[Jimmy See]

hi mate,

Wasn’t back at the facility where I’m using the particular equipment and FCPx until today. I’m having similar issues today also (although there’s other confounding factors involved today so hard to get a measure).

The system specs are

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac14,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 3.4 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
Memory: 32 GB

By my reckoning this should be sufficient for the demands we’re placing on the system with our workflow, any clue?

[Jimmy See]

Actually solved my own problem. Embarrassingly basic troubleshooting step I should have taken much sooner before all the other stuff I tried. Just cleared the render cache. I don’t exactly understand why there would be anything from these clips in the render cache as I’d not been rendering them because they could playback real time but in any case, clearing the render cache fixed it up right away.

[Jimmy See]

I seem to have sort of accidentally figured out how to do it in FCP 7. Basically the answer, as it seems was pointed out by Larry Jordan and others is: use Plural Eyes.

I thought I may as well at least sync all the shots first while I tried to get an answer to my question and then I saw there was a ‘make multiclip’ option in plural eyes. Somehow Pluraleyes seems to have figured out a workaround to FCP 7’s limitation with respect to non-continuous and continuous multiclips; generating a working multiclip which simply switches on and off tiles when media ends and then starts again.

The workaround is not perfect though, my A cam tile (for some reason not always the upper left tile though usually despite the synching being done exactly the same way for every interview) will occupy 1 space in your split-up viewer consistently as expected, however different cameras will appear to occupy different tiles in a rotation for each occasion that B cam clips end and then start again. In my 2 cam setup where the footage is primarily A-cam except when occasionally switching to the B cam for cutaway, this isn’t a big problem, though if I had more than 2 cameras this would get really confusing since they’d be constantly swapping positions making reliably switching from B cam to C cam for example really hard since B and C could be in different tiles to where they were a second ago.

I’m lucky though because for the situation I’m in now, this is perfectly fine and completely solves my problem.

[Jimmy See]

That’s because I can only test with the tools I have at my disposal sadly 🙁 .

Curiously, since the last posting further testing yielded some more positive results, though I’m not entirely sure what I did. I noticed after all my frustration that there was a checkbox in the import options that read ‘Use existing media’ intuitively this looked like it was my culprit but before checking it I decided to read the automatic duck pro-import user guid which (in a section referring to AAFs) said that the checkbox was only relevant in terms of video and that if no video is present, the audio will be linked to the embedded existing media regardless of the state of the checkbox.

At the time when I noticed it, I was actually doing another OMF import test using the Automatic Duck Pro Import (this OMF had been generated with the plain old ‘audio to OMF’ setting of standard FCP 7’s featureset. Seeings as the user guide actually only mentioned that the checkbox was irrelevant to my situation in the context of AAFs I reasoned it was worth trying here and checking the checkbox thus telling it to use existing media not reference external media which should be an option only for if you want to reconnect to a specific media directory. It worked a charm.

I then tried this again with an AAF with the supposedly irrelevant checkbox checked just in case and now IT worked too, when previously it hadn’t. I even checked to see whether or not the folder created for the embedded media extracted from the OMF was being referenced by the now online media from my newly imported AAF somehow thus invalidating the test, but no, it had indeed extracted the media from the AAF in to it’s own separate folder.

I guess I’m glad I got it to work in FCP, though it doesn’t exactly make sense. I haven’t had the time to check in all the other applications the various exports failed to open in before to see if they magically work now as well but whatever. Anyway just for future people in this situation to sum up.

There’s a checkbox in Automatic Duck’s pro import plugin that I should have noticed which you can switch on or off that allows the AAF or OMF to reference existing media embedded within the file (it extracts it to a folder) or for it to reference external media which you have manually link to yourself. It’s not meant to make a difference unless there’s video present but apparently it actually does after al.

[Jimmy See]

Thank you.

It’s actually connected in a peer to peer network of machines which each have large local internal RAIDs. Could that cause issue do you think? I would have though one would need to have network drives mounted before Avid could ‘see’ them.

I’ll try starting it the ethernet cable disconnected.

[Jimmy See]

what’s the difference between this and same as source?

[Jimmy See]

Thanks fellas, I think the method that best fits my needs here is the ‘show reference clips’ option. Then it’s just a matter of consolidating all the clips in the bin to the destination volume of my choice.

Thanks again for all your help.

[Jimmy See]

Hi,

Thanks for replying here is a screenshot of my encoder window

and here is additional information in the basic video settings pane

it hasn’t actually turned out to be a problem as the pixels are the correct aspect ratio to fill a widescreen at 1920×1080 but it’s just unexpected and I’d like to know what’s happening especially if there are unintended consequences in future.

[Jimmy See]

For what it’s worth, I was still composing this message when the editors and I hit upon a solution which has worked remarkably well so far.

I posted the last message anyway so that anybody in this situation should it ever arise again can read the solution.

We created a directory named something other than Avid MediaFiles on machine 2’s RAID let’s say ‘consolidated_material’ for example’s sake. We then placed the Avid MediaFiles folder in to this as a subdirectory. Then we mapped the ‘consolidated_material’ folder as a network drive in it’s own right which meant that for windows, it was a drive containing nothing but Avid MediaFiles on it’s root directory.

Then I opened Avid, copied bins from other versions of the project in to the new master project version I was making and then switched enabled Avid to see network mapped drives as media drives in order for it find the newly mapped network drive (X:) and scan the Avid MediaFiles folder within, which it did.

This worked but would have been very difficult if the network were more complex than the 4 machines ours consists of and if anybody were actually using the RAID to work from at the time, in our case we’re still moving to the RAID and so everyone is still using their external drives so everything I do has no effect on everyone else’s ability to work.

[Jimmy See]

Resolve the grading software? Or is it something else? I was not aware of it to be honest. In any case I’ve figured it out now. It wasn’t anything technical, either bad interface design or I just miss things that are staring me right in the face.

Basically in the output preset section which included ONLY information about frame size and frame rate in the preset names, you can choose any old preset you like doesn’t matter and then below that there is another pane with further details about that preset. From there, there is a create button at the top of that pane and within that details pane there is the ability to define your own preset which includes a ‘compression’ field where you can select a codec. For some reason there are only 4 available options: uncompressed, DNXHD185, DNXHD120, and DNXHD120TR. It actually wasn’t what I needed but the DNXHD120 might do I guess. Pretty limited and counterintuitive I hope the other abilities of this software make up for some frustrating stuff so far.

Tell me about Resolve