need to move quickly.

My workflow for this is therefore “I have 5 minutes, open laptop, edit, shut lid, move on”. A regular mechanical hard disk has physical risks in these situations, and SSD’s have the risk of electrically being erased if unplugged accidentally.

Also, there is no need for me to have the full suite of large original footage on my laptop. It’s a much faster workflow to edit with low res proxies, I never have to wait for rendering and there is no stuttering etc. I can still do primary grading on low res proxies using scopes, leaving the main grade to the desktop suite with calibrated monitors etc. So the only thing I need to move around between the computers is metadata, i.e. what’s changed in the edit, keywords, etc. Yes, if I add additional assets like stills, I need to manage them myself outside the project.

The xml export/import was engineered with this very portability in mind and now I’ve been directed to export at the event level (rather than project) the world has become even more beautiful!.

For example you could email an xml to another editor if you needed to (especially if you compress it – the project I am working on is 10.3Mb xml -> 293K when compressed). So from the train, I could email all my changes to a colleague back in the office at a snap. All I have done to the project is a few cuts here and there, and a few metadata changes. No need to send a whole library around everytime, as long as external media is organised, which in my case is similar to the FCPX library concept in that it all lives under one root folder, making relinking very trivial.

There are merits in having everything rolled up in one library, but this in itself is just a folder structure, treated differently by MAC because of folder attributes, but a folder all the same. FCPX creates all sorts of files for internal use, rendering etc, which are all very useful, but superfluous and throwaway. For me, I manage my media externally from the editing package and manage my backup strategy accordingly. This has the added advantage that the media can be used in more than one package directly without having to worry about the internals of any of them.

Slightly off topic but worthy of note to discuss disks.

With regards to RAID5, I take it you have never had a failure? I never use RAID5 for anything anymore. A single disk failure means that the array still works yes, but at reduced performance, and the time it takes to rebuild after a failure is astronomical and degrades performance during the rebuild (and carries it’s own risks). Once an array is in a degraded state you should immediately take steps to repair the array!

Then when you have more than one disk fail, which is more common than you think because most RAID5 arrays are built from disks that were made at the same time, then a lot of people get a shock because they use it mistakingly as a backup solution then realise they have lost everything! This may not happen very often, RAID5 has mostly good press, but when it does go wrong, it can be potentially catastrophic.

SSD’s are fantastic for their speed, I use them in RAID0 configuration in my desktop and my laptop disk is also an SSD. I wouldn’t be without them, BUT, they should be treated as unreliable data stores. Why? because if something goes wrong with an SSD you will lose everything, no exception, everything, no recovery. A simple power glitch can do this. This is due to the technology used.

Always separate operational use / responsiveness from backup / data security. I’ve never had an SSD failure in my computer (yet), but I have had it happen to SSD’s used to capture footage (on more than one occasion). Think of them as volatile, non-volatile RAM devices!!

My strategy is a 3 backup system with one copy off site, and that is simple mirroring with contingency (I use carbon copy cloner which has a safety_net feature, so even though each time I clone, if I did accidentally delete or change files between clones, they are preserved , a bit like time machine but a 1000 times better!).

I use RAID0 on most things for performance reasons. This brings the added danger of losing everything in the event of a failure, just like SSD’s, but the 3 backup system works around this also.

Simple mirroring requires no rebuilds, no performance hits, and total reliable data security. The pay off is that I have three times as much storage than I actually use, i.e. if I have a 6TB disk, then I have two other 6TB disks for backup which gives me a total of 6TB usable storage from 18TB, but it’s secure and reliable and a life saver!

With the Carbon Copy Clone approach, if my main computer disks were ever to fail, and I need my computer in it’s entirety to work right now because I have an urgent project, then all I need to do is boot off the backup and carry on working, leaving the replacement and re-cloning to when I have time. Things never break conveniently.

This 3 backup system is tried and tested. I also used it for DIT workflows when offloading footage as well as general backup etc. It has saved me many a time!

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
FCPX / Adobe CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

\”it\’s either binary or it\’s not\”