[Joseph Owens]

My local MacWizards are informing me that my current stability and display problems are due to the presence of a Kona 3 card, which when removed cures all of the problems that I’ve been seeing. FCP freezups, crashes, extremely slow renders… etc.

It seemed to be working fine up until Snow Leopard and K3 Version 7…. hmmmm….

jPo

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[Joseph Owens]

Case in point: EdWin.

Those who know can nod their heads sagely. And for the rest…. if anyone reads this forum… details available on request.

jPo

This IS my blog!

[Joseph Owens]

“This is no consumer stuff 🙂 ”

Really? Hummphhh. So much for democratrization.
No i-daVinci for my nano?

Those elite snobs will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

jPo

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[Joseph Owens]

Oh, sorry, I thought you wanted them to make the panels out of bakelite instead of milled aircraft aluminium. My mistake.

jPo

This IS my blog!

[Joseph Owens]

From Apple’s white paper “Handling Closed Captioning”

Scenarist files are always CEA-608 encoded. This means that if you output a program with a Scenarist-formatted closed captioning file to an HD tape format, Final Cut Pro outputs CEA-708 closed captioning that “carries” CEA-608-formatted closed captioning (supported by QuickTime 7.6 and later).

Of course this is some kind of legal statement, and doesn’t say anything at all about whether the approach will generate anything like a useable result…. which it apparently doesn’t, at least when attempted in an average environment.

However, you can use a third-party utility (such as CPC MacCaption) to reformat CEA-608 closed captioning as true CEA-708-encoded closed captioning, saving the result as a QuickTime closed captioning track that you can use for output instead.

Translation: Buy more software and it will finally work…. maybe.

In the sub-paragraph “Outputting Video with Closed Captioning Using Final Cut Pro”, I find the italicized portion of the following statement to be either blatantly false, misleading, or mistaken:

When outputting to tape, either CEA-608 or CEA-708 closed captioning can be encoded to the video stream being output using the Closed Captions controls in the Print to Video and Edit to
Tape windows. Select “Insert closed captioning data from file,” click the Choose File button, and choose one of the following:
* A Scenarist-formatted file (with an .scc extension)
* A QuickTime file with a closed captioning track

I would dearly love to be corrected in my belief. My conclusion, after wasting a considerable amount of time trying to get this to work, is that FCP will only support closed captioning in conjunction with third-party software conditioning and not stand-alone in any way.

jPo

jPo

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[Joseph Owens]

Are the captions coming straight from Scenarist?

More or less… the scc file was not composed in MacCaption, it was done by a post house that has been captioning with a hardware solution up to this point — but the business model is in the process of relocating, shall we say.

jPo

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[Joseph Owens]

So you have to wonder what definition of <> is in play…

jPo

This IS my blog!

[Joseph Owens]

Time will tell.
All this has happened before, and there has been a plot twist associated with each. My understanding of the re-hires is that individuals who had been headed off the previous management’s agenda had been let go and they are now back on the track that the new owners are pursuing… consequently there is a group currently out of that loop — namely the adherents to the old track. But that may just be embellishment.

I sincerely doubt that this will make any difference at the Apple COLOR end… might not affect the Final Cut workflow at all. Where it will be a threat is in the Lustre/Baselight/Scratch et al., market of $75,000 – $500,000 (and on up) systems which was daVinci’s territory up until multi-layer non-linear serve-grading came into favour/vogue, whatever. But — I suspect no Cadillacs at the bottom of the Cracker jack box, to re-borrow a phrase. Apple disrupted Silicon Color Final Touch2K from its $27K placement, including its service contract, so there is a bad, but not entirely dissimilar, example. The Apple offering now has the undeserved reputation of an uncomfortable side-kick (gimpy Deputy Festus to Sheriff Dillon) and although shows flashes of brilliance won’t ever get its own prime-time series, to stretch the metaphor to the breaking point.

So, this does remind me of the automobile industry as a business model. There are plenty of examples of well known domestic brands taking control of exotics. Plenty of cachet, no practical upshot. FIAT owns Ferrari — a new Maranello or Enzo still costs more than a mansion… with servants, and they still need a new timing belt every year, and do not react well to winter conditions. (And if you don’t know how to drive the thing, it will kill you.) Everybody thought the private Formula One teams would benefit from factory ownership… BAR, Sauber, Jordan… eventually were taken over by, for example Honda, BMW, and so on… who are now in the process of withdrawing and/or shutting down those teams. (Err… the exception now being Brawn GP, but that is a special combination of gifts.) Not to mention the knock-on problems of corporate expectations, including the client relations that go along with that, and so on.

Be extremely careful what you wish for. In any case, this is probably yet another nail in the coffin of what we have known up to this point as “telecine”, unless the non-linears start “reaching back” into that world. NOT easy, and “why”?

jPo

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[Joseph Owens]

https://tig.colorist.org/wiki3/index.php/Da_Vinci_September_8,_2009

Apparently this is legit, but it sure had the feel of a “poisson d’Avril” on first read.

jPo

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[Joseph Owens]

Okay, then so how about dual-stream, so that the consumer can select Stereo or Surround?

This so-called bluRay export seems to be less flexible than the average “real-time” DVD-R deck.

jPo

This IS my blog!