[Jeff Meyer]

Admittedly my preference is on the PC side of things, but there some very good reasons to stick with a Mac.

1) Once you get to a certain point the speed of the box isn’t as critical as the speed of the operator. Adobe Premiere may be a fastern NLE than Final Cut Pro, but retraining myself to use it breaks my muscle-memory with FCP, and it only takes a few extra crashes to negate any speed boost. When working in ProRes Final Cut is pretty stable. Working with MXF XDCAM/QT H.264 in Premiere hasn’t been as stable in my experience.

2) Exporting on the backend matters…sometimes. Often an export can run in the background while working in another application. If it’s too large to be done in the background chances are it’s a lunch break or overnight render anyway, at which point it doesn’t matter how fast it exports as long as it’s done by the time I get back to the computer.

3) RAM is a huge factor. You can load a MacPro up.

4) Changing platforms can be costly. If you have a pile of FCS projects, Motion documents, etc. switching to a PC means many assets will need to be rebuilt, or you could to go back to the Mac for any old projects that need to be updated. Now you’re rebuilding a lot of assets or you’re maintaining two systems. If you start talking about rolling this out to several editing seats the costs add up pretty quick. MacPros may be expensive towers, but 3.9GHz chips don’t come without a premium either.

5) Apple computers tend to last longer. If you need to buy two towers over 10 years instead of three or four that can change your bottom line. If you’re doing a lot more cutting than animating five years isn’t out of the question for a computer, particularly with a few strategic upgrades.

6) The CPU/GPU isn’t always the bottleneck. Q-Master (segmented processing in Compressor) is the only thing I can get to peg all 24 logical 2.66GHz processors in my Mac, and even to get that I’m going from one RAID-5 to another RAID-5 transcoding footage. Without two separate RAID boxes do you think I’d be pegging the CPU? Pulling data off of a spinning disc will always be slower than data flying throw a chip. You can talk SSD all you want, but with the storage requirements for video this isn’t even close to being affordable.

The PC may have some more guns today, but a computer is only as strong as the weakest link. If changing platforms makes you the weakest link it doesn’t sound like a good choice. If the weakest link is a storage solution both computers will have similar performance. Same is true for RAM. Programs that aren’t multithreaded will have some benefit from the added clock speed, but OSX’s Grand Central Dispatch is pretty likely to still gave Apple the advantage. Numbers aren’t everything. There’s a lot of work being done using MacPros right now. Don’t expect this to change overnight because there could be a minor performance benefit in going to PCs.

[Jeff Meyer]

While I don’t have any C300 footage, I do have XF footage and Adobe CS5.5. Same codec/card structure. If you go into the card (use a copy not your master, MacOS likes to write invisible ancillary files everywhere) and grab the MXF files you can throw them into Adobe Media Encoder and get a QT movie out. Make sure you build a preset that matches your source after adding the first clip so you don’t have to select it for every clip. This method isn’t as convient for logging, but timecode stays along for the ride.

If you have CS5.5 (or probably CS5) this could be a solution, with the only expense being some labor.

[Jeff Meyer]

Why limit yourself by partitioning? It would be annoying to start a project with 500gb and need another 20gb to finish, requiring you to change your partition mapping. Also, you may have 10gb free on this partition, 60gb free on this partition, and not have enough space to start another project because it’s tied up in free space scattered over several partitions that you can’t access.

I would set the Drobo up with one partition and one scratch folder. Within your Render Files/Capture Scratch Final Cut automatically makes a folder for each project. Things will be pretty organised this way, and moving a project is as simple as using the Media Manager tool.

[Jeff Meyer]

Adam, as suggested above the Canon XF plugin should get you up and going. We have XF cameras at work, and while 50mbps isn’t uncompressed it’s a pretty good picture. I’ve been quite surprised by how much you can pull back in the highlights. If the C300 works like the XF cameras you’ll get best results overexposing a bit.

I wouldn’t get too worked up over the compressed 8-bit picture. You’re in a 4:2:2 color space, and you’re saving about 6x the space over uncompressed. That also means images of the cards can be made in 1/6th of the time, and your long-term storage costs are 1/12th of what they would have been if you’re making two copies of the images from the card. With the time and economic advantages of 50mbps XDCAM and the elegance of the C300 package without a nanoflash recorder I wouldn’t be too bothered by the trade-off. If you’re going to broadcast it’ll get compressed out by a cable or satellite provider, and if you’re going to web it’s likely to get compressed out as well. If you’re going to the big screen or Blu-Ray there will be some minor differences, which would become more exaggerated if you apply a steep color grade to the footage. If you have a chroma-key project coming up (I’m guessing this isn’t a normal event for you as you work with SLRs now) rent a nanoflash and run some tests with it while you have it. In terms of cost-benefit I doubt it’s worthwhile.

Word of advice, on the Log and Transfer window be sure to go to the preferences. Change Canon XF to a ProRes varient, probably plain ProRes422. The “Native” setting will use the XDCAM codec you shot in. While Final Cut can work with this codec natively, it tends to get buggy. Switch to ProRes for stability.

