[Gary Morris mcbeath]

I actually didn’t take the name SaltAire from the famous SaltAire Pavilion on the Great Salt Lake. We live in Steilacoom Washington, a small town right on the shores of southern Puget Sound. If you go down to the ferry dock at low tide, take a wiff of the air, you’ll understand where I came up with the name.

But lunch would be good. Only a couple days drive for you. We can keep lunch and this thread on topic by discussing Final Cut Studio 2.

Thanks for the offer. And now, back to work.

Gary

[Gary Morris mcbeath]

Tom,

I think I’ve seen some of those shots; I’ve thought those drivers are getting really good, or computer graphics are really outstanding.

Of course, they’re using Motion 3 or Shake? hmmmmnn?

My experience was back in the “old days”. Thanks for the fun.

Gary
SaltAire Cinema Productions

[Gary Morris mcbeath]

Wayne,

Well, they hit their marks most of the time. Your pan & scan in post solution doesn’t work, because the director, or DP will want you to stop, say, with your right front tire on the mark, and at an angle so those pretty trees over there reflect 2/3 of the way between the A and B pillars of the car (rule of thirds?); or something similar. And by the way, the mark is under of 2″ of water on the skid pad.

A little history: I was a precision “stunt” driver and camera car driver from 1990 through 1998. Mostly West coast, regional, national and international car, tire, hotel etc. commercials. Kept my driving skills sharp racing go-karts, occasional stock cars, and off-road rally cars, including the Pikes Peak Hill Climb in 1994; and teaching some performance driving.

So, no, I don’t edit the commercials. But I did learn the craft of film making working with some of the best directors, DPs, grip, gaffers, script & continuity, craft, make-up!, costume, & PA’s ever. Also, my photographer that traveled with me when racing, was a combat cinematographer in the Viet Nam war. He has taught me a great deal. It was a time to remember.

Then, I grew a bit older, and lost my touch. I’ve loved photography and the cinema since I was a young fella, so here I am back with a camera and this new-fangled edit system having the time of my life. Well, one of them. Time of my life that is.

As if that isn’t enough, I play the pipes and the big bass drum in a local pipe band. And now you know why people that “retire” never seem to have enough time.

Keep the shiny side up.

Gary
SaltAire Cinema Productions

[Gary Morris mcbeath]

Stewart,

I also so those artifacts Walter is referring to (he pointed them out to me at NAB); however, I spoke about it to an Apple rep there, and he told me that he thought the footage was film originated, and has been though multiple generations, etc. etc.

Check out my post over on the FCP forum regarding my tests so far with ProRez HQ. Heading: ProRez revisited again. In my non-scientific tests, I have not been able to break the codec. But I’m also probably not the last word on the subject. Looks like it will work for me, but everyone’s needs are different.

Gary
Saltaire Cinema Productions

[Gary Morris mcbeath]

Paul,

The lower case “b” stands for bits; the upper base “B” stands for bytes. Multiply the bytes by 8 to get bits. Essentially the same data rate.

Gary

[Gary Morris mcbeath]

I agree with you Walter: DVCProHD is great for many uses. I’ve found shooting a picture with a relatively low amount of detail, it is nearly indistinguishable from my HDCAM master.

But shooting an outdoors scene with lots of detail, for example a downshot of a wheat field with a combine: everything in the picture will be noticably softer, I assume the result of the lower horizontal rez as well as the 100 Mbit compression. I can even see the difference on my 14″ monitor, let alone the 24″.

For now, I’m going with uncompressed, since my G-5 dual 2.7 just isn’t up to the task of ProRez.

Gary
SaltAire Cinema Productions

[Gary Morris mcbeath]

Gary,

No, I have not tried the ProRez 8 bit; I can do that in the next day or so. That would help isolate the problem.

However, it is the 10 bit HQ codec I’m interested in for the work I do.

Quite busy today, on a shoot tomorrow and Wednesday. But I’ll try to squeeze it in, and I’ll report back with results.

Thanks,

Gary
SaltAire Cinema Productions

[Gary Morris mcbeath]

Hi Michael,

l also tried the 8 bit playback, and found the same: reduced image quality, but smoother playback.

I was going to call AJA Tuesday, but they will probably tell me the same.

Apple’s recomended system is the dual 2.5; I purchased FCS2 based on those recomendations, my system being in excess of that.

Frustrating.

Thanks,
Gary

[Gary Morris mcbeath]

I’ll give them a call Tuesday; But I’ll probably spend the $ for a new raid, however. Then the older unit will be a nice, big, parity protected backup drive.

Thanks again for all your help.

Gary

[Gary Morris mcbeath]

Hi Bob,

Yes, I just went through the raid, pulling one of the drives at a time, trying groups of 2 and 4 drives at a time, as well as all 8 drives, all configured as RAID 0; Ran the AJA system test in each configuration.

Results: all showed an average of around 82 MB/s write/75-80 read; about a 12% increase from the RAID 3 config. Didn’t matter if it was two disks or 8: same nominal results.

With the slight increase from the RAID 0, I again captured a couple HDCAM clips: still dropped frames, and plays back the video portion at 2x speed, while the audio plays normally for the clip duration.

I’ll contact Infotrend on Tuesday, but their website says support for resellers only, no end user support. But I’ll try anyway.

I heard somewhere that the Kona2 does not do any hardware acceleration for ProRez like it does for DVCProHD. I’m thinking that might be a factor here as well.

Thanks to all of you for your help.

Gary
SaltAire Cinema Productions