[Joseph Owens]

[Kritsada Kaewmani] “how it looks like then i can modifiy them or make a new one. “

You probably don’t want to do that. Only the manufacturers know how to port their sensor data into the ACES colorspace, so IDT’s will come from them exclusively… As far as ODTs go, its somewhat the inverse, so only the display manufacturers will know how to re-map the data so that it will look right/calibrated on their displays, although the true advantage of all this is the consistent exposure values being easier to write into conventional display colorspaces. All this of course is of large benefit to a particular workflow — 4K 16-bit LOG RGB image sequences.

Unless I am reading this all wrong, Quicktime users are not going to find this workflow particularly useful, even if they get past the really big numbers that are part of the calculation, all in terms of data throughput, storage, and hardware costs. Can’t see it being appealing to those who balk at the price of a certified grade monitor, and ODTs may not be worth the price of admission for graphics display manufacturers.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

Shane, I used to get some rejections from a high-level QA client claiming that my on-tape audio tracks were not “stereo” when viewed on a phase meter. I adopted the step of selecting the stereo tracks (if they had been delivered as discrete Left and Right tracks) choosing Modify… Make stereo pair. It may appear that it only makes the two little red arrows appear in the timeline, but I get the feeling there is something more going on….

Also, unless you choose something other than “stereo monitoring” in audio sequence settings, and in this case, the only option that FCP gives you is “Surround 5.1”, compressor won’t recognize that you are trying to export discrete tracks and will default back to 2 channel audio. Once you are in the compressor or FCP Conversion parameters dialogue, you will see what audio encoding options are available. This only changes if you choose away from 2 channel stereo, and of course if you choose Export Quicktime Movie, you don’t get any options at all. Its supposed to follow the sequence… but… in my experience, it doesn’t.

Its also worthwhile to pull up the Audio Mixer from Tools… and you can push the Left/Right sliders in that window, as well.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

Hope it works better than the axial vs. radial selector in Apple COLOR, which either did exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to do, or took the long way out to infinity, instead of through the vector origin… but Apple “took care of it”, *now sleepin’ wit’ da fishes*.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Jack Bonnett] “Assuming I can extract the information from the files to a ProRes or similar, maintaing the 5.1 audio how will I be able to get that into FCP? Will it need to go through Compressor to give me 5 separate audio channels?”

Might be the easiest way to stay in control/sanity check, but you may not have to extract anything deliberately if the first ProRes conversions are properly executed. I capture 12 channel audio from SR tape on a routine basis and it maps to FCP just fine. Change your “monitoring” in the FCP sequence Audio settings to the 5.1 surround mode, then make the appropriate “Dual Mono” selections in the first six channels and re-check the monitor/channel routing in the timeline — its a right-click option if you have never set up a discrete multi-channel output. You will have to be careful to keep the channel assignments consistent. SMPTE convention is L,R,C,Lfe,Ls,Rs, (A1-6), but there are others that Apple will offer. Making a new mpeg output can be accomplished in Compressor, but this might be complicated if you need to turn these back around in the supplier’s “proprietary” codec. MPeg itself is lossy, so this is by no means an ideal workflow in terms of quality preservation.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

Jake, are you going to be in Vegas next month?

You could take all this directly to Grant Petty, who probably doesn’t need to be on the floor, but is. I’m sure he would welcome your card if he hasn’t already… I don’t know if you have met him personally or not, but its A) possible and B) worth doing.

This is a little bit of a difference in how BlackMagic relates to their client base, as opposed to some ridiculously over-valued companies with fruit in their name, who really do treat their once-rabid supporters, who once kept them afloat (you know, where there was one set of footprints on the beach, the way the parable goes?) like dirt. BM really are post fanatics.

