[Jason Porthouse]

Just to redress the balance a little – I have a Multibridge Pro 2 from BM and it’s so far been great. I’m not sure where Lu got his info on the lag from – I certainly haven’t experienced it from any BM products and I wouldn’t tolerate it if it did. It’s a very snappy editing experience in SD and HD. IQ is excellent too.

I’m not a BM fanboy, I just happen to think their products offer good value and (so far) good reliability. I like AJA too – for me it came down to cost. I’m happy with my decision, and I think you’d be happy with either – as long as they fulfil your needs.

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

Just a quick follow-up,

2 days in without a crash whilst editing – turning off thumbs in the timeline has definitely improved things. Had one crash on a render, but I’ve gotten in to the habit of saving before rendering.

Also, as I can’t seem to get the Alsoft (Disk Warrior) site to work (www.alsoft.com) I downloaded OnyX from here:

https://www.titanium.free.fr/index_us.html

Seems to be pretty comprehensive, whilst not doing what DW does but certainly OK for basic first-line maintenance.

HTH

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

Hi Piers & Rafael,

Rafael – my system maintenance is limited to disk utility and good housekeeping at the moment – suffice to say that I’ll be ordering either Disk Warrior or Tech Tools soon. Any opinion as to which is best?

One thing (I am writing this on another mac, quietly, so as not to tempt fate) is that changing the timeline to name only, rather than name and thumbnail, has significantly improved things. Making sure I don’t have too many bins open with icon view seems to help too… fingers crossed.

Thanks for your input

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

Hmm, at least it’s not just me – frustrating though, innit?

I’d a feeling that it was somehow connnected to redraw – when it first started I had a project that would open to a certain degree and then just quit out at the same point. Trashing the thumbnail cache cured it completely. I think, as you say, its a memory/redraw issue.

I do wish Apple would widen their beta program – this is the sort of thing that makes people consider A**d *shudder*

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

I have to agree about the track being hot. In all my years of editing in FCP, I’ve always – and I mean always – had to pull back tracks (some classical or quiet ambient being the exceptions) on import. Most producers use all of the headroom and often compress the **** out of a track – especially dance stuff, and doubly so for ‘radio mixes’. I typically bring them down 10dB to get them in the ballpark – but of course we’re talking broadcast levels. If your sending to a post house don’t worry – they’ll mix to legal spec. FCP’s meters are just being cautious, as for pukka online work you’d never be anywhere near that level anyway. I’d expect they’ll send out with no peaks higher than -10 anyway. You could try bringing it down to this, and turning your speakers up – your dubbing mixer will thank you. Mind you, might spoil that Spinal Tap moment if you want to go up to 11 😉

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

Hi Lisa,

Sorry if I confused you more…

Shift Fields only ever needs to be applied in the case of mixing differing field order material. So if you mix HDV and DV in the same timeline, as the two have differing field orders. So, if you have an HDV timeline with HDV material predominantly, you (or FCP) would apply the SF to any DV material that you cut in to that timeline – and vice-versa.

If you convert DV to HDV material in Compressor, for instance, you create new HDV clips – these will not need SF applying if used in an HDV sequence. Compressor has done the job for you, and changed the field order from lower to upper (provided you haven’t changed the default settings). I’d only look at doing this at online stage, unless a) you have little DV material and b) you’re sure about how your delivering the final piece. If that’s not fixed yet, stick with DV – as you may decide to finish in ProRes or some other HD flavour, and put up with the shift fields thing. Once you’ve gotten your head round it you’ll be fine.

BTW converting SD to HD in compressor – I think Shane did a tutorial about it sometime, and I’ve used it with good results. I tend to do it at finder level – drop the source QTs into compressor, go to Advanced Format Conversion and choose the codec I want, creating new clips alongside (or in another folder) with a suitably appended filename – so I don’t destroy the originals. Then import these in to FCP. Compressor is a really cool tool for doing conversions like this, and with a little tweaking the results are pretty good. Not as good as a Terranex, but cheaper! If you;ve a lot of footage it can be pretty render intensive though, so best left on overnight.

HTH

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

Lisa,

If your main source is HDV, then I’d stick with that if you want an HD master as your deliverable

If not, you need to decide on the best workflow.

If I were in your position, I’d take the path of least resistance. If you’ve 20% DV footage, and the rest is HDV, I’d be inclined to stick with HDV and up-res the DV. It may look pants for the offline but you can do it properly for the online – either use Compressor to up-res (creating new media) or something like Digital Anarchy’s ReSizer.

If you do that, then simply go through the DV clips applying the Shift Fields filter accordingly.

You could try this to make sure it’s right: select all DV clips, right-click and remove attributes, check filters. This removes all filters so don’t do this if clips are CC’d etc. Then command-c to copy – then, make a new sequence, easy setup HDV 1080i50, and paste clips in to this, the SFF should be applied correctly for the DV clips.

HTH

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

Lisa,

You need to separate out 2 issues here. The first is the discrepancy between field order in DV and HDV. If you put HDV in a DV sequence FCP should resize and apply shift fields, and vice-versa as both have differing field orders. You will only see this correctly if you’re monitoring on a proper, interlaced CRT monitor being driven by a Kona or Blackmagic card (or similar – i.e one that has a proper composite, component or SDI video out), You won’t see this on a computer monitor. Many people get caught on this as the first time they realise it’s wrong is when playing an authored DVD on a TV.

Once you’ve got your timeline correct – so if its a DV PAL timeline all material should be lower field first, and the HDV material will have Shift Fields applied (and opposite if it’s a HDV timeline) then you can move to the NTSC issue.

I’m in PAL land and authoring an NTSC version of a PAL production at the moment. My workflow was:

Cut in PAL DV – Grade and polish, then output QT self-contained.
Compressor to encode MPEG files and Dolby audio
DVDSP to author and burn

then, using the self-contained QT:
import in to new NTSC project with a ProRes setup – I used this rather than DV for preserving quality, but you may want to use DV for speed if it’s for non-critial appraisal
Use Natress Standards Conversion filter to convert PAL to NTSC
Export Self-contained QT – this is NTSC native
Compressor to encode NTSC MPEG assets
DVDSP to author

I’m very happy with the results. It seems like a faff, but it’s a straightforward workflow once you’ve gotten your head around it.

You could use Compressor to convert PAL to NTSC if you don’t have (or don’t want to buy) Natress Standards Converter.

BUT – heres the rub – you will have odd results IF your fields aren’t right to begin with. Hence the need for proper monitoring.

HTH

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

THIS will do the trick nicely…

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

Adam,

I know you’re researching before dealer contact, but it may be worth having a chat with Ken Bell at Quad Logic in Bristol. They’ve been doing lots with RAIDs and SANs for people and have tested lots of these in anger, and seem to be very set on supplying the best solution rather than one pet manafacturer. Not connected, just impressed.

HTH

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*