John Heagy
Forum Replies Created
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I’m not familiar with how Avid deals with ProRes. What metadata do you need beyond Reel and TC? I would hope both of those would come in with the import of proxy or 4444. Episode will preserve both if used to make the proxy files. If you can maintain unique Reel names the rest is standard offline/online workflow which Avid should handle without help.
John Heagy
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[Alex Geroulaitis] “TBolt will not be available as on add-on card”
Where did you learn this?
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Hi Gary,
Date in the card volume name on v3? We did a shoot with v3 loaded and I got the same volume name as before. I looked through the manual and saw no setting to enable this.
Thanks
John Heagy -
Hi David,
So you’re planning to do the offline with Avid and the online with FCP? This is what we do everyday.
We link QT media to Avid Meridan offline sequences based solely on TC and Reel. We built our own system but Videotoolshed has an app that does the same thing.
https://www.videotoolshed.com/product/41/fcpreconnect/3
The first step is to consolidate the Avid seq then export an omf. We use Automatic Duck to convert the omf to xml. The xml is processed externally and clips are linked to any media that matches.
This type of workflow requires unique Reel names. The Alexa creates Reel names based on Camera A, B etc and Card number. An example would be A001L6PQ… A Camera, Card 001, Left eye, and finally the 3 digit base36 camera serial number. Unfortunately the Alexa card number gets reset to 001 on power up so you’d end up with duplicate reels every day. That may have changed with the new firmware and allow you to enter a new Card number. If so you could combine camera and card numbers to keep every card unique. You could also blast your own reel numbers across clips using FCP or QTchange from Videotoolshed. This is want we plan on doing as we have a reel name system in place.
I can’t speak in terms of AMA or any modern Avid system. We still use OS 9 Avids… yes OS 9.
On a separate note: Arri did a near perfect file based workflow regarding Card and Clip names. Especially when compared to the abysmal FAT32/4Gig spanned/NONAME/CONTENTS/truncated UUID system Panasonic uses. The only thing I’d like added would be a date stamp to the Card names so it’s easier to maintain unique reel names.
John Heagy
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Open one of the problem clips in QuickTime player and do a “Save as..” self contained. That may fix it. Were these recorded with the new 3.0 firmware?
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I wouldn’t suggest using a separate recorder for proxies. Like you said file name/TC nightmare plus another thing to fail. You can easily exceed .5x proxy render time if you deploy Episode Engine on two of your Mac Pros. The more cores the better. Episode does not have proper LUT support but you can use the basic color correction settings to get close. Never tried creating Avid edit ready files with Episode. I would recommend archiving everything to LTO after each shoot. This will keep your footage safe in the event of power failure. A Cache-A system would be perfect.
John Heagy
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[bryson jones] “I’m betting you are right, the XML schemas are fighting”
hmmm.. if your right, than all clips would be wrong not just spanned. Before I got the mxf demo I would simply drag the CONTENTS folder into a catalog and filter to the video.mxf files. Is there a way to disable the mxf feature and let Calibrated do the work? That would also confirm the xml conflict… no?
Catdv “sees” the match point TCs and indicates them as dimmed TC numbers in the catalog. Would it not be relatively simple to use that info to trigger an “auto merge” of those spanned clips?
Oh by the way… Arri’s Alexa kicks the P2 NONAME/CONTENTS paradigm from here to kingdom come! Near perfection!
Thanks
John Heagy -
It will be interesting how Apple deals with 64 bit Quicktime, which would surely be required. I would guess Apple has it hidden away in Snow Leopard and is reserved solely for FCP 8. It may surface as a general API in Lion.
Just a guess…
John
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Thanks Matt, but that asks for a new start TC. I suppose if one was meticulous that would work. I did try that but there was a jump at the match point. Doing the same thing manually in QT does not jump so it seems Calibrated is not at fault. The idea is to build a Worker job that would recognize P2 media and direct it to an Episode watch folder for conversion to ProRes.
There is a DV pref that stitches shots together but looks like it is deprecated. Stitching spanned shots together can be done in FCP via L&T. It would be a nice feature in CatDV.
I’ll look more closely to determine how large and in what direction the jump is.
Thanks
John Heagy -
Nice list Zac! I ike your proper use of 29.97i for frame rate instead of 59.94i.
A few things I noticed:
I think your giving the Quicktime Animation codec to much credit. I’ve always found it limited to 8bits. It can be intra or inter.
You should ad the open standard VC-2 aka Dirac from the BBC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(video_compression_format)Also Avid’s DNX is an open standard aka VC-3
Apple’s “NONE” codec is still used. It’s basically an uncompressed Animation.
John Heagy