[John Calhoun]

DRW-“I keep hearing this argument over and over again, and I really find it quite interesting, as it is undoubtedly of more concern to FCP users than it should be, and of more concern with FCP than it is on many other NLEs.”

This isn’t an FCP issue. Berkley did not design RAID 3 specifically for FCP.

Are you saying you should spend the extra money for good drives, redundant power supplies, etc., but not spend a few extra bucks for a RAID 3 controller? You would rather swap out fresh drives every year for $500??? That doesn’t make any sense.

pxlmvr

[John Calhoun]

yo var,
I guess you would have to decide how critical your content on your drives is. If you are self-imployed, ain’t got the cash and don’t have to worry about deadlines or clients, then have at it. If, however, you do have deadlines and clients then I’d have to at least pony up for a decent controller.

The controller you speced is RAID 0 or RAID 1. RAID 0 gives you JBOD (just a bunch of disks) with no parity disc for backup should a drive fail. RAID 1 effectively cuts your hard drive capacity in half. I’d at minimum get a good RAID 3 controller. I’m with the other guys here, I’d never edit without RAID 3. This is not to say that your build would be inferior, but they are machines and machines do fail. Protect yourself.

One good thing if you buy a RAID and you have problems, you tell the boss that ‘it’s their fault.’ If you build it yourself, guess what? …yeah. … not fun; especially if a client has to wait. (…how many of us has had to do the ol’ misdirection tap dance while the render bar creeps to the right?)

Huge MediaVault HMV-U320R-1250-Max 1.250 TB and no problems whatsoever. And it’s the RAIDIEST because it looks like my Mac!

pxlmvr

(p.s. horror story: I remember when I was an edit assist, i was told to swap out two drives out of the avid and put in two empty ones. i surely did … to the wrong avid … during a render … i thought the editor’s head was going to explode as he stomped back to the machine room!)

[John Calhoun]

I disagree Dean. No adjustment is necessary.

The digital realm is 0 and analog is 7.5. When you edit in FCP the levels will be at 0. That’s standard in all NLEs.

ALL digital tapes record at 0 IRE as well. The 7.5 setup is added by the DECK during PLAYBACK.

When you are laying off to Beta or other analog, the CONVERTER BOX will add the necessary setup. If you add setup in your NLE, when you lay it off, the box will add another 7.5 and your master will be washed out.

Now, if you are monitoring through the digital deck and the output looks dark on a properly calibrated monitor, then you need to add PLAYBACK setup through the menu option on the deck (if it has that option).

pxlmvr

[John Calhoun]

You’ll do better to resize it in Illustrator since it is a vector graphic. That will give you your cleanest edges at any size.

pxlmvr

[John Calhoun]

What converter are you using to convert to analog? Are your levels brighter or darker? Do you have a hardware waveform/vectorscope to view output levels?

The bars in fcp should be converted correctly as they go through our media converter.

pxlmvr

[John Calhoun]

I read on the cow i think, a while back about exporting a reference then importing into compressor. The reasoning was, if i remember correctly, because compressor was a pretty buggy then and also for convenience sake. That way fcp isn’t tied up while compressing.
pxlmvr

[John Calhoun]

I generally don’t use the text tool or boris in FCP; I usually use Photoshop. I can be a lot more creative in PS and is a necessary tool when dealing with graphics from clients. If you don’t know PS, you need to add it to your list of applications.

(if you don’t know PS don’t sweat these steps. Just print them out for later) For broadcast safe in PS, add an adjustment layer to your graphic and clamp your “output levels” to 16 and 235 (not 0 and 255). This will look a little strange in PS, but will look ok on your NTSC monitor and be broadcast legal.

It’s also better to add drop shadows in PS to save on rendering time on slower machines.

To merge your graphic elements onto a single layer *including drop shadows and glows*, create a new layer and hit Command, Option, Shift “E”. This will merge all of your layers in a single pass. You can then save and import into FCP as a PSD or save the single layer as a targa (.tga) file, but you then need to make an alpha channel. To do this you Command click the layer to create a selection, then go to Channels and hit the ‘Save Selecetion as a channel’ button at the bottom. This creates your alpha channel. Then just ‘Save As’ a Targa file at 32 bits.

pxlmvr

[John Calhoun]

I recently upgraded to the intuos 3 9×12 from the intuos 2 9×12 which functions the same except for tablet buttons. The best thing for me is having a scroll wheel and multiple buttons in FCP.

The mapping I use is:

left main-regular click
right main-control click
left small-option click
right small-command click

Currently I haven’t mapped any functions to the tablet buttons, although I’m thinking of adding control, option, and command click there in addition to control and option on the pen.

As has been said, it really does speed up workflow and I hate having to go to our other station that just uses Apple’s single button mouse. Having a pen is indespensible when doing delicate work in Photoshop or doing any sort of drawing.

An added benefit is, on long days of editing, when the wrist gets a little tired, I can switch to the pen for a while to avoid any carpel tunnel issues.

pxlmvr

[John Calhoun]

What’s your drive situation? Having a fast RAID will be faster than a firewire drive.

pxlmvr

[John Calhoun]

yep. fcp5 and 10.4.4 has been very stable for me as well. I no longer seem to have to trash my preferences every day or the unexpected quitting. i might just hang here for a while.

pxlmvr