Floh Peters
Forum Replies Created
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[Marc Morel] “Searched the posts, and although this feature has been requested and promised, I’m running v. 1.6.2 and can’t find it. What am I missing?”
On Export, it is at the bottom right of the export window; it is only available if you don´t export self-contained or by ref clips, since by their nature by reference or self-contained clips cannot display timecode.
On Playback, you can find it either in Project Settings->Real Time, or if you display the extended viewer prefs (click on the oval in the upper right hand corner of the Source or Record viewer).
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[Jay Rudin] “I did a Mac migration from my Macbook pro with OS 10.5.8 to a new MBP with OS 10.6.6 and M100 Producer 12.5.1 won’t open on the new Mac, says OS is too new. Anyone know what M100 Producer I have to upgrade to to make it work?”
I think either Suite 1 or Suite 1.5 were the first releases to support MacOSX 10.6. In any case it would not hurt to upgrade to the latest version.
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[Robert L. Kopf] “In the case of the Kona Ki Pro, what’s involved in moving the “captured” media to the Media 100 or into something like Final Cut or DVD Studio Pro? Does one simply copy the files into some directory and then they just magically appear?”
The KI Pro can be mounted as a harddrive on your Mac. Simply copy over the media from the Ki to your local harddrive, and drag or import it into Media 100 from there then.
[Robert L. Kopf] “So how do I decide on which ProRes variant to use?”
ProRes 422 for “normal” footage, ProRes 422HQ for e.g. difficult chromakey footage or for stuff that needs heavy colorcorrection. Coming from BetaSP or other analog sources the “regular” 422 variant is more than enough in 99,9% of all cases.
[Robert L. Kopf] “It would seem that copying bins of shots made while using the laptop Media 100 systems would be fairly trivial over the Gb Ethernet LAN, and would mostly eliminate the problems of waiting for copying over Firewire or whatever.”
Remember that you not only need to copy the bins, but also the associated media directories. But yes, it should be pretty quick over Gig ethernet. If you want you even could acquire over Gigabit ethernet onto the media drive of your stationary edit system (mount the HD over FileSharing and then use it as your media drive).
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[Robert L. Kopf] “Going by my present usage (which has been running 8.2.3 on G4 systems with P6000-type boards), isn’t going to provide me much perspective on this. I’ve been creating long form videos from tape sources, utilizing practically no effects, nor doing much else that requires rendering at all. In some cases, I have moved the Media 100 files to Bitvice and Purifier, and to DVD Studio Pro to make DVDs. But in those cases, I’ve been doing that work on newer, multicore Macs, which is probably what I’ll continue to do unless they work faster in the background on this new Mac Pro. Having said that, I am aware that I just don’t know what new processes and workflow issues will arise. “
Media 100 is pretty well optimized for Multi-CPU and Multicore usage on the newer software versions. So more cores will give you better performance. But of course if there´s not much to render at all you won´t see big differences. Encoding in BitVice definitely will benefit from the extra cores as well, but again it depends on how often you are going to need it to make it worth the money.
[Robert L. Kopf] “One of the latest bottom-end Mac Pros can be had for $1200. That combined with some kind of component I/O, an external drive, and a copy of Media 100 wouldn’t be a bad camera recorder package for not very much cash. And of course when not shooting, those Media 100/Mac systems could be used for other things. Rough edits, shot selection, etc. could be done on them, even before the media gets moved to the “real” systems. And it would seem that over a Gb Ethernet LAN, the file copying would be fast.”
Right. If having this thing mobile is not an issue then you would have a pretty good setup there.
[Robert L. Kopf] “I need to educate myself on things like which format to capture to, how to move the media files into Media 100, etc. Got any leads on good sources for perspectives on this sort of thing? It seems that practically everything I see is focused on Final Cut.”
Codec wise, we do most of our work in some ProRes variant these days, which gives great quality for reasonable data rates. It can be used natively in Media 100, and you are pretty open to the rest of the “world”, since the ProRes decoder is free with QuickTime anyway.
Regarding files and compression: most stuff that can work with QuickTime files is more or less compatible with Media 100. Not all codecs are supported natively, but nearly everything can be transcoded to work with Media 100. -
[Robert L. Kopf] “1.) Without going into all the myriad options and choices, what is your recommendation as to I/O hardware and CPU configuration? I am leaning towards using a current 6-core Mac Pro, but would consider using a base model quad-core, if it will prove sufficient for ordinary tasks. For I/O, I would probably get a Matrox MX02 Rack with Max.”
