Dylan Reeve
Forum Replies Created
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That could be a very valid point – I am in PAL world, these trivialities don’t affect me 🙂
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My suggestion would be download and install the Avid codecs on your Mac, and export in the Avid uncompressed 1:1 format, or even Avid DV50.
However it’s worth exporting a few small clips with different settings to test import into the Avid first, just to make sure you find the best setting.
Uncompressed (1:1) Avid media will be around 170Mbit/s
Otherwise, Animation should be fine, there will be an import delay on the Avid side though.
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In this case the drive in question is an Addonics external array (4x 750GB drives on a Hardware Multiplier in RAID 1+0 configuration).
My suspicion is that the overhead of the hardware multiplier (which has to emulate a single SATA device to the system, as well as manage a hardware RAID array) is possibly an issue.
We’re quite possibly going to replace with a PM-aware SATA controller and a regular Port Multiplier in the array (shifting the burden to the controller card and operating system).
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Well I have used the Blackmagic one, but it’s reporting impossibly slow results, so something is a amiss – according to the Blackmagic disk test I can’t even play DV video of my external SATA drive, but I can clearly demonstrate that is incorrect.
So I’m trying to get a little more information with a slightly more detailed test.
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I’d say yes, definitely Avid is a lot better at just working.
However, for someone with an FCP background that’s probably going to be a false economy at first, as while you might be able to spend more time just editing, there is going to be a fair bit of adjusting to do, which will slow you down (although once you get used to it, I’m certainly you’d be faster).
It will also depend on what you’re doing. FCP is probably better suited to some types of work. Personally I feel confident that I can do just about anything I want in Avid, but I’ve been using it for years and learned a huge amount, and a lot of things may be more intuitive in FCP.
For my money, FCP doesn’t come close to Avid in terms of pure efficiency for cutting footage. Just editing. It is also much better tuned for offline/online workflow, with really powerful media management and good batch capture tools. But outside this paradigm things can sometime be a little tricky. While Avid is getting better, FCP still has some advantages in some file-based workflows.
What Avid lacks that FCP offers is format flexibility. With a Decklink HD Extreme card we are able to capture uncompressed HD into our FCP suite, something we can’t do in any of our Avid suites (and won’t be able to do until we get a Mojo DX at a significantly higher price than the BM card).
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I haven’t used Media Logger for a long time, but I believe it will be project based (sort of like the Media Tool) so if you delete or move the old projects then is should clear. Also there should be a checkbox for ‘Show tapes from other Projects’ or something, which should do it.
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You can’t have two Avid installations on the same install, no. For a while I liked the idea of having Xpress Pro and MC on the same system, so I could choose what I needed with Dongle, but that wasn’t possible.
Although, interestingly, my Dongle (now updated to MC 2.8) still work on another computer with XPro 5.7 just fine.
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And one more option – export and ALE and do a find and replace on the tape name, then reimport into a new bin.
So many solutions… 🙂
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This is one of those things that I’m never quite happy with – a filter or effect in an NLE never really looks quite right. Not the way genuinely bad TV does. In in these situations that I want to sub my footage onto VHS, abuse it and then recapture it, but that’s not usually a practical option.
That said, the FCP ‘Bad TV’ effect is quite nice I reckon.
My other pet peeve in these sorts of things is viewfinders – they never look anything like an actual viewfinder.
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Many broadcasters will not broadcast 16:9 letterbox. They either choose to do a 4:3 center-cut or a 14:9 letterbox. Both of which have quite different safety areas within the frame.
In this case is sounds like delivery in HD. For the SD version of that channel they broadcast a 4:3 center-cut signal.
The reason channels so this is, ironically, because of how 4:3 gets blown up to 16:9 for widescreen or HD broadcast. In that case, 4:3 programs are ‘columned’ where the left and right edges of the frame (12.5% on each side) are black bars. So channels that run both Widescreen/HD and SD channels tend to have their SD channel as simple an Aspect Converted version of their 16:9 master channel. If the 4:3 columned signal were then letterboxed down for the SD broadcast then what you actually get is a full 4:3 image scaled down about 75% in the 4:3 screen. It looks pretty bad.