[Keith Moreau]

Yes, I do have 5.0.3

More information:

I used ‘Cocktail’ to reset the system caches (this seems to work for a variety of weirdness) and tried loading up the project again and still every sequence now displays red bars. Not sure why.

I closed it and opened a simpler sequence and I get yellow bars. Open up the original sequence and all red bars again, even on the simplest sequences. But now just clicking really simple sequences within this project I’m getting yellow bars again everywhere.

I don’t even know if this is just a cosmetic glitch or if PPro thinks these are red when they’re red or yellow, or it’s just displaying red because it’s confused.

Anyway at least for now I’m yellow. Any other advice is sincerely appreciated.

[Keith Moreau]

Thanks for the follow up.

I’ll try the cache clean thing.

Is there also a reason to move the location of the media cache files or database to another drive? I’m looking at those files now and most the large ones are .cfa, and some are .pek. I notice when I’m on a fast CPU there are less of these files, I guess because PPro can render right away and doesn’t need to save a preview file, is this correct?

Anyway, thanks for the help, and any other suggestions are welcome.

[Keith Moreau]

Thanks for the response Jon.

Here is the thing:

I have multiple eSata drives the media is spread out amount them, they are superfast 300MB /second rate, I don’t think it is a media access problem.

The reason that I’m using PPro CS5 now and ‘switching’ from FCP is that I DON”T want to transcode clips. I’ve been transcoding for years with FCP and I’m tired of it, it’s a waste of time and hard drive space. If I didn’t mind transcoding, I’d have just stuck with FCP as I know it well and it works well with Prores transcodes and does better multi camera than PPro in my opinion when the tracks are all prores. One of the promises of CS5 was the ability not to transcode, and I’ve seen plenty of marketing material that show disparate codecs on 12 tracks, with effects playing at once, without transcoding.

Also, if I do a ‘Cocktail’ cleaning (a useful Mac utility) of the system caches on my Mac OS system (I’m not sure if this actually does anything to help the problem though), and restart, multicam works perfectly fine. It seems though that PPro gets bogged down after a while, like a memory leak or something after doing some complex imported and use. I was just wondering if there was a way to save some time and reset it within PPro, it’s caches, or preferences to get it into that initial state where it works fine.

Thanks again, and I welcome any more suggestions.

[Keith Moreau]

I have a couple of different questions related to Multicam Editing and XDCAM EX Files:

Is there a way to ‘gang’ the playback in the Multicamera Window with the Timeline and the Program window? I can ‘scrub’ and get the Multicamera window to chase but when I play the timeline the Multicamera window freezes. If I stop on the timeline the Multi-Camera Window with then ‘chase’ to the stopped frame. I really would like to be able to do edits on the timeline and actually see all the cameras playing at once. I can do that within the Multicamera window’s controls, but it makes it less efficient. FCP is better at this part unless there is some PPro setting I’ve missed to accomplish this.

I also like the way that CS5 deals with native formats rather than having to go through the time consuming process of either wrapping or transcoding native files into Quicktime files. For FCP use Calibrated Software’s QT plugin that fakes out Quicktime into thinking XDCAM EX files are Quicktime files and this is how I bypass the wrapping or transcoding process when having to use Quicktime or FCP.

However, sometimes for my workflow I need to export FCP XML and it seems that PPro is ‘helping’ with the XDCAM EX files and putting all the files together if they are spanned into the first clip of the set of spanned clips. Then when exporting XML the sequences only refer to the first XDCAM EX file and misses the other XDCAM EX files. Is there any workaround or setting to keep CS5 from combining the clips?

Another Question: Is the new Quadro 4000 Mercury Engine enabled for the Mac and CS5? Is it better than the Quadro 4800?

I am finding that I’m using PPro a lot more than FCP nowadays mostly because of it’s handling of native codecs better than FCP.

Thanks for any answers.

[Keith Moreau]

Thanks for the information, it’s very helpful. I was tape-based but now mostly flash memory-file based, the interviews could get up to 2 hours continuous. I guess I’ll cross that road when I get to it, but I just wanted to see what was possible.

Thanks again.

[Keith Moreau]

Thanks Rolf, that allowed me to create preview clips.

-Keith

[Keith Moreau]

Hi Rolf

Thanks for the reply. After experimenting with this I can’t really figure out if the camera clock adjust is working. I assume it should be modifying the “record date” field but I’ve tried with small and large values, and since the unit to adjust is in seconds I assume very large values for hours or days.

However, I can’t