John Rofrano
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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I had the completely opposite experience. I came from editing with Vegas Pro where you manipulate everything directly on the timeline and editors who are use to doing 3-point editing would be lost because their old techniques did not work. FCP X with it’s magnetic storyline and secondary storylines made perfect sense to me because Tracks are for audio editors. They never made sense to me for editing video. I am telling a story. I could care less about tracks. ????
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
[Bill Thomas] “I then assumed ALL 1080p would edit like that. But once I tried footage from the GH4 it was OK. Weird!”
The reason for the disparity is that MPEG4 is an extremely broad specification that no software in the world can support in it’s entirety. Not so with earlier formats like DV or MPEG2. So it is quite possible for two cameras to shoot MPEG4 but one is extremely difficult to edit while the other is easy. The AVCHD format (which is a subset of MPEG4) tried to fix this problem by tightening the standard. Usually any camera that shoots AVCHD (like your GH4) can be edited easily. But as manufacturers try to optimize their cameras, they use more features of the MPEG4 spec that software isn’t ready to handle yet or that requires more compute power than before and so the footage stutters until software or hardware catches up.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
I’m guessing it’s a graphics driver problem. Try updating to the latest drivers for your card. If you are at the latest drivers, try downgrading to older drivers.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
[Bill Thomas] “I have an older Mac and was curious if it can even be upgraded to work with 4k (or even 1920, since even THAT format lags in Premiere Pro!). “
I edit AVCHD 1080p like butter a day long on my 2010 Mac Pro 12 Core w/24GB Memory so you shouldn’t be having any problems on your 2012 Mac Pro. Mine is a 2.9Ghz as compared to your 2.4Ghz but that shouldn’t make that much of a difference. You didn’t say what Graphics Card you have. I have a Radeon HD 7950. A Radeon HD 5870 would be fine as well. The HD 5770 is about half the power of the HD 5870. If you have the stock graphics card that might be your problem. It is very weak by today’s standards. I also added an SSD boot drive to mine. That made a huge difference in performance over a boot drive that is still an HDD.
I don’t use Adobe software so this is with Final Cut Pro X so maybe you need to upgrade your software instead of your hardware but I have no problems at all editing 1080p on my 2010 Mac.
[Bill Thomas] “SInce I’m still testing, I have been using the MOV format at 100mbs, 59.94. Would the AVCHD format be better to edit with? (I read a previous post about some compressions, like H264, being awful to edit with).”
Why are you shooting 59.94 @ 100 Mbps? I would try 29.97 @ 50 Mbps and see of that edits easier. I edit 29.97 so at 59.97 you are asking your Mac to do twice the work. What are you getting for that? (besides slow editing) and is it worth it? If you’re shooting Formula 1 racing I agree that 59.97 is much better but for every day shooting 29.97 has served us well for decades.
[Bill Thomas] “And since I probably know what your answer will be, and if I have to go to a new system, what would be the least expensive Mac I could get that would easily edit 1920 (and occasionally 4k) using Premier Pro CC?”
Least expensive would be to get a Used iMac from someplace reputable like OWC. Something like this: Apple 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display for $1,579.00 USD. Any Core i5 iMac will do but a Core i7 will be even better for video editing.
[Bill Thomas] “Lastly, I’ve been very pleased with external USB 3, 3.5” drives instead of my old SATA RAID setup. Never any hiccups, BUT it’s been for 1280×720 P2 footage. “
I edit 1080 on external USB 3.0 drive without any problems in FCP X. If you got a newer iMac you could get a Thunderbolt RAID enclosure to get better disk performance if needed.
[Bill Thomas] “EDIT: Since I prefer Premiere Pro, can you offer an argument why a PC system could be better/cheaper than a Mac? (I have had Macs forever, but I’m not married to it).”
I wouldn’t wish a PC on my worst enemy. I used PC’s for over 30 years and a Mac for about 5 years now and I would never go back to using a PC. Cheap PC’s are more trouble than they are worth and good PC’s cost as much as a Mac but are still an inferior user experience so why bother. Unless you want to learn to become a system administrator, get a Mac. Think about it… I’m still editing on an 8 year old Mac. I would never attempt to edit on an 8 year old PC if it still even worked.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
Are you working in HD or 4K? We use to use Sony MXF HD422 1080-60i 50Mbps to send HD to NTSC broadcast. It had plenty of quality and you can create your MP4 files for YouTube from it.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
Fonts can be install for the entire Computer or they can be installed only for an individual User. Perhaps you are trying to install a Computer level font for which you already have a User level version?
