[Donal O kane]

From contact i’ve had with AJA, and experience with my AJA IO Express you can capture 1080 (25 for me) ProRes 422, not HQ with the macbook pro 17inch onto firewire 800.

Its to do with only dual core apparently, needs 4 core minimum for ProRes 422 HQ.

From my experience you can capture 5 seconds or so before dropped frames occur.

But there are plenty of discussions on whether HQ or Non HQ makes a difference etc, most say they have an easier time with non HQ.

My motto is if its good enough for walter, shane etc its good enough for me 🙂

[Donal O kane]

I have captured embedded timecode from SDI using AJA VTR Exchange with the IO, IO Express and Kona3.

And you are correct FCP 7 can’t see it via SDI.

I have had mixed results capturing with VTR exchange, its is great and i’m sure it was the drive I was capturing to that caused the problems but I thought i’d just say it.

[Donal O kane]

There shouldn’t be but it will be hard to tell until you remove it.

fcsremover does suport fcs 3, or you can google uninstall fcs 3 and do it the manual way.

I’d run fcsremover and see if it causes any problems.

[Donal O kane]

To go back

option 1) use your handy ready made clone of your system drive made with carbon copy cloner, (or the other one), to restore your system to it’s pre-instalation / screwing around with things status. (next time 🙂 )

option 2) remove FCS completely, google fcsremover (not sure if this works with FCS 3 yet but worth a try) then re-install FCS 2. It is usually recommended to remove previous versions before installing new versions, same for going backwards.

FCS 3 or FCP 7 is only an update in terms of updating your license, the programs themselves are not updates, they are complete new versions which remove the old version during install.

Generally speaking when installing programs its a bad idea to cancel the install process part of the way through. With a proapp like FCS its a really bad idea.

For both FCS 2 and FCS 3 you can choose what you want to install, you can decide to leave out the audio content, motion content or dvd studio pro templates if you want a quick install.

Do it this way, not canceling installs. Once again, that’s bad!.

For what its worth I wouldn’t go back unless you are experiencing exporting problems yourself.

[Donal O kane]

What video output setting are you using

Final Cut Pro -> Audio/Visual Settings

what do you have for
device control preset
what settings do you have when you go to the
A/V devices tab

what are your sequence settings?
and do they match the settings on the deck you are using?

[Donal O kane]

after I stopped panicking and got an extra day extension on the project I searched the cow for field dominance and found lots of stuff. (as of course I should have done first)

so hdcam 50i footage is 25p (or psf)

i need to change the field dominance of the sequence and the clip to none to get proper 1080p25

correct?
one question still:
would the mixing of sequence and clip field dominance be bad? it seems like it should but it doesn’t ask for rendering and rendered things look fine.

thanks

[Donal O kane]

You could try to create an offline version in media manager from your edl and then reconnect the xdcam .mov file to the offline clips?

Full length xdcam files will reconnect to offline clips for me, timecode accurately, but again omf import via auto duck from avid not edl, so not exactly the same situation.

[Donal O kane]

Tough situation to be in.

If I were you I would try and make it so that your systems and media directory structures are set up as close to each others as possible.

If it was me and one machine has to have it spread across 3 drives then on the second I would spread the file/folders the same way in 3 directory’s on your one drive.

for example:
3 drives machine has disks called: media drive A, media drive B and media drive C.
1 Drive machine has a disk called: large media drive

On media Drive A, B and C have folders called Project_Name_Media_A, Project_Media_Name_B, Project_Media_Name_C respectively which contain all the media with.

On large media drive have 1 folder called All_Project_Name_Media and withing that folder have 3 subfolders Project_Name_Media_A, Project_Name_Media_B, Project_Name_Media_C, which contain the same media structure as the media Drive A, B and C folders.

Also in FCP put the clips in 3 bins so that when reconnecting you use locate and reconnect from relative path from the appropriate Project_Name_Media_X folder.

Not perfect, but a few test runs and working out a strict strategy at the start will save hair follicles later 🙂

Good luck!

[Donal O kane]

> Dont Consolidate! Duck the finished sequence into FCP – relink the
> XDCam to newly imported Quicktimes (which I guess should match the
> Avid XDCam Imports in name length and track info) Media Manage and
> Batch Digitise the DVCProHD

exactly!

wow that took me four paragraphs to explain …..

just had a go at trying to relink a whole folder and it worked.
I think as long as you have the same filenames that the clips expect then you can relink groups of clips.

Donal

[Donal O kane]

Hi,

Just got finished an online doing just this, mixed sequence of varicam hdcam and xdcam from media composer to final cut pro via auto duck (which is awesome) for online.

Its not as bad as you might think, and you have two options, I prefer option A even though it has more steps.

These steps assume you still have access to the BPAV folders however and its been a long weekend and i’m still in work I might not have read your posts corectly.

Option A:

Use the sony XDCAM transfer program (i’m currently on 2.7.1) to import (or re wrap as quicktime) the clips that you are using, I had about 20 clips from 12 rolls so i wrote a list and then selected the appropriate ones.

Then using the imported sequence from auto duck (before media managing to an offline) reconnect the newly quicktimed clips.

Then I duplicate the sequence
Cut out all the non xdcam stuff and media manager recompress with delete unused media (with handles) and recompress to the online setting you want (my case 1080i25 pro res 422 (hq)

Then you have a sequence with the clips in the correct place with the correct compression.
I move them up to previously empty tracks
copy and paste into the media managed online sequence and fit nicely into place.

pros : you get clips with handles in the correct place with correct codec so no rendering from now on.

cons : is a bit long and you have to manually move clips to the correct position.

Option B:

perform the same step as above with sony xdcam transfer software

in your media managered offline sequence just reconnect the offline xdcam clips to the full res quicktime files and they will connect up perfectly. i didn’t think this would work as the offline clips have different durations but it does, timecode accurate and all.

pros: quick and easy

cons: you might have mixed codecs on same timeline … not too bad but can be a render pain if like me you get directors that like to move stuff during online, or are going to color you might want to bake the clips etc.

Hope any of that helps