[Jeff Coleman]

How many speakers are critical to your event recording? 1? 2+?
Are they all speaking from a podium, or will they walk and talk?

One mic on the speakers and one from the PA mixer sounds like too much reliance on the house PA system. Scary. What if the house mic has a buzz in it or experiences intermittent drop outs throughout the speech.

I like to have four mics available for these things.

I’d have a multi-channel mixer on hand for flexibility.
#1 Pan left your main mic on the main speaker. If there’s only one speaker, then button a wireless lapel mic on the person yourself. If more than one, then keep them at the podium with your own podium mic (I use a Shure MX418D – 18″ Gooseneck) or tape your mic discreetly to the end of the podium mic.
#2 Pan left the feed from the house PA mixer and have it ready just in case #1 fails.
#3 Pan left a hardwired mic taped to the house speaker and plug it into the 3rd input of your mixer and have it ready in case #1 or #2 fail in the middle of your shoot.
#4 Pan right a cam mic or mic on a stand to get room audience applause. It will sound very dead without this source.
Test everything prior to the event under the conditions of the event (all mics, amps, lights, etc. on).

[Jeff Coleman]

Your version of Flip4Mac works as a plug-in for Compressor. I’m After Effects ignorant, but if you could render a file and load it to Compressor (say a hi-rez quicktime file) then it could compress a WMV movie. Settings/New Default Setting/Quicktime Export Components/Encoder Type: Windows Media

[Jeff Coleman]

[Andwon] “is the only solution to having decent looking vision for this program, is to reshoot and cut it in 10bit? oucheehuahua!”

I don’t believe you can shoot digi in 10bit. I believe its an 8bit compressed recording device.
Instead, capture in a 10bit codec like Apple 10bit uncompressed, but even it has some issues.
Here’s some links regarding Sheer Video codecs
https://www.lafcpug.org/reviews/review_sheer_video.html
Sheer offers a free tryout
https://www.bitjazz.com/en/products/sheervideo/
At times I’ve had better luck scaling with something like Boris Continuim plug-ins, but I don’t recall it ever fixing a banding issue.
let us know what you learn
(on this thread, please)

[Jeff Coleman]

[Herb Sevush] “You don’t have to spend $400 for a 250GB drive – there’s nothing special about the drives you get from Apple.”

We tried that and it didn’t work. Hitachi said there was something special about the firmware that Apple puts on their drive that makes the system think it’s actually a 251GB drive. I could replace the drive with a bigger Hitachi (e.g. 300GB or larger) and it would work. Also, I could replace all the drives in the XRAID with off-the-shelf 250GB (we bought Hitachis at $60ea. BTW). Our VAR said their Apple rep feared what would happen it we did that and then a crashed occured on one of the drives–i.e., there’d be no guarantee the data would be recoverable. We thought that was hype, but couldn’t convince our VAR.

RAID buyers might be interested in this thread and the links within it:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/947286

CalDigit shoppers might be interested in this thread:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/933316

[Jeff Coleman]

[Nathan Adams] “Now using a 4Gb Infortrend drive that sustains about 550MB/sec read times and doesn’t roll off as badly when it fills up.”

Can you post a link to this system?

We’ve had very poor performance from our RAID with drives bailing out on us left and right at $400 a pop for a 250GB and just barely enough speed to on only half our space. Then there’s the problem of the 24 hour wait while the xRAID rebuilds itself. It usually means we lose 2 days production when a drive goes out. A reseller tells me that the xRAID has been the most reliable of all the systems he’s sold including Medea and others.

[Jeff Coleman]

We have an older xRaid, fully populated (14 250GB disks) running in RAID 50.

Speed is dependent on fullness of the raid.

Normally at say half-full, we can barely do 1080i60 10bit uncompressed captures and playback.
An average write speed using the AJA System Test is between 160-180 MB/s.
An average read speed is usually in the 220-260 MB/s range.

We have found anything more than half full is rolling the dice when it comes to capturing HD uncompressed.

hope that helps.

[Jeff Coleman]

I think you want an MPEG2 transport stream.
In FCP, File/Export/Using Compressor
In Compressor, under Settings/New Default Settings/choose MPEG-2.
In the Inspector window, choose the “Extras” tab and check the box “Multiplexed MPEG-1/Layer 2 Audio”.
Note the “Extension” change to .m2t from .m2v.

[Jeff Coleman]

Ouch!
Sounds ugly.
I don’t know, but here are a few suggestions:
1. Pray.
2. Trying changing your render settings in the video processing tab of the sequence settings.
3. Duplicate your sequence several times and create versions with only one of those final scene elements, then a version with two, then three, etc., turning on filters and layers until the problem reappears. You could even create sequences with only one of the elements in each sequence just to make sure each element is okay. Perhaps its just one of those elements that are causing the pain and you could isolate it this way and work on just that element.
4. I think you mentioned when you go to tape its messed up. What happens by the way if you create a Quicktime Movie of your sequence (Export/Quicktime Movie)? Is the movie messed up or not? If not, can you bring the movie back in to final cut and play it on the timeline crash recording to tape? Capture the tape again and drop into your sequence over that last scene.

[Jeff Coleman]

I beat myself for another day and then went to a different box with older software — G5 with Compressor 2 and QT 7.1.2.

The captured clip played back fine in QT player on this box (unlike on the box with QT 7.1.3).

I compressed an H.264 movie and an MPEG-2 and they looked pretty good, possibly a hitch in the MPEG on DVD Player but I don’t think I would’ve noticed hadn’t I had all the big hitches/jumpy video on the other box.

Interesting though that the DV file I captured on the first box in FCP 5.1.2 with the KonaLH played fine on this box. But that same file was outputted as a Quicktime Movie in FCP in the DV codec and would not play fine on this box running QT 7.1.2

Perhaps it is a Quicktime issue.

Anyone else see this?

[Jeff Coleman]

It’s more art than science really.
Cut out the ummm.
Replace if necessary with room tone.
Use a 1, 2 or even 3 frame dissolve to smooth out the cut especially for low frequencies. Find a breath to replace the ummm.
Find an “and” to replace the ummmm.
Find some nats in your b-roll to bring up instead of the ummm then continue the interview after you’ve let your nats play for moment.
There are more ways but keep at it and you’ll discover your favorite. Make it sing!