[Jeff Meyer]

You will not see any field dominance issues on a computer display. The 100% confident way to see these issues is to use an I/O and a monitor, and to quality control your output off of a deck prior to delivering. Computer displays are very different from TVs. Don’t trust what you see on a computer – particularly when scaling footage. This could be why you see some issues using Quick Look in Finder..footage is often scaled when previewed. It’s difficult to build a shelf without essential tools, like a hammer. It’s also difficult to produce a TV program without a TV. You’re blind without monitoring.

Shift fields is useful if you have content with the wrong dominance (lower when you need upper) but it isn’t useful for content with no dominance. Normal dominance for SD is lower and for HD it is upper. SD footage needs a shift fields filter if it hasn’t had one. If the SD footage had a shift fields baked in upstream and you add a shift fields the dominance will be incorrect.

When going through Streamclip you need to pick the Options after picking ProRes422, pick two fields, and pick even or odd. Often with ProRes getting interlacing is takes two steps, you have to tell the program to export fields and tell the ProRes encoder to be interlaced. If you didn’t look into interlacing when taking the content through Streamclip you easily could have introduced a field dominance issue. I find Compressor to be more intuitive to use, and Adobe Media Encoder is my preferred tool for transcoding footage. Streamclip feels rather unintuitive every time I open it up. In Compressor pick the ProRes preset, then on the Encoder portion go to the Settings for video and you should be able to pick Interlaced. Make sure every video is interlaced before submitting a job.

Working with interlaced footage requires due diligence at every step of the workflow, otherwise you end up scratching your head at the end. If the studio is having a slow day perhaps you’ll be able to tie up a deck for an hour or two and make notes of what does/doesn’t look correct and go from there, but I wouldn’t bet on you being able to do that.

[Jeff Meyer]

Do both sequences have the same settings?

Are the sequence settings correct?

The sequence settings should match the clip properties.

[Jeff Meyer]

Thanks for the response Andy.

I had about 10 layers of text with an average of about 15 characters per layer. The text was a clean, sans serif font from the Adobe CS package with a solid face and a drop shadow with blur. The only animated properties were the Gather In and Gather Out behaviours at 20-30 frames in duration. No filters on the text, and outline and glow were both unchecked, and there weren’t any behavious that were continually happening.

Other elements were a photo with a drop shadow, two logos (max 3000px wide), and a color solid as the background with a vignette filter. The vignette was keyframed at the front and back of the ad, otherwise I would have made a PNG in Photohsop. One logo had a luma keyer, but it wasn’t up too long.

I haven’t played with the Motion Blur samples or shutter angle. Checking my settings I’m at 8 samples and 360º. The 8 samples could probably drop to 6, which would cut the time down quite a bit. The shutter angle is something a bit fuzzy on where motion graphics is concerned. I’m assuming 360º is the default?

[Jeff Meyer]

Right-click on the files to be replaced and pick Reconnect Media. Select Locate and point the computer to the new Quicktime versions of the files.

[Jeff Meyer]

Thanks for the info Jerry! I do mean I-frames when I say keyframes. Not key frames for animating.

I was suspecting the whole video would need to be reconformed, which is among the reaosns I’ve been working in ProRes from the start. I was hoping I could cheat the render time by transcoding elsewhere. I should know better than to think I can cheat render time. I’ll stick with the workflow I’ve been using and keep the backend render time in mind.

Should I be rendering on the timeline or recompressing all frames on export? Guessing recompress?

[Jeff Meyer]

I’ll admit to having a difficult time understanding what you’re trying to figure out, but I’ll attempt to talk around what has you confused.

1) Most cameras do not record an uncompressed data stream. Uncompressed video is extremely large, so often cameras will use a codec that throws some information away – compresses – to drop the size of the data stream and to fit more onto the card/tape/drive.

Once recorded into a compressed medium it is possible to to play an uncompressed stream of the compressed data. For example, you could shoot on a DSLR, transcode it to uncompressed/animation and play an uncompressed stream out, but you’ll be playing a perfect copy of the compressed copy. It’s like starting with a 1,000 pixel (camera RAW) wide image, making an 800 (camera recorded) pixel wide copy, then making a perfect copy of the 800 (uncompressed transfer of camera recorded playback) pixel image. It doesn’t have all of the detail the 1,000 pixel copy, but it has all of the information of the 800 pixel image.

2) Think of camera playback as converting data to a video stream rather than than decompressing. The camera compression at recording isn’t lossless compression like a .zip file, it’s lossy compression like making .mp3 files.

3) Interfaces (AJA, BlackMagic, etc.) are just that, interfaces. They take a video stream and convert it to a data stream that can be seized by a computer as a file, or the opposite.

4) I can’t say that I understand this question. If you shoot on a digital camera that records to a card you should capture from the card, not through playback. This method is lossless relative to what the camera recorded. If you captured onto a tape you should capture through an interface (AJA, BlackMagic, etc.) or firewire if the tape was DV/HDV. That said, you could route/connect a camera or a switcher into a deck or a computer I/O and capture, at which point it isn’t capturing playback.