Erik Lindahl
Forum Replies Created
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Doesn’t Final Cut Pro still need to do a render before final out-put? I’ve had sequences state “full quality” but after a render it still looks better. Do layouts to tape work when you’re using the RT-engine?
Sounds awesome if it does but I thought this still was somewhat a limit of how FCP operates.
Also have you experienced FCP7 more efficient when working with RT-effects in 10-bit? I’ve been editing a 1080i50 ProRes 422 HQ sequence during the day in FCP 6 and even a 3-way CC gets the green-bars (and the resolution is lower during playback).
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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Blurry footage in Final Cut Pro can be due to a number of things:
1. The clip has something wrong with it’s attributes and FCP has issues interpreting it / playing it back
2. The clip is set to a different field order than the sequence and FCP sometimes then enforces a de-interlace.
3. You are going to a lower quality codec. Uncompressed holds higher color resolution than DV, sharp colors will look blurry or blocky in a DV-sequence that otherwise look good uncompressed.For me no 2 is the most common issue since I always work uncompressed.
In regards to After Effects that’s another “fun” story… The matter of the fact is uncompressed video stores data in “YUV” where AE works in RGB (as does most compositing software). This is much like the printing world needs to deal with “CMYK” vs RGB files as well. To deal with this a conversion is made where AE will most of the time does this slightly different than QuickTime player or Final Cut Pro. The best way to maintain gamma and color between the two is using animation as your intermediate codec, exporting your video from FCP to Animation files.
I’ve done some tests with AE and 10-bit uncompressed files but always see a slight shift between the two applications on way or another. You can minimize them with the use of color profiles, but the shifts are still there. This is very frustrating since using native 10-bit files would simplify my workflow A LOT at work.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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According to Telestream one Mac can control multiple Pipeliens and you connect the Pipeline to the LAN and not directly to a Mac. As of version 5.1 of Episode I think Windows Machines can control a Pipeline also.
Note I’m just passing on the word, I don’t have hands on experience with the hardware. Depending on your needs it or a custom solution with xServes might be the way to go.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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When you get these error try as Chris states to shift effect order (sometimes this can give you a different result but it can remove bugs). The other option is to shift the rendering pression to 8-bit instead of 10-bit or higher.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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I thought Red Giant software had the “feature” of “buy one, use for all” as in buy one plug-in and use it for all host-apps. I might be wrong in this however…
I’m also looking for other alternatives to the Keylight plugin in After Effects. It often does the trick but not always and Keylight looks at a keying jobb different to Primate if I’m not misstaken (i.e. the outcome of a key can vary).
Primate for Motion vs “the real deal” from Red Giant is hard to compare. The Motion plug-in was built for speed (realtime keying). I would also say depending on what you do, the choice of keyer or application / workflow can also vary a lot. DV Matte from dvGarage has proven to be very impressive before and it’s only 199 dollars.
https://www.dvgarage.com/prod/prod.php?prod=dvmattep3
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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VirtualVTR I actually also saw in an automated demo at IBC. However it was there just a part of a larger system but it was the in/out software used.
I thought the Pipeline-boxes supported SD Uncompressed but that might be me being overly optimistic? 🙂
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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You got me there, I’ve only read about the box and seen it at IBC but supposedly it works well.
The idea is that they sit on your network (Gigabith of course) where you access from any computer. The exact requirements in “real life” and what actually works and not I can’t say. But you set the box up for the given codec you want and record to I guess ideally a network san of some sort. According to their site a single Mac can control multiple Pipelines also which can be quite efficient.
Telestream does offer some limited literature you might want to read:
https://www.telestream.net/pipeline/literature.htm
Sounds pretty nifty given the 10K per unit isn’t cheap it might solve the issue more elegant than mixing with xServes (xserver + kona 3 boards will be hard to get to the 10K mark but a pipeline dual HD gives you two SDI-HD pipelines so to speak). It all depends on your needs.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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1080i50 (1920×1080) is generally your safest bet since it will cross-convert to either 1080p25 or 720p25. 720p (1280×720) has it’s pros being a smaller yet quite acceptable HD format and if mixing with video shot in 720p this might be the best route to go. As others have stated however I’d check your delivery format before setting a standard.
1080p25 is what I do all my HD work in now to be set for the future. Still all advertising in Sweden is SD PAL 16×9 FHA unless you’re doing spots for the cinemas which is 1080p25.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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Would a Pipeline Quad be an alternative solution perhaps or do you have specific needs with the xserves / AJA hardware?
https://www.telestream.net/pipeline/overview.htm
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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I can experiment a bit more at work tomorrow but I stumbled across this as well when we upgraded to CS4 at the studio. We’ve got an 8-core MacPro as well. I however managed to sort the problem out – it was either video-out put related or the resolution / zoom level factor bugging out. Seeing you don’t use a video-card on the machine it does sound a bit odd.
I will also be putting a Radeon 4870 card in our studio machine shortly, let’s hope that’s not the bad apple in the basket so to speak.
Seeing there is an Adobe rep monitoring this two features in regards to the PREVIEW of AE that would help a lot are:
1. An option to only use the multi-core rendering on output to file. It can cause some very odd behaviour when dealing with RAM previews.
2. An option to display “Rendering…” while rendering. This would really make clients ask less / get less worried when their footage is crawing at 1 frame per second 🙂
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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