Jeff Carpenter
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Those are H.264 files, just like the movies they have on the iTunes store. It looks great but it’s not really an editing format. What you’re doing is correct, convert them to something more Final Cut friendly and go from there.
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Forgot to mention my experiences…
I compress high school football games for a local cable channel (to give to the teams). These are mutli-camera truck shoots. Video cutting, graphics, slow-mo playbacks…everything you’d see on any football broadcast.
In most cases the videos are about 2 hours, but sometimes they run closer to 3. In those cases I’ve gotten 3 hours of video on a DVD-4 disk, even with all the movement and cutting!
Now, it’s close to VHS quality at that point, but the client is happier with that than with paying for 2 discs or a DVD-9 disc. So they live with the quality loss when games happen to run long.
So my point is, if I can fit 3 hours of a sporting event on a 4 GB disc, I’m betting you can do 5 hours for a disc twice that size. That’s less compression than mine, first of all, and secondly, your subject matter should compress a lot smoother and look better at lower rates than my does.
It’s sure worth the time to compress a test. And be sure to burn the test to a disc and watch it on a TV. It’s nearly impossible to judge them on the computer screen.
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It MIGHT be possible to get 5 hours on a DVD-9 IF your confrence is mostly static shots of talking heads.
If that’s true, you can squeeze a lot of space out of it without much quality loss.
Cut it in half and compress one half (so 2.5 hours) using a custom Compressor setting:
VBR
Average: 2.0
Max: 6.0…and see what you get. Both quality-wise and file-size wise. The MPEG file and the AC3 file need to add up to 4 GB or less to be safe. I’m guessing you might be under that and will be able to raise the ‘average’ setting before trying it again.
This is all based on there not being much motion in the shots, but if that assumption is true, yeah, I think you can do it.
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The final edit and dub will all be SD, right? Why not just shoot in SD mode on your camera? Which model is it? I thought they all offered that. Then everything matches right from the start.
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FW and FW Basic refer to the FW’s ability to control the camera or deck. The “better” one is whichever one works. Usually they both work fine.
Capturing to other codecs is what many HDV shooters do, but you need some kind of capture card to do the conversion. Firewire just copies the data, it can’t change it.
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While it’s true that a program written to take advantage of more cores is best, it’s not a lost cause for the other applications. OSX does do a little bit of work to spread things out:
https://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/technology/multicore.html
Notice in there that while bragging that the OS splits things up they still mention that they’re re-writing apps to be multi-core aware. So it’s still better to have the apps be aware, but it’s not like the other cores are going totally un-used when they aren’t.
But either way, Brett, there’s nothing you can do about it.
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Search the Apple site for “Final Cut Pro Upgrade”. There is an upgrade version for $699 that will accept the code from FCP 3. That saves you $600 over the full purchase price.
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I finally found the page I’d seen before:
https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304492
They give a little chart of the options Final Cut likes best.
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1) Be sure to get out the computer’s manual and follow it exactly on how to install it. They have to be put in in the exact right positions, no exceptions.
2) It should all be ECC, but you can trust Crucial’s site. If they say it’s right, it is.
3) RAM has to be in pairs, which you seem to know. As you suggest, you can get away with odd matchings of different kinds of pairs (like 512 x 2 + 1 GB x 4 for a total of 5 GB). The computer can deal with that, but Final Cut Pro has stricter guidelines. It wants ALL the RAM to match. Dunno why, but that’s what Apple says. It’ll work on that hypothetical 5 or 10 GB computer, but Apple just says you could have problems, whatever that means.
So buy 1 GB or 2 GB sticks from Crucial and REPLACE what’s in your computer. I suggest either 4 GB total (1 GB x4 OR 2 GB x 2) or 6 GB (1 GB x 6) or 8 GB (2 GB x 4).
Go with 4 GB if you’ll mostly just be using 1 application at a time. Go for the higher numbers if you plan on switching between multiple apps all the time.
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Why do you suggest that he let Apple put in extra hard drives? I thought that adding SATA drive to the Mac Pro was the easiest part of setting it up.
Just remember, DorkAlert, to run the disc utility and format any drives that Apple didn’t install. They’re sure to come formatted as something other than what you want them to be.