[Jeff Greenberg]

If you’re limited to email, all the money isn’t going to help you with a 10 min HD show.

at 320×180, you might get something under 10 megs, but not at HD.

You could put it on a dropbox account – that will stream to her iPad. But all the magic in world isn’t going to get the file small enough.

If you did 320×180 at 15fps, you could do a data rate around 250k/s with h.264 for about 10 min and get it to be 10 megs – and that should play on her iPad. But it won’t be HD.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

There’s no easy solution right now – at the moment.

You’d have to set this up and test it first.

There are some third party solutions (I think) that can auto launch software – it probably won’t auto start compressor though.

You could set Compressor with a script to launch Adobe Media Encoder at the end of the compression.
Why? Then you could set Adobe Media Encoder to auto start after 30 seconds.
And to set it all up? You’d copy/paste your comp to Adobe Media Encoder.

At the end of the compression, it’d launch Adobe Media Encoder which would then compress (render) your AE work.
Ugly, but possible.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

Kaoru,

I just testing some AVCHD footage from a Canon camera. FCPX gave me momentary access to the AVCHD files and then rewrapped them into a QuickTime container (codec AVC1- meaning it’s an AVCHD file), in the directory I gave it for the event. So, FCP is editing the native AVCHD file.

[Kaoru Koike] “Anyways, I have tried with the compression with 10mb bit rate 1980×1080 MPEG-4 video and it certainly reduced the size and video looks as good as QT Movie.”

Did you use compressor? Are you sure you didn’t make an h.264 (a type of MPG4) as opposed to an MPG4?

[Kaoru Koike] “But I have a new concern.
The final destination for this video is TV broadcast so I want to make sure it looks good on TV. But for some reason MPEG-4 setting in compressor doesn’t give me the option to choose i/p.

Do you know when you export MPEG-4 it is automatically set i/p? Is it true that MPEG-4 is more for web tv than TV broadcast??? if so, do you know why??”

Well, again, I don’t knwo what you used here. FCPX (and possibly compressor) may not be the best tool for the job for delivery.

What does the brodcasters delivery specification sheet look like? It should give very specific data rates and file types. You use a compression term (I/P) and we need a bit more information than that. Often, Apple doesn’t always give you every option for every tool.

[Jeff Greenberg]

Frank,

I used a simple ‘averaging’ formula with the four dots, it’s a valid method, but very destructive.

DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) compression (used in MPEG, JPEG and DV formats) uses a mathematical formula to remove information without you visually knowing it’s gone; it’s lossy (once gone, in this case, it can never come back.)

The problem with this new data, is that any further operations (such as color correction) will expose how much lossage there is.

[Frank Black] “hat do you mean by this:

3) If hardware can’t keep up – say BM is requesting to playback uncompressed video @ 1080 and the drives aren’t delivering data fast enough, your system ‘drops’ frames.

Which drives are you talking about? In the camera? And what happens when the frames drop? How do they drop? How is the drop represented — in layman’s terms and in precise terms”

A camera that can’t record the information is useless! So it’s not a problem in the camera.

It’s in the capture to the drives or the playback from the drives.

Let’s say you’re playing footage that is stored on the drives uncompressed. Arbitrarily, let’s say the demand for uncompressed is 30 units per frame, or 900 units per second (30 frames x 1 frame of 30 units=900)

What if the drives can’t push 900 units per second…but only 300. We’ll get 1/3 of the information (remember, we’re using chunks that we’ve called frames, and each is 30 units) So let’s display every third frame and just skip the ones that we can’t get in time.

Other factors: The drives may deliver 900 units, but we chose firewire which only delivers 400? Again, not enough data shows up and some data is ignored; since we’re slicing them into 30 unit frames, we’ll skip some to display an actual picture.

Factors that can ‘fail’ – drives, drive attachments (esata, firewire, USB), computer failure (CPU capability, Graphic card capability or Ram capability.)

—–

Oh, you asked for specific too? Go back and change units to megabits per second and then it’s specific. (P.S. Yeah, I did some fudging, but it’s forgivable.)

[Jeff Greenberg]

Two immediate thoughts:

First, you could use Apple’s Disk Image – It does have a checksum/verification (but I don’t believe it does more than verify.)

The second is you might want to try something based on rsync (the underpinnings of what makes carbon copy cloner and Superduper work.) I found this utility while looking for that: https://sourceforge.net/projects/psyncx/

[Jeff Greenberg]

Bob,

I thought I heard you say that your projects are unimportant and that a problem like a failing Raid 5 isn’t important.

Ok, I know, you didn’t really say that, but I’m worried enough about your data that I phrased it as such. Stop what you’re doing, go grab a couple of 2-3 TB drives and backup ASAP. A RAID is not a backup – and yes, I’ve seen two drives die before in a raid. Backup your data, check the integrity of the backup(s), wipe the raid and reformat.

Then transfer the most important project back. Transfer the others while you work on the key one. You could be working without a net here.

[Jeff Greenberg]

A great way that you can check exactly what slowing down your Macintosh is to open up the activity monitor your utilities folder and leave it running while you do intensive activities like render.

Here will find 2 major culprits–something that’s eating up all of your processors and the observation of how much of a swap file was being used in the memory tab. If you utilizing a lot of swap files the speed of your hard drive would be a major reason that the machine is running slow, and that you’re hearing the hard drive chug quite a bit.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
New! FCPX DSLR workflows; What’s new in Media Comopser 6; Full Media Composer 6 basics from macProVideo.com
Come see me speak at the Government Video Expo Nov 30 – Dec 1; Seminar link here
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

Best OS X utility for what?

I’m assuming you’re talking disk repair?

I heavily rely on a number of them–but disk warrior is the 1st of that list. It does quite a bit of directory maintenance and repair. Then Apple’s own disk utility and often, yes Tech tool Pro 6.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
New! FCPX DSLR workflows; What’s new in Media Comopser 6; Full Media Composer 6 basics from macProVideo.com
Come see me speak at the Government Video Expo Nov 30 – Dec 1; Seminar link here
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

Mary,

I’m not sure if you have a G5 or an Intel Mac Pro. The Chip is irrelevant here, but these are two different processors in the same shell.

It sounds like your system is having difficulty with the DVD drive; it’s hard to say if this is because of overheating, or some other factor. The drive no longer ejects and software (you don’t mention the version) that talks to the drive refuses to launch.

Next time it stops working, I’d like you to go to your utilities folder, and open up system profiler. This application has a list of everything connected to your computer–including whether or not a CD/DVD drive is available. My instinct, is that when both of these issues show up, your Macintosh no longer believes it has a DVD drive.

Why this is a problem, is difficult to say without seeing the actual machine–it could be heat related problem, a problem with the drive, a problem logic board, etc. but a very least this is the right step for a good diagnosis.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
New! FCPX DSLR workflows; What’s new in Media Comopser 6; Full Media Composer 6 basics from macProVideo.com
Come see me speak at the Government Video Expo Nov 30 – Dec 1; Seminar link here
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

Importing into MC means footage is converted to whatever video resolution (HD or SD) you’ve set up in the format tab. The BCC Pan and zoom (if you have it) is better than the avid Pan and zoom.

Red lines = dropped frames. Something needs to be rendered (or faster system needs to be purchased)

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
New! FCPX DSLR workflows; What’s new in Media Comopser 6; Full Media Composer 6 basics from macProVideo.com
Come see me speak at the Government Video Expo Nov 30 – Dec 1; Seminar link here
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website