Not that long ago, several colleagues of mine anyway would not install a Blackmagic device in their systems if you paid them to. At the moment, however, I’ve got a number of their outboard boxes… SDI router, Teranex, HDLink, and so on, that have seriously made life easier, at least here in my little suite. The Decklink Extreme, in particular, seems to work better with FCP’s Edit-to-Tape module than the Kona3 ever did — at least it doesn’t keep disappearing like the AJA does if the Mac ‘sleeps’. Then its a system cold boot or forget it.

Porting Revival to Mac, or even Windows (more probably) and linking it with Resolve? Bring it. I’m in.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[MichaelMaier] “Are you talking about the Super HIgh Band AVR-3 quad videotape days”

1980-1986. But the same limitations still hold true with some of today’s lossy DV codecs, which tend to fall apart even faster. ProRes and DNxHD have made enormous strides, though, and 8-10 generations, which aren’t really re-compressions, really do hold up well. I really do disagree with attempting to flip back and forth, though, between RGB and Y’CbCr with so-called “Uncompressed” codecs and TIFF/DPX sequential files. Its not penalty-free, considering the re-matrixing and 4:2:2 processing that necessarily have to happen.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

And its not even Tuesday, TIGers.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

I will grade wherever in the workflow that it makes sense.

If the VFX have not been done yet or maybe we don’t even know this is going to be an FX shot, or maybe because I’m the first stop after picture lock, I will treat images prior to handoff — trying not to compromise any greenscreens so that we’re not hooping the matte. Conversely, as long as the fg/bg plates can be separated, and we’ve agreed to exchange ProRes4444 with an alphamatte, if elements need to be treated differently (grading in contex), as if the completed composite were an original scene — that’s fine, too. Often, if I happen to also be doing the VFX work and I know where the scene is going, I’ll do both — pre-bias the source elements so that whatever is happening to it later its already in its appropriate dramatic role — its a bit like an actor staying in-character and in-costume between takes. Or maybe I can simply stick the finished composite back in the Final Cut timeline and it doesn’t go back to grade. I’ll do this with cleanups as a rule — if all you’re doing is a logo or wire removal, the grade is the grade, and if there is something about the shot that needs another tweak (“Can you take out that other truck too?”), then its not a double round trip, just re-do the composite, not *plus* the correction, just to get it back to where you wanted it in the first place. That can backfire, of course, if you compromise an area that you need to borrow for a clean-plate.

So, there is no “better”, “set”, approach.

You can really help the VFX along if you can set the look of a scene — for example, if FX is placing a model building or other object into a landscape– big consequences for how the model is lit, according to time of day. If the modeling department can get that right, we’re good to go, but otherwise, if the producer/ post supervisor wants to do some more shading, that needs to be planned (as above), and it is a huge advantage to see that layered final.

And believe me when I say that I do count generations; that dates back to doing multiple effect passes on Super HIgh Band AVR-3 quad videotape, in NTSC, composite baseband. (That means if you haven’t figured out how to do it in 3 generations, you need to start over again, because what’s left after that is mud.)

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Leonard Frankford] “Also, I unchecked Abort Capture on Dropped Frames and it aborts anyway. Why does it do this and how can I prevent it?”

It depends on whether or not you are using the HDV log&capture mode or the regular Final Cut Log & Capture. The HDV mode will capture natively, but the FCP one will have difficulty, because it may be trying to transcode the incoming video stream (if you are not using the DV connection in favour of SDI) and this is not usually possible.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Pratul gaikwad] ” subtitles in ‘HTML’ format.”

What does that look like?

You need to convert the subtitles into some sort of either text or graphic format.

As text, you might be able to create text generators in Final Cut, and superimpose in the usual way, or depending on the HTML, convert that in a captioning/subtitling application like MacCaption and import either a QT movie or FCP XML onto a timeline and proceed as per usual.

Or export a lot of graphic files — png or tiff or whatever works for you and composite those onto a timeline. Otherwise it is not likely there is a Quicktime Pro or DVD authoring-type of procedure that will magically produce a subtitle track.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.