Of course it depends. If money does not matter, get the biggest, fastest Mac you can buy. But usually money does matter, so I personally would recommend looking at the Quad core. Probably you should look at your current usage and decide if you wait for renders to finish often right now.
The Matrox MXO2 Rack is interesting, but you should be aware that the integration between Media 100 and the Aja cards is a little bit better than with the Matrox and BlackMagic devices. If you do need the MPEG4 encoder on the Matrox there is not much alternative to the MXO line, but if you “only” need solid I/O options I would suggest having a look at the Kona LHi, which should be cheaper than the Matrox.[Robert L. Kopf] “2.) If I do upgrade myself to a current Media 100 system, I will also consider forsaking tape as a recording medium. But rather than dump my existing analog cameras, I would consider using a Macbook or Macbook Pro, along with a Matrox MX02 LE, to just record the outputs (video and XLR audio) from the cameras directly into the laptops running Media 100. Naturally, I’d connect external drives to the laptops for storing the media. Has anyone done this? I’m wondering if I can do this, then move the files to a “real” Media 100 system.”
You definitely can do this and move the files to a “real” system. The question is if this setup is flexible enough for your shoots. Laptop with MXO2 LE and external drives sounds like a lot of stuff to carry around and to set up for recordings. If you are recording in a studio all the time (or at least close to a power outlet) this probably works fine. If you are out in the field, then probably something like a Firestore (for DV-based cameras) or an Ki Pro Mini (SDI) or Ki Pro (SDI and Component inputs) from Aja or something similar is more compact.
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MacOS files contain 2 parts, the resource fork and the data fork, as far as I understand. Media 100 needs both parts (unmodified) to actually relink back to the files, since some metadata about the files is stored in the resource forks, and if these metadata are not there Media 100 cannot “see” the files during a relink attempt. If both parts are there and undamaged Media 100 will automatically relink to the correct files. If not, there is not much you can do about that, except to manually re-edit the timeline or maybe to export an XML of the timeline and to manually add the filepaths for the files into it, and then to do a “Update Media from XML” to get the files back in.
If you need help feel free to post here or to contact me directly.Floh
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Reacquire from different formats is a tricky task. Do you want to reacquire clips only, or a timeline? If it is clips only, you can export your bin as a PowerLog file, and reimport it in the new format. Then you should be able to reacquire the clips.
If you need a timeline, one thing you could try is to export it as an XML, then look into the XML under the “timebase” command (e.g. in TextEdit.app) and to replace it with the needed framerate (which probably is 29.97, but you can check that if you export a timeline in your needed target format). Then set the width and height to the new resolution 1920 x 1080. Make sure that you change the samplecharacteristics and the timebase for your timeline as well as for all clips (most likely best to do a find->Replace all there).
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[ralph conradt] “mport same video with iMovie and Share (there is a sophisticated term) as DV (same as M100) and the result is a DVD via Toast that has sparkling colors, true blacks. “
Hmmm, DV streams created by Media 100 Producer and by iMovie should be identical. Not sure what is wrong there. There is only one thing I can imagine: does your version of Media 100 (Producer) has the “Video 16-235/Computer 0-255” setting at the bottom of the File->Export window? I cannot remember in which version this has been introduced, but if you have this option and if you select “Computer 0-255” for your exported DV stream you should be good to go. If this option is not in your export window in Media 100, you should think about updating to a later version (which also means that you have to upgrade to OSX 10.5, though). -
[ralph conradt] “I tried the suggestion of exporting as DV Stream, with only slightly enhanced results.”
Okay, what is your actual problem? Black levels? Color saturation? Motion artifacts? Compression artifacts?
Have you tried the DV stream you exported from Media 100 in iDVD? Does this give better results?
Do you have DVD Studio Pro? You should be able to use the DV stream in DVDSP with okay results also.
I never used Toast to do the actual encoding, so I am not sure how well it works for this kind of tasks. -
Hi Ralph,
BitVice still is one of the best MPEG2 encoders I know. But you should be able to get okay-looking DVDs from Toast also:
In Media 100, export your whole timeline as Other: DV Stream. In the “Options”: NTSC or PAL and aspect ratio depending on your source. Field Dominance: Lower, Color Range “Computer (0-255). This should give you a “regular” DV file, which as far as I know should be usable by Toast. If Toast cannot encode this correctly then Toast is missing some of the most basic functionality it should have.