[Keith Koby]

[Herb Sevush] “I work on half hour cooking shows broadcast on PBS. I’m as interested in working in 4K as I was in 3D. Take a moment for that to sink in.”

Really? If I ever had any respect for the content you post here, it is completely gone now… Sad.

I’ve got plenty of friends here in NYC that _do_ work on cooking shows that are completely interested in any technology that is powerful enough to work and render realtime in 4k.

The breakthroughs happening for processing power at price point should be of interest to any post professional despite personal reservations about the software or platform.

[Keith Koby]

Well, can’t wait to see that synergy!

[Keith Koby]

whoa, whoa, whoa, stop the clock. You can’t break out ones mixed in with the exclamations and then claim sarcasm after the fact.

[Keith Koby]

We have a larger san and plenty of seats. ~500TB total and +60 san hosts. About 35 of those are stations where editors sit.

We currently have about 10 users on fcpx. That’s up from 3 of us last year at this time.

There have been a number of threads on fcpx and sharing on xsan in this forum and the other one. Do a search in here and you’ll find it.

We are currently using the san location methods, but blend the two examples given in the white paper. Our san locations are folders that sit parallel to where the fcp7 projects go.

Last week, we switched up to try out John’s method of using sparse bundles. We like it. It’s nice and clean. The disk images basically equate to the fcp7 project file too. Just be careful with either san locations or disk images on your san. Make sure you put them in a beefy storage pool that can support holding renders and playing back renders. In the future we hope to see better network and collaborative sharing options.

Also, if you keep your media centrally located (which makes sense on a san), make sure you have the “copy media into event” preference turned off on every station. It is on by default.

The other thing you might encounter if you haven’t done any research yet and you have a big facility full of 12 core mac pro workstations, is that fcpx works better on new hardware (read: not old mac pros). Use it on the new t-bolt iMac with san links and t-taps, and you’ll love the speed.

One last piece of advice would be to wait till the new mac pro ships. If you are anything like me, I have an aversion to proliferating windows boxes on the san and in the facility. My job is way easier dealing with OSX only. I want to see how the new mac pro performs with each app. To me, the premiere route probably means PCs with nvidia cards or imacs with nvidia cards rather than new macs pros which seem to only have the AMD option.

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D

[Keith Koby]

I skimmed through the rest of the replies, and don’t think you’ve got this answered yet. Export your 5.1 master ProRes file from your fcpx timeline. Open it in QT to make sure that it is indeed 5.1 in metadata.

Download Handbrake (and VLC). Handbrake started reading ProRes files a while back. I imagine the decode is going to 8 bit, but the resulting h.264 is anyway, so don’t worry.

Grab the AppleTV3 preset and then modify the audio settings to just make the one AC3 5.1 track.

The x.264 encoder in handbrake is ridiculously good compared to just about every paid transcoder out there and the audio will be 5.1.

Not to talk bad on episode, but even if you do get the pro audio option, you have to use the channel mapper to rearrange audio into the order they expect (which by the way matches no industry standard).

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D

[Keith Koby]

It doesn’t hurt to have certifications when you are interviewing for work.

You remind me of a funny thing that happened several years ago. I had an editor interviewing for a low level position and she put her name with ACE after it on the header of her resume. I had to ask. “Wow, that’s quite an accomplishment to be accepted into the ACE (american cinema editors) at such a young age, without any film credits!” She was like, “Yeah, I’m an Apple Certified Editor…”

That was the best.

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D

[Keith Koby]

It’s my turn to rant…

No offense to my friends at ESPN, but, that channel was bad. The 3D was never great because shooting a live event is difficult as is and the 3D always had problems. But that wasn’t the real problem with that channel. It wasn’t the 3D as much as it was the compression. Cable cos were squeezing the frame compatible signal down a regular sized 15 mbs mpeg2 HD pipe. The picture is ~ twice as busy as a regular HD picture and the mpeg2 encoders just can’t keep up. You’d have artifacts all over the picture and it was really a miserable experience. If you kick it up to 18.75 mbs, it does better, but then you have engineers jump off a cliff because you’re giving up half a qam for a channel that has content running 12 hours a month or whatever. And even at 18.75 mbs mpeg2, 720p and 1080i 3D are not quite good enough. 1080p 23.98 is _ok_ at that bit rate, but of course, 24 is no good for live sports.

I’m speaking for myself here, not as a representative of any company. I’m very disappointed in the way that the broadcast industry destroyed 3d@home. We were in such a hurry to get 3D content up that we sacrificed quality for just some little bit of quantity. We sacrificed better technologies for the rush of being the first. The first 3D tvs available to consumers were really bad. The technology has improved remarkably in the last 2 years, but it doesn’t matter now. When the early adopters had to pay exorbitant premiums for a bad experience, the well was poisoned.

Keith

[Keith Koby]

Similarly, there was this from apple’s Mac Pro page:

With all that power, you’ll be able to do things like seamlessly edit full-resolution 4K video while simultaneously rendering effects in the background — and still have enough power to connect up to three high-resolution 4K displays.

Any clue there? True background rendering when you have the firepower?

For me, this has always been about “retina” monitoring. 4k and beyond ecosystems that easily enable pro video and pro photo/publishing workflows is the endgame. It was easy to see that we wouldn’t see an update until the technology to drive it was available.

Now the question is, will we see a reasonably priced 4k display from them when the computer is available?

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D

[Keith Koby]

[Victor Vazquez] “I recently heard that companies, at least in New York, choose to stay with Final Cut Pro 7 because FCP X lacks certain features. What are your opinions of FCP X? I wanted to get a certification in the new FCP X, but now am wondering if it’s even worth it. Would it be worth it to get certified in the new FCP? Does anyone use FCP X at work?”

Hi. We are in NYC, we use it extensively (yes – for real work!), and we hire freelancers who know how to use it. Certify yourself if you want. I think the classes are getting better at a few places like MEW.

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D

[Keith Koby]

Yeah try this. Disable a/v output in the window menu. Open your pref pane and switch frame rates. Command tab back to fcp and re-enable a/v output.

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D