Graeme Nattress
Forum Replies Created
-
I’d look at Metasan. I’m running that here on two edit stations on a 3.5TB Xraid. It works well, and works easy. It is not hard to set up yourself. It’s also very happy now on Leopard and the biggest advantage over Xsan is that you don’t have to format your drives to a proprietary format – you can just leave them HFS+. That means, if something on the SAN did go wrong, you can go back to direct connecting your drive to a mac, and still be able to access the data direct, do any disc repairs using normal disc repair software and so on.
If you have any issues with the fibre, the LAN mode cuts in and you get access to your data over gigE, which is slow, but at least you can still access your data. And you can extend the SAN out to LAN machines over gigE also, if needed.
Quite frankly, Metasan is a mac-like SAN in all the ways that Xsan is not. I don’t, for my small SAN use a metadata controller, just one of the edit suites fills that dual role, and that not only works, but saves money too on cables, hardware, switches and licences.
Best of all, as it runs on HFS+ drives without formatting them, you can get an evaluation copy to run and see what it’s like if you a fibre switch and the other gear.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
Does it look bad on a real DVD in a DVD player though? Often they will deal with the chroma subsampling better. What colour is the background it’s on. Again, a black line around the red can help if the background is messy.
But in the end, you’re stressing the 4:2:0 of the MPEG2, and it’s reconstruction on playback in a way it was not designed to cope with. Software players can often just duplicate the 2×2 pixel chroma blocks rather than interpolate and make it look worse than it really does. Then, on interlace, there’s the famous MPEG2 decode interlace chroma bug, which again, if it’s on your player, would fail on this kind of image.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
standard place is:
/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins/
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
I bet you would! It would be so much easier! And the end viewer at home would potentially receive a better picture too! I really, really want to see interlace die soon…..
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
Even in such a scenario Walter, the picture image your delivering is still progressive, albeit embedded in an interlaced carrier, but there will be no temporal difference between fields, or there will be 3:2 pulldown if you shot 24p. But in either case, the resulting image retains it’s progressive visual appeal.
What it sounded like here is that the broadcaster didn’t like the look of progressive acquisition and wanted it to look like it had been shot interlaced. That’s a highly unusual request as the technology to do so is rarely effective and incredibly time consuming, and fraught with visual issues. I’ve seen it used relatively successfully for restoration of old programming purposes, but never as a final mastering decision on a new programme.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
I’ve added a level clamp on the effect to stop this happening. It will go out in the next update of BBOT.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
I’d be very curious to know which broadcaster as the BBC regularly comissions shows shot in progressive HD, broadcasts them, and has never to my knowledge asked for a show shot in progressive to be made into fake interlace. The BBC have even happily broadcast interlaced acquisition that has gone through a deinterlace process to make fake progressive, which when not done well, as it often isn’t, can look lower resolution than it should.
That the “technical” person you spoke to doesn’t understand progressive, and doesn’t understand that the vast majority of video based UK drama is shot this way, is quite beyond me.
However, it is usual to go over shooting specs and delivery specs before the programme is made. Was this done and did you inform them of your intent that it would be a filmic production? Of course, had you shot on film, it would be telecined as 25p also.
I see no technical problem with you shooting and delivering 25p unless, and this I highly doubt, the camera guy shot in a non-filmic style and the pans are all too fast and stutter badly.
Please inform us all of how this interesting issue develops.
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
I don’t see how they can patent what high end standards converters have done for ages, along with progressive TV sets etc. They all detect pulldown and remove it based on analysis of the video stream without reference to metadata.
Graeme
-
Sure – drop me an email graeme@nattress.com
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
There are still some very bad hardware converters out there that were not really even good enough for VHS. And then there are good ones, like the Alchemist. The price differential is huge.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP