[Eric Hansen]

hey dan

i tried to watch your videos, but it looks like they’ve been removed.

the first still with pixelization “jaggies” – all video DSLRs have a bit of this because of the line skipping that is used to capture video from the imager (2MP video from a 18MP image) but yours looks worse than most. i don’t use MPEG Streamclip or DNxHD, so i can’t comment on that.

your second still with the blockyness – looks like H.264 compression. MPEG compression doesnt do well on slow gradients of dark objects, especially things like walls.

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Eric Hansen – The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com

[Eric Hansen]

Ryan writes: Specifically speaking about hard drives, no matter what brand, what make, or how much it’s praised…all hard drives will fail! I hope you have a raid configured for data protection in mind 🙂

i couldnt agree more. with hard drives, best and cheapest don’t work together. the best are the server/enterprise drives. but these cost 2-3 times more than their consumer-level cousins. but they are designed to run 24/7 for 5 years minimum. consumer-level drives aren’t. this is especially important if you are RAIDing these drives together. now that drive manufacturers are “green-washing” their cheapest drives, they are making them incompatible with RAID configurations. ie, if you’re hard drive spins down to save power, it will destabilize the RAID.

i think you’ll get some good suggestions over in the SAN forum. most of us over there have worked (and had failures) with every hard drive and configuration under the sun.

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Eric Hansen – The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com

[Eric Hansen]

what programs have you tried? which ones crash?

i’ve never shot with the GH1, but if it’s making MTS files, you should be able to use MPEG Streamclip. i would suggest converting to ProRes. let me know if it does or doesn’t work.

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Eric Hansen – The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com

[Eric Hansen]

Tomi writes: The footage and audio will be slowed down ever so slightly.

are you sure? according to your description, you’re conforming 30.00fps to 23.98 in Cinema Tools, which just changes the playback flag on the Quicktime file from 30.00 to 23.98. this will slow down the footage by more than 20%. if you use Cinema Tools to conform 30.00 to 29.97, this would be “ever so slightly.”

like Lance, i’ve done a bunch of tests using similar techniques and programs. my personal favorite is Twixtor, but on really fast footage it can fall apart quickly. any method will require a close inspection of the results to make sure you’re not getting any unwanted artifacts, blends, etc. nothing is perfect for this conversion and unfortunately theres no Automatic button for this. i just watched a documentary DVD the other day that was definitely made from a 23.98 film print, but most of the source material was DV cameras shot at 60i. there were the warping “waves” typical of Twixtor along with other problems. so even projects with enough budget for “film-out” have trouble with this process.

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Eric Hansen – The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com

[Eric Hansen]

yup. i tried putting them together with a cross dissolve. tried putting one above the other with a cross dissolve on the top. and i tried just dropping the opacity on the top one instead of a cross dissolve. same result every time.

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Eric Hansen – The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com

[Eric Hansen]

it could definitely be a FCP issue. when i installed my first Ethernet-based SAN, we had capturing issues. whenever the capture hit 2GB, Final Cut would stop capturing. exactly 2GB. i was stumped, Small Tree was stumped. we switched the capture systems over to NFS sharing instead of AFP and the problem went away. that was on FCP 6.0.6 i believe.

the next Ethernet SAN i installed was all FCP 7 clients. no 2GB limit on captures over AFP. some Leopard, some Snow Leopard, but all FCP 7. that’s why i think its a bug in Final Cut and not an OS thing.

i’m not a dentist, but i think it might have something to do with Final Cut’s prefetch. when you’re capturing, Final Cut has to make sure that all that storage you’re about to use is available. i believe with AFP, Final Cut can prefetch, but with NFS it can’t. so when the prefetch wasnt working with AFP, it would just stop capturing at 2GB. with NFS, it doesnt have the ability to prefetch, so it doesn’t, and there’s no error. there might be a similar thing going on with long timelines/quicktimes. i must reiterate that i don’t know much about this stuff and i really have no basis for this conjecture. but based on this previous capturing problem, i have to think that it’s related to Final Cut. Final Cut is used to using local storage. to Final Cut, even Xsan is local storage. but using ethernet with AFP or NFS is a totally new thing for Final Cut. i can imagine we’re pushing this now very old FCP code.

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Eric Hansen – The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com

[Eric Hansen]

hey matt

you definitely know more than me on this, but i just want to clarify what you wrote. the switch just has jumbo frames enabled or not. you don’t set the size on the switch. i think they support packets over 9000. i also believe that all switches you guys ship have Jumbo enabled by default, which wasnt always the case. since having it on causes no harm to standard 1500 byte packets.

jacob,

the important setting is at the computer and server. 8100 is a magical number for packet efficiency. Steve at Small Tree can go into this further. but you need to have the computer and server use the same setting, otherwise you could get dropped packets. every computer you have hooked into this switch (or at least in this VLAN) must have Jumbo frames turned on and set to 8100.