One thing you can do is look for the font by name under All Fonts in Font Book and remove any version you may have and then re-install the new ones that you are trying to install.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
[Bryan London] “does it being a quadcore bring it up to over 50% chance?”
OK that model has a Intel Pentium N3700 @ 1.60GHz which has a better PassMark of 1848 which is better than the Celeron and about 50% of the Core i5. The problem is that the minimal requirements are bare minimums with a strong recommendation to go higher so going lower is usually not advisable.
The bottom line is if you can playback the timeline. If the timeline playback is too slow, you’ll never be able to render properly. If no video can be seen on the timeline when you place it there, that could be a different problem. You should see it. The question is if you have enough power to play it back.
[Bryan London] “have you ever heard of /seen anyone edit in the cloud? i think adobe had a thing like that.”
Adobe doesn’t have editing in the cloud. They deliver their software downloads from the cloud and store files in the cloud but you download and install the software on your computer and edit locally.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
[Wendy Peter] “It is exactly as you have said, I will be able to install whichever system was on my 2014 computer which appears to be lion or mountain lion.”
Actually, OS X 10.9 Mavericks is probably what came with the 2014 MacBook Pro’s. Mavericks came out on October 22, 2013 so it makes sense that all 2014 Mac’s would have it.
If the Mac that you have has nothing on it that you want to keep, you can get back to Mavericks very easy. Just hold down Command ⌘+R when you boot the computer and it will boot into the recovery partition. From there you can reformat the disk and install the original OS that the Mac came with. Perhaps that’s what Apple is going to walk you through.
If you want to preserve the existing data on the drive, just use a program like Carbon Copy Cloner, to copy the contents of the drive to an external drive of equal or greater size. CCC will create bootable backups so you could even boot using the external hard drive to get back to the current OS. You can then copy back any data that you need after installing Mavericks.
Finally, if you wanted to be able to dual boot into either OS, you could repartition your existing drive and install Mavericks on the new partition using Recovery Mode (Command ⌘+R). Then to use the new OS, just hold down the Option ⌥ key when you boot and it will show you a selection of partitions to boot from. So there are several options to consider.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
[Bryan London] “i bought vegas 12 platinum, had a disk, and year or two ago i think i paid a 60 dollar upgrade and got a download version, i could be wrong. i don’t have the disk, it is being shipped from europe hopefully soon.”
You don’t need your disc. All you need is your serial number. You can download Movie Studio 12 Platinum here:
[Bryan London] “if i can see the media in the trimmer, get it the way I want and put it in the timeline, is it possible that over several hours/a day that the dell plastic wonder can make a render ready for dvd? even though I can’t see the footage played in timeline? perhaps impossible w/out a video card. it’s windows 10, some intel celeron about 1.6ghz i think, hd has about 340g left on it.”
Unfortunately, the act of rendering must be able to playback the footage on the timeline. So if that’s not working for you, a successful render is highly doubtful. I would try it with what you have and see for yourself.
You laptop is way below the minimal specifications to run Movie Studio. MS12 is designed for a minimum of a Core i5 Dual Core 2.0Ghz. Your Celeron is a single core running at 1.6Ghz. Even if you could somehow assemble an edit, my guess is that at render time all it will do is overheat and shutdown or reboot.
Here is the PassMark Rating for your Celeron 1.6Ghz. It’s 995 compared to 3493 rating of a minimal Core i5. It has about 1/3 the power that is needed to run Move Studio. I don’t see how you can make this work. As I said, try a render now and see if you can get it to work without overheating.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
[Eric Sanchez] “i went to render my project and tried to save in magix prores hq and it didnt save the video portion..”
What are you basing this on? Did you try and view it on your PC after the render? What did you use to play it back. Apple ProRes is a QuickTime format. Do you have Apple QuickTime installed? If not, you won’t see any video because the ProRes codec comes with QuickTime.
[Eric Sanchez] “i usually would save in sony avc as a mp4 blah blah but since prores is all the hype these days i figured id save it as such.”
Apple ProRes is not “hype”. It has been the defacto industry standard on the Mac for many, many years for delivery to broadcast, film, etc. but it doesn’t play well with Windows PC’s so if you don’t need to use it to submit your work, I would avoid it. It’s not a native format for the PC. MAGIX added it to Vegas Pro to be Mac compatible because most Post houses are Mac based and require ProRes for submission.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com