Gary Askham
Forum Replies Created
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video
That’s about as concise as you can make it.
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
I don’t think you’d notice any kind of speed increase by upgrading your mac. There are however a few other things you could do.
Upgrading your graphics card is one. There aren’t that many graphics cards that are supported though so do your research first. I think the ATI Radeon HD 4870 might work with your system (but check first).
Add some more RAM. RAM should be installed evenly over the risers (which yours doesn’t seem to be at the moment – you have eight slots but 3GB of RAM. That doesn’t add up). 8GB is a nice amount for your system (either 8x 1GB sticks, 4x 2GB sticks or 2x 4GB sticks). Try to match brands and don’t buy from Apple – it’s expensive. FCP only uses 4GB so that leaves 4GB for the operating system and any other apps you might run in the background.
What do you currently use for storage? You might find the most noticeable speed increase would come from buying an external RAID drive. There are many good ones advertised either side of this forum. Go for eSATA, SAS or Fibre.
If you’re fed up with rendering effects and want better realtime performance consider converting your footage to ProRes prior to editing. The file sizes will be larger but ProRes is much more suited to editing than camera codecs such as XDCAM and AVCHD.
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
Everyone is giving you really bad advice (apart from Steve Eisen).
This is really basic post production knowledge freely available on the net (and in the manual of the application suite you are using – Final Cut Studio).
Handbrake is for ripping DVD’s into video that will play on you iPod or PSP. Not really what you’re trying to do. Mpeg Streamclip is great at converting problem video clips into editable formats.
What you want to do is export an MPEG-4 – something that is built into Final Cut Studio and is a very standard procedure. Use Compressor. There are about a dozen MPEG-4 presets with plain english descriptions telling you what each one is best for. Copy one of these and change the size (if it HAS to be 960×540). Easy.
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
It’s not that peculiar and unfortunately not that uncommon either.
QuickTime (and therefore Final Cut Pro, which is based around QuickTime) is only capable of playing video if the corresponding codec is installed on the machine you’re trying to view it on.
With the standard install of QuickTime you get a handful of commonly used codecs – things like H.264 and DV along with a bunch of legacy codecs (such as Sorenson and Cinepak) to make sure that older video’s will always play back. These are in the Library>QuickTime folder of your hard drive and show up as .component files. These ‘components’ sometimes contain more than one codec so just because you don’t have a corresponding .component file to the type of video you are playing back don’t assume that you can’t play back the video (the AppleHDVcodec.component contains the codecs for playing XDCAM as well as HDV). To find out what codec your video is you should try to open it in QuickTime player and open the inspector (Apple+I). Unless the codec is very unusual it usually is displayed here. (Otherwise try opening it in VLC and pressing Apple+I).
When you install Final Cut Pro you get a few more codecs more suited for editing – (such as DVCProHD and XDCAM) and from Final Cut Pro 6 the Pro Res family was introduced (Pro Res LT, 444, proxy etc were introduced with Final Cut Pro 7).
Unfortunately it’s impossible to explain everything about why some codecs work and some don’t in this forum. There are probably over a hundred codecs in use at the moment – some are made by third parties where licensing laws come into play and must be bought or bundled with software, others run at such high bit-rate they just don’t play back on most people’s computers. Some older codecs can cause conflicts, some will work on a mac but not a PC (DVCProHD). Some allow you to view a video but not encode it, some allow you to view Flash video, some allow you to view .avi files, some allow you to view Avid files. There’s even a QuickTime codec that allows you to view and interact with 3D content.
Back to your original questions. I am guessing that your system is running Final Cut Pro 5 which is why the Pro Res files won’t play (If you are running FCP 6 or 7 the .component file has possibly been deleted or become corrupt). And the reason why the RT settings are reduced? Final Cut Pro is optimised to work with only a small amount of codecs at certain frame rates and frame sizes. You should aim to only work with video in these formats. These include…
Common editing codecs = DV, Apple Intermediate Codec, DVCPro, DVCProHD, HDV, XDCAM, ProRes (Proxy, LT, HQ etc), Uncompressed 8bit, Uncompressed 10bit
Common Frame sizes = 720×486, 720×576, 1280×720, 1440×1080 (thin raster HD), 1920×1080 (full raster HD)
Common Frame rates = 23.98, 24, 25, 29.97, 50, 59.94.Some of these work better in certain combinations than others. Look at the FCP Easy Setup menu for a guide.
Wow, that was longer than I was expecting.
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
I’m far from an expert on this but we have just started our first 3D job. I can answer some of your questions.
– To use Neo3D you have to convert all the footage to the Cineform codec.
– If you don’t have a 3D monitor it is possible to edit in anaglyph mode with the old style glasses but we have found this can cause pretty bad headaches for the editor after just 30 minutes.
– The budget way of creating 3D content at this time is using Smoke (on a Mac).
– Do some research and get ahead of the game. There are already some good books on the subject. If you can get in now, good stereographers are in demand.————————
FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
Although I agree that it would be nice for Apple to make a 12″ laptop which has Firewire 400, 800, Express Card slot, PCMCIA Slot, CF card reader, USB3, eSATA, SCSI, user replaceable batteries and a Blu-Ray burner you have to understand there are limitations to what a company like Apple can do.
Their whole approach to making hardware is down to simplicity. There is a reason why there are only a limited number of configurations for their computers. It is so that they can keep it locked down and under control. Not like the Microsoft/Windows approach which is the opposite – wild and chaotic. Sure if you want you could probably find a PC computer which does everything you could possibly want – but who knows if the different components are going to work together. Apple know that the hardware they use works.
I think Apple understand that most “professionals” don’t use a laptop as their primary machine. They use Mac Pro’s. Those that do can use a 17″.
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
The normal way you learn is to become a runner at post facility. You do that for a year or two and you try to get involved and show enthusiasm. If you’re lucky you get promoted and you become a junior edit assistant or a junior tape op. Your company may send you on some courses or you might shadow someone a little senior. If you apply yourself after doing this for about 3 or 4 years you’ll have a pretty good grasp of the basics of film, TV and video post production.
I’d say 5 years is a good marker for the point when you can call yourself pretty competent in this industry.
By the way it’s practically impossible to learn in “a bubble”. You need hands-on tutorial from a real person. Someone who you can speak to and ask questions. Unfortunately there aren’t too many websites that show you this world. Probably cos there is no template facility or studio. They are all different with different equipment and workflows.
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
7GB RAM is an unusual number for a Mac. They like the RAM to be split evenly across the risers. Try bringing the RAM down to 6 or 4 or whatever you need to bring it to an even number. Or you might just have a bad stick of RAM.
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
You asked what would do it fast.
Compressor is one of your best bets for quality but it will take time. You need to turn the Frame Controls on and turn on Motion Compensation. You then need to play with the settings until you get the results you want.
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
Mpeg Streamclip will do this fast. But it will look like crap.
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London