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Eric Hansen – The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com

[Eric Hansen]

I was having dinner last night with a friend who’s a blogging editor like myself. he said there’s 2 things he hates when he’s researching a new product or workflow on different sites and blogs.

1. no one ever talks about the problems they encounter because it either makes the writer look dumb, or the product less awesome. he used the example of 35mm adapters for video cameras. no one wrote that they looked like jittery crap when shot handheld. since that made the footage look bad, no one wanted to post footage like that on their blogs. i think the aliasing problem on the 5D/7D is a good example of this too. the camera is so awesome, why would you want to talk about the shortcomings.

2. unanswered questions and problems on forums. i’m guilty of this for sure. when i figure out the answer to a question i posted on a forum, a lot of times i forget to update the forum post for those with the same problem in the future.

so onto my solution to my current problem.

i have a lot of different components with different internal latencies that i’m trying to play in-sync. the biggest problem is that the Denon receiver has a big processing delay on its HDMI input. since we have a Kona LHi card with HDMI out for this purpose, we wanted to find a solution without buying a new card. so:

1. Final Cut is set with a 6 frame offset. this brings the canvas and the HDMI projector into sync.
2. FSI monitor’s processing setting is “Noise Reduction” this maximizes it’s delay which matches the Denon’s 6 frame delay
3. adding a digital delay to the analog XLR outputs on the Kona LHi which feeds a Mackie Mixer for audio monitoring. since the speakers and headphone attached to the mixer will be used more than the speakers attached to the Denon receiver, getting this combo to work was critical. the digital delay is set to 206ms. yes that’s not equal to 6 frames at 23.98fps, but that my be due to differences in distance (20ft to theater speakers, 3 ft to KRK monitors). now the KRKs monitors are in sync at the editing position to the theater speakers, which are in sync to the video.

i wonder if audio delay is a bigger problem? i’ve never run into this issue on other systems that i’ve installed, but i’ve also never had to sync 2 different audio components in the same chain. most of the FCP systems i’ve installed have between 0 and 4 frame offsets. since this was 6, maybe that’s why it’s so jarring. so, onto posting about this “problem” on my blog.

thanks

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Eric Hansen – The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com

[Eric Hansen]

nice!

i made a lot of mistakes last year. my experiences really enforced the fact that Support is EVERYTHING. but this was probably the biggest lesson i learned:

The time spent researching and testing a product and its support before the sale, is much cheaper than the time spent problem solving, calling, emailing, pulling your hair out and ultimately returning a product that you didn’t spend the time researching and testing beforehand.

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Eric Hansen – The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com

[Eric Hansen]

ok, i spent some more time on this swapping out different HDMI monitors, and trying different frame offset settings in Final Cut. this is where i am and i want to know if i’m interpreting this stuff correctly. thanks in advance.

the frame offset feature in Final Cut seems to delay the timeline and the canvas monitor when you use higher offsets to match any delay introduced by the capture card or monitor. just to see, i set the offset to 30 frames. the cursor in the timeline and the canvas video are delayed a second after i press the space bar. during this though, the audio never changes. it does make FCP feel sluggish though, which i guess is the point.

the Flanders monitor has different delays depending on the processing setting. i got this info from FSI support. with the “Normal” processing setting, i have to set Final Cut’s frame offset to 6 to match the monitor. if i set it to “Fast” processing, i have to use a 4 frame offset in Final Cut. FSI support says that all LCD panels have an inherent delay and will never be as fast as a CRT.

all HDMI devices seem to introduce a delay of varying length. a Dell 24″ computer monitor with HDMI input needs a 1 frame delay from Final Cut. and the Denon receiver/projector combo we’re using in this theater needs a 6 frame offset.

this is where the audio delay is a problem. since the Denon/projector combo introduces a 6 frame delay, the audio through the receiver is delayed 6 frames to match the video. but, it matches the video on all points, including the FSI monitor and canvas monitor. i ran a bunch of different material through to make sure that the projector video and Denon audio were in sync. so the problem is that Final Cut doesn’t delay the audio when you use a frame offset. so the XLR analog audio out of the Kona card is 6 frames ahead of everything else. half of the time that this theater is used, the editor is either using headphones or KRK monitors running through a Mackie mixer. so i’m now thinking that i need to add an outboard audio delay between the Kona XLR outs and the Mackie mixer.

does any of this seem correct? AJA has told me that all outputs on the Kona LHi are in sync with each other. FSI has told me theres an inherent delay in their panels, and Denon has told me that all HDMI processors will have some amount of delay. what i’m trying to figure out is how the frame offset effects all this, and in the end, how to get all the different components in this theater to be in sync.

thanks. since this is now a frame offset question, i’m thinking i should have posted it in the FCP n00b forum…

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Eric Hansen – The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com