[Jeff Strachan]

“In between frame rates”
Ugh! glad I am not the one writing NLE programs that have to work with this %$#%$

yes, I had expected an array of possible frame/field arrangments but not something quite that messy.

So the answer to my question is, “both, and more”

Jeff Strachan
CJBN TV
Kenora, Ontario

[Jeff Strachan]

Our station has DG Fastchannel, Extremereach, and Mijonet.

the biggest problem is with Mijo who will send an e-mail that a spot is ready and when we look for it, nope, not there. They will claim up and down that it was sent out to all stations yesterday and later discover that oops they missed us somehow.
Mijo also does not arrange the spots on the server by date they were downloaded.

At least with Extremereach I can go and force a download myself.
they were also obviously hungry to get as many stations on board when they were starting up. We are very small yet they took the time to give us all the support we needed to be using their service delivery. That impressed me.

DG is usually on top of any issues like this and often calls us to let us know that there was a problem in trying to upload a spot to us(usually a modem/ISP issue) wheras Mijo seems oblivious when that occurs.

We also have DG’s Pathfire for full length show downloads but we have not used it now for a year. This is a scheduled satellite download and they keep moving to different sat’s. I have one, fixed, dish to use for this and its a real pain to have to re-aim it twice a year because CBS or Fox decides to change sat feeds.
we get all our shows now from Global TV’s Canlink feeds or CTV’s Red,green,and blue national feeds.

[Jeff Strachan]

I should add that the suite in Vancouver is not using firewire to machines, I believe that they are using an AJA board and sending SDI to DigiBeta as you are.

[Jeff Strachan]

I was in contact with the tech in a larger office of the company I work for. they have 15 FCP suites and 20 people editing.

He states that the problem is the user pref file getting corrupted, that Apple/FC knows about the problem and so far have not fixed it. The work around is as discussed, to dump the user and start again fresh.

The work around he uses throughout the year is a variation on creating a new user. Once he has created a user on a system he then copies the user pref file to a new folder on the desktop and names it “123”. That way a brand new, uncorrupted copy of that file is just sitting there on the desktop. When FCP starts acting funky he dumps the user pref file and then copies the ‘clean’ file of user pref’s that is sitting on the desktop to the preferences library and re-names it. As far as FCP is concerned this is still the same user and the file is as it was when first created.

He also said that once a year they take each machine out of service, format the drive and re-load FCP (of course first backing up all media even though they do not format the media drive(s)).

,,,, I now just get mad at the PC vs. Mac ads. Is there really any difference?

[Jeff Strachan]

We have had a similar problem
We uses a Sony DSR11 via firewire to capture from and print to.

Once in a while when playing back a clip the audio will sound fine and the meters will show good levels when playing back in FCP
BUT
when sending to the tape machine the audio is heavily distorted and the levels on the tape deck indicate that the audio in is wildly overdriven.

We shut down FCP and reboot the computer and all is OK again until the next time.
the other solution is as above, dumping user preferences and starting over.

Obviously these are both only stop gap solutions. I believe it is a bug in the Apple software. there are known problems with the way FCP communicates over Sony’s ilink(firewire1394) and in corruption of user preference files.

Hopefully (??) Apple will get these bugs worked out at some point in time.