Erik Lindahl
Forum Replies Created
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Speed-changes are big no-no from my experience in terms of media management or exporting of EDL or XML files.
Best solution is to remove the speed-effects on the original sequence, re-export the XML-file and re-import it / re-link the media. After this is done you can redo the speed-effects.
I’ve pulled my share of hairs with this bugg in FCP and I really hope FCP 7 does a better jobb with it.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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All I wanted was everything that was broken to get fixed and every broken promise to be finally met.
Exactly what I’m primarily interested in. It’s all nice with new features but even now, at version 3 of Motion, I don’t trust the application. It’s erratic and / or slow behaviour is a huge problem for me to take the application serious (hence why I wonder when Next-gen Shake will come out – After Effects deals with animation / compositing very well yet Shake is a true compositor).I’m not asking for them to re-invent the wheel either… The MacOSX dev-team is really getting things right at the moment given MacOSX isn’t perfect, they move now in a very good line with Snow Leopard – refining, fixing and optimizing while stil giving a few hints of innovation.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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Well I mean Apple does do good things, not question about that, I just wonder sometimes about their focus and “how they think” about things sometimes. With the advent of Motion and Sound Track Pro (two from the ground built applications by Apple I beilive), Final Cut Pro seems to have trailed a bit behind. My “hope” a few years back was these applications would gain and share technology from one another byt evidently this hasn’t happened.
With Motion and Sound Track Pro the hardware footprint was raised ALOT given the apps also did a lot we might not have thought of doing in real-time before (STP vs Logic was however very questionable, but that’s a different story all together). Never the less, I figured Apple wouldn’t dare push FCP into this area seeing it had a very well established user group and making it require the best of the best in hardware to even run would kill the product for many people.
Still, now they made the moved to the “intel only” area which isn’t a huge surprise but the evolution has been quite modest to make this move in my opinion. What surprises me more is Apple them selves develop all the technology these applications run on and still they suffer the same issues most apps / environments do. The whole “intel” transition surprises me a bit as well since Apple has the power to control both hardware and software yet some of the early intel systems where crippled at birth with a built in GPU (I think the original MacBook was 4 times faster on CPU compilations but somewhat slower on GPU operations than it’s iBook predecessor).
Now with Snow Leopard, OpenCL and all the other modern technologies it brings… The whole thing feel a bit un-thought out…
– The MacOSX Dev Team in April 2005 brings us features like Spot Light
– The MacOSX Dev Team in October 2007 brings us features like QuickLook and iChat Theatre
– Final Cut Studio Dev Team in July 2009 embrace the above technologies more or lessAlso, just looking internally into the studio package Motion and Final Cut still don’t even share filters and effects or “base” abilities such as slow-motion and time-remapping. Back in the day when DVD production was “hot” I asked an Apple rep why QuickTime had such a SHOCKING MPEG2 playback support where DVD Studio and the DVD Player where amazing at it. Share resources and solve the problems. The comment was “licensing issues”, well apparently those where solved by open source projects like VLC which I now use to review copies to go on air… Using Audio-filters in Final Cut Pro is simply a joke in version 6 (might be better in 7 but I haven’t tested things there yet). And before people go “but I you tried it on AVID?” I really don’t give a rats arse if AVID sucks cause I want my preferred editing environment to be the best it can be and that is Final Cut Pro. And Apple has proven they CAN solve problems I have today but they just don’t go the full mile.
But yeah, I might be hoping for too much. It’s like when I asked a DVD Studio Pro rep at IBC 2006 I think it was why they couldn’t develop a QuickTime review and interactive feature for DVD productions (i.e. you export a QT movie from DVDSP with all the menu’s and media and place on a server where you either just view the production or you can make notes and send them back to the editor / producer). “Awesome idéa, but who would develop that?”. One of the QuickTime guys was there also and I just shook my head and said “well you both work for the same company, talk to one-another”. Funny thing is Adobe has added a similar feature like this to Encore recently…
Drifting a bit off topic yet still not – has Final Cut Studio 3 become better on the integration and system usage area, those are my main questions and perhaps Snow Leopard will give us a surprise here.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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Given Compressor as far as I know doesn’t support proper flash output, Episode does with one “but”. It requires it’s output video size to be dividable by 8. So say a normal 1024×576 isn’t an issue but if you’re developing a video-file for a site with an odd aspect it will be.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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De-interlacing is something I don’t do much but you do have a lot of options in Episode to handle it. I’ve had quite varied results there.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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Codecs and why Automatic Duck isn’t for everyone
Right… Try a comp with 8-bit, 10-bit and animation as your original media. It will render ALOT faster with animation as your base codec. I haven’t done any resent tests but I’d imagine a 2X speed increase with animation still. That’s the first problem. And I notice this even on an 8-core MacPro with 16GB of RAM and an 8-disk RAID 5 array esp. when moving to larger HD projects. The second one lays in the gamma-rendering issues that can occur depending on how you’ve set up your system. But going Uncompressed > Animation > Uncompressed always works and renders perfectly.The above are two reason why Automatic Duck isn’t always THE solution. On complex projects you’ll lose time due to the simple fact rendering is bogged down from going with another codec than animation. I think the main issue of rendering slowing down is there is the YUV to RGB conversion, but I can’t say for sure. This is also why I sort of get my hopes up with the ProRes 4444 RGB codec…
The second part is depending on what you do it what stage of your post-production. Since Automatic Duck links to your original media, any effects of filters applied in FCP don’t follow through hence you still have to patch and stich media when going the Automatic Duck route IF you do stuff like Color Correction in Final Cut Pro.
Just making people clear of the downsides of a tool like Automatic Duck. For some it might be The Tool, I thought it would be for me (we even bought it). But the above limitations makes it tricky for me to use often and it hasn’t even been installed on our latest system. For us, most effects we do are on a “per clip” basis and the clip often travels from FCP, might get a CC, to After Effects and into Mocha for tracking and rotoscoping and later back to FCP. Here, again, the “complete original media route” isn’t always the way to go either.
If there was a way to “round-trip” things like CC would still work but as far as I know there isn’t one.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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How does AE perform with ProRes compared to Animation footage?
Working with Uncompressed 8 or 10-bit is very inefficient. Also, I thought Automatic duck would be an “awesome” tool for us but I constantly run it to issues with it since it only links to the original media. IF ProRes is as efficient as Animation to work with in AE it might be a solution for me now actually, otherwise I’m stuck with my manual exporting “hell”.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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Episode Pro from Telesteam is the encoding tool for MacOSX at the moment. You can create workflows to it via Compressor if you want also. It supports far more formats in and out including better filter support. It’s not flawless but does a solid jobb.
https://www.telestream.net/episode/overview.htm
There are rumors of a new Compressor / Episode / Engine competitor on the horizon, we shall see what IBC brings.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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Very nice! If only we used AVCHD… 😉
How’s the CPU load for general operations, say a few CC filters?
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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A native 64-bit app doesn’t necessarily have to be better written for multiple CPU’s than a 32-bit app. It will however on the x86 architecture most likely be slightly faster but primarily it can address tons of memory. This is return is something you want for multi-core since each core can essentially “eat” more RAM for it’s jobb.
The ProRes White Paper can be found here:
https://images.apple.com/finalcutstudio/docs/Apple_ProRes_White_Paper_July_2009.pdfIf Snow Leopard gives general applications a boost on a multi-core system that would be terrific but I think you as an app-developer will very much have to write your apps with this in mind. Snow Leopard just gives you some help on the way.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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