[James Poll]

[Gerry Fraiberg] ” The original document is 454 pages. I wonder what happened to 79 pages?
“

Don’t worry… they’ll be coming “early in 2012” !
🙂

[James Poll]

[Jeremy Garchow] “No, it leaves it there and makes a new one. This is really easy to track and watch while you do it.”

Actually, FCP 7 will delete and clean-up unused render files, but it only appears to do so when you close a project. This is pretty easy to verify, just drop a clip onto a timeline and add a colour correction. Render it out. Add another effect, render it out. Add a third effect and render it out. In your render cache you’ll find the 3 render files, but once you close the project, render files 1 and 2 will disappear, leaving only the most current one remaining.

This actually caused me some trouble in the past, as I would sometimes “borrow” timelines from one show to make another (it was a simple interview show, with a common format of interviewee/movie clip/interviewee/movie clip/etc. I would replace the clips and interviews, but keep the opening and closing as it was common to all shows. I was always a bit annoyed to find that when I went back to the original project, all my colour-corrected clips were now unrendered, because FCP had done a “render clean-up” in the new project, but in so doing wiped out the render files from the old one. The way to work around this was to copy the *contents* of the timeline, and not the actual timeline itself. I was a bit mystified at first, because although I had copied the sequence from one project to another, I had saved the new project with a different name which I thought would be sufficient to “break/isolate” the link, but no go… FCP would trace back to the original workspace and delete the render files there.

[James Poll]

Wow, thanks Mark for the quick response!

That’s exactly what I needed. I had been playing around with the Link behaviour, but couldn’t find anything to link to. The idea of a dummy text scale is so clever, and yet so simple, that I’m totally face-palming myself for not figuring this out before.

Think I’m going to go get that Motion Cheats book!

Thanks again… very much appreciated!

[James Poll]

Although FCP 7 will apparently run under Lion, I’ve seen a couple of people mention that the Final Cut Studio 3 installer is PowerPC based – which means you can only install FCP 7 using Snow Leopard *after which* you upgrade to Lion. If you have a Mac with Lion pre-installed, then you won’t be able to install FCP 7 on it.

Can anyone confirm whether this is actually the case? Is the FCS3 installer PPC only?

Thanks!

[James Poll]

Unfortunately, Apple’s arrogance and culture of silence has been around for a while, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon.

Does anyone remember way back when OS X first came out? Apple released a firmware update the was required in order to install OS X. This firmware update had a nasty habit of deactivating any third party RAM that didn’t meet the specs necessary for stability in OS X. Now, that isn’t a bad thing per se, but *they didn’t tell anyone* that they may lose some or all of their RAM by installing this firmware! One user had all his RAM disabled, and his computer wouldn’t start up any more. People were freaking out, Apple weren’t saying anything,and it wasn’t until one lone programmer figured out what was going on, and wrote a small application to check your RAM before applying the firmware update, that Apple bothered to (rather sheepishly it seems) come out and admit what exactly was going on. That whole situation was handled so poorly, and that was the first time I felt Apple really dropped the PR ball.

Since then, the shine has continually been eroded away with other poorly-handled launches. Remember when Snow Leopard came out? All the great changes to the core code… but now half the Mac community had to go out and buy new printers and scanners, because all their old ones were suddenly made obsolete by a re-write of the I/O routines (which seemed to be working just fine beforehand). Again, Apple said nothing and gave no warning that this might happen. Of course, it’s all the fault of the third parties for not updating their drivers… nevermind that Apple was the one who forced that particular situation upon everyone – users and developers alike!

More recently we have the Rosetta issue. Unless you are a Mac geek who frequents Mac forums, you aren’t going to know that PowerPC support is being flushed down the toilet, because Apple isn’t sharing that information with anyone. I can hardly wait until Lion comes out and people like my elderly parents upgrade to Lion, only to find that that old copy of Office 2004 and PowerPC Quicken need to be re-purchased for the new Intel-only world. Suddenly, that $29.99 Lion upgrade is going to cost hundreds of dollars in software upgrades, just like the Snow Leopard upgrade cost hundreds of dollars in printer/scanner re-purchases, just as the OS X firmware update meant buying new RAM for many people.

All this without any warning, no notice, and no response (until the bad PR starts to get to them, of course).

I’m really starting to worry about Apple’s direction with OS X as well. You can see how they are turning it into “iOS Pro”, and for the first time, I’m really starting to feel like I’m losing control over my computer/digital life. I *like* having a file system that I can control, I *like* being able to manage things myself. By all means, add these great time-saving and ease-of-use features… just give us a freaking override button!! And be more open about what’s going to happen when you upgrade your software!

These last couple of weeks have been tough. I’ve been an Apple pusher since the mid-90s, and have converted pretty much everyone in my family, my girlfriend’s family, and many friends to Macs over the years. After the event of the last several years – and the last couple of weeks in particular – I’m starting to wonder if that was all a mistake.

In some ways, I’m really hoping that the Lion launch totally blows up in Apple’s face. Maybe then they might finally learn to be a little more open and supportive with their customer base, many of whom have been loyal devotees for many years, if not decades. Somehow, though, I doubt it. Sigh.

Thanks for listening to my rant.

[James Poll]

Sometimes it’s useful to add bars and tone in a tapeless workflow. I regularly add a little at the beginning of files that go out-of-house, since I know that the files may get transcoded at another facility, and the bars are useful in determining if there have been any transcoding issues (gamma shifts, level/colour distortions, etc.)

[James Poll]

I ran into this problem a couple of months ago, and found that all my usual tricks – MPEG Streamclip, VLC, Perian, etc. didn’t work… they would get one thing right (e.g. audio), but mess up the video frame rate.

In the end, the only way I was able to solve the problem was by using Adobe Premiere Pro (Mac CS5 version). PPro could import and play the file correctly, so I then just re-exported as a DVCProHD MOV file for use on our FCP system.

If my memory serves, that particular AVI (UYVY) file is a product of the Sony Vegas editor.

Good luck!
JP