Dylan Reeve
Forum Replies Created
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I’d get in touch with Off Hollywood, I know they’re moving into a whole new place at the moment, fitting it out from scratch.
https://www.offhollywooddigital.com/
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I think there’s a trail effect in Sapphire. Otherwise I’ve always liked experimenting with stacking video layers and using things like the DMN/Profound Transfer plugin (https://www.profoundeffects.com/products/transfer/) to mix the layers in interesting ways.
In my personal experience with these things, the hallucinations we typically see on screen aren’t really anything like a real one – you can pretty much do whatever you want.
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I’m actually quite surprised about Avid’s telegraphing of the features in Media Composer 3. Certainly a change from Avid of old (well, not that old) that wouldn’t comment on anything ahead of release.
Uncompressed HD (even only 8bit) on the Mojo DX is quite good to see (although I’m pretty happy with DNxHD).
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I feel your pain – I have found the same thing, coming from Avid. In Avid, as things are all captured or managed in native Avid codecs, it does, in my experience, offer better and more efficient realtime performance.
One of the things I really miss from Avid and haven’t yet found an alternative for in Avid is the ability to play through complex effects in non-realtime – For example in building a layered effect with a glow, colour effect and warp or something. Avid won’t play them all realtime perhaps, but if you hit play when editing the effect it will at least play through the effect and show you what’s going on. In FCP on the same sort of effect I have trouble even moving across the effect frame by frame. Obviously the complexity of the effects is a huge part of it, but I’ve never known Avid not to be able to give me a reasonable preview in that scenario.
An FCP reseller I was talking to the other day gave me the ‘and with FCP you can mix all sorts of formats on the timeline and play them all in realtime without any rendering’ – I laughed at him, that certainly hasn’t been our experience, I believe it is technically possible in some circumstances, but certainly isn’t the rule.
We are working with 1080i50 ProRes 422HQ material of internal and external SATA drives arrays. There is probably room for improvement on disk speed, but the should certainly be able to manage it. We can play realtime DNxHD 220 on the same system with a variety of realtime effects.
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[Russell Lasson] “Open the activity monitor in the utilities folder. Sort by processing power and see if some other application or task is eating up your processors.”
So I did this when I was trying to save in Color (where it ‘beachballs’ for about 30-60 seconds every time) – it showed no huge processor usage, but it did show Color as ‘not responding’ which went away after the beachball stopped and the Color save progress bar came up.
I have experienced similar on another Mac Pro, also with FCP. It’s most frustrating when it happens when trying to do something seemingly so simple, like moving down the timeline, or clicking on a dropdown option in a dialogue box or something.
I’ll look into DiskWarrior or the other application that was suggested, and will upgrade to Leopard when Avid supports it.
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I did look at DiskWarrior recently, but as someone who’s not that familiar with OS X it’s really hard to actually figure out what it is for and how necessary it is – ‘rebuilding directories’ means nothing useful to me really, doesn’t make a lot of sense in any context I have about what a directory is.
In a month or so (hopefully) when Avid Media Composer 3 ships, we’ll be rebuilding the system with Leopard also.
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Negative on both counts.
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We can capture 1080p ProRes 422 HQ directly to a LaCie FW800 drive, which has an almost identical bitrate to DNxHD 220 I think.
Only way to know really is to try. Capturing is much harder on drives that playback, also.
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No Leopard at all (it shipped with 10.4.10, including upgrade disc for Leopard).
We’re restricted to 10.4.11 for Avid support.
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[Russell Lasson] “Open the activity monitor in the utilities folder. Sort by processing power and see if some other application or task is eating up your processors.”
I don’t think it’s that, because the system is still responsive and other applications run just fine, it’s only the current app (typically FCP or Color) that is hanging.
I will pop open the activity monitor next time though and see what the processor ulitisation is like.