[Dylan Reeve]

I’m always interested in learning about a new plugin or two.

Also maybe give Scott at EditBlog an email, he’s got a popular and useful blog and might like to take a look.

[Dylan Reeve]

I don’t have any pets, but my then-one-year-old son switched off my edit suite twice once when we was sitting in with me once.

Not so bad, as hitting the power switch on the box gracefully shuts it down, so the project was saved as it went down, but it was slightly panic-inducing as the project was a 48HOUR film, due to be delivered by no later than 7pm that day (it was late afternoon when he was visiting).

He’s three now, and no longer obsessed with the power button, but he really does enjoy loading tapes in the HD1400, and other places (it’s hard to get a DVCPRO HD tape out of J3 deck).

Of course, in a year or so I can train him to be my assistant… I’m not sure a dog is going to manage that… New tricks and all 🙂

[Dylan Reeve]

Pretty much what Michael said.

There are some potential issues with a precomposed fill channel in doing it that way. It certainly can be done and I have used the method to export a Avid-built baseline key to be usable in a linear edit suite (although in that case I actually played them out to tape as a fill and matte signal).

[Dylan Reeve]

[Don Walker] “Question 2: If Final Cut died on the vine… where would you go?”

I can’t imagine that a product like FCP with the userbase it has could ever be simply killed off. If it were sold (which seems unlikely now of course) it would presumably because Apple didn’t want to devote the resources to a very specialist market with very specific demands, and whoever bought it would presumably want to be devoted to that market, or ideally already would be.

I haven’t really jumped into FCP with everything yet anyway, so for me it wouldn’t be a huge problem, I’d carry on with Avid. Otherwise for many users Premiere Pro seems like the best alternative (I haven’t used Premiere in years, but Ive heard fairly positive reports about PPro).

[Dylan Reeve]

[walter biscardi] “I have to agree with this assessment. Using Media Manager to “save space” is not what it’s designed to do. It’s designed to archive an entire project or move a project from one system to another.

Using it to clean up a drive that only has 500MB left shows poor media management on your end. You need a much larger array.”

A fair call… But boy, a media manager that to all outward appearances seems likely to be able to do this in fact does the opposite and sabotages the sequence you were trying to protect? Aiiieee.

For what it’s worth, no matter how much space I have available, it never seems to be enough… The data will expand to fill the space available, or something like that 🙂

[Dylan Reeve]

In many ways I was kind of hoping it was true. In one of the iterations of the rumour I’d heard Grass Valley was a likely buyer.

I think FCS could really benefit from the mentorship of an organisation that has a heavily vested interest in professional video and broadcast. At the moment I tend to think that it sort of lacks that. There’s so many things FCP does well, and so much promise, but quite a few big and sort of fundamental things that just sort of get ignored.

–Edited to add:
I saw in that article it said, The report continues to explain that Apple took 49 per cent of the US professional editing marketing (Avid took just 22 per cent) last year, and the article it is quoting says, According to research specialist SCRI, in 2007 Apple took 49% of the US professional editing marketing with Avid trailing on just 22%.

I was trying to figure out what that actually means, it seems like people might read it as FCP has 49% market share, while Avid has 22%, which seems unlikely. But I assume it’s talking about sales, 49% of units shipped were FCP, 22% were Avid. But then what does the ‘US professional market’ mean? Are they surveying a professional market, or assuming that the product is only being purchased by the professional market?

I may never know, because it looks like the report it was based on costs more to read that it would cost to buy Final Cut Studio (the report is $1,450).

[Dylan Reeve]

I’m sort of dreading this. I haven’t yet done a lot of media intensive work in FCP, or attempted to recapture an FCP originated project. But my recollections from using FCP quite a few years ago for a bigger project aren’t great.

Currently we’re editing in Avid and finishing in FCP, which is working fairly well because we’re doing all the media management and timeline capture prep in Avid first. In reading this post I thought to myself, perhaps it would be easier to export the sequence to Avid and then use Avid to prepare it for recapture before sending it back to FCP. But I’ve never tried anything of the sort, and who knows how much important information would survive the journey.

The lack of leading preroll thing will always be a problem, but some systems will make it easier than others. In Avid you can crash record the clip with as little head on it as you can manage and if you get enough of the clip it will automatically relink.

I think improved media management and a media database of some sort should be way up near the top of Apple’s development list. Being unable to reliably recapture a sequence is totally unacceptable in the serious professional market I think. Being unable to relink to available media based on reel and timecode is a huge negative as well.

[Dylan Reeve]

When doing this, you may want to drop the pre-roll time slightly. You will miss the beginning first few seconds of each clip (due to preroll) – although not too short, or you’ll have trouble if you need to recapture (for online or data recovery).

Also, you will run into problems if there are clips that are very short (less than or not much more than preroll time) as Avid gets confused trying to cue for the clip or the one following.

Also be careful of time rollovers – when timecode leaps backward numerically on a tape. This is most common when a shoot goes past midnight (actually rolling a take from 23:59:59:00 to 00:00:00:00 can be mighty troublesome), or when a tape is used one day, and then again the next. Or, in fun cases when the tapes have bars pre-recorded on them.

In general capturing for the offline is easy, recapturing for online can require a little more attention to detail, but it’s not too much hassle.

[Dylan Reeve]

I love that people are still doing serious cutting with 10 year old suites. Man those things returned on their investment.

I second the eBay suggestion. If you can’t find the part you’re looking for, check out some other older Avid bits, there are a bunch of sellers who are basically Avid wreckers, if they don’t have it listed they may still have it available, contact them and ask. I know we’ve picked up old Avid boards that way.

[Dylan Reeve]

I don’t think you will want to unlink before changing the Tape ID… If you unlink the clip then change the clip Tape ID the media will remain unchanged and the relink won’t work. I think.

I believe when I’ve done this I’ve been able to Modify the Source without having to unlink first (some other clip modification do require unlinked clips – such as altering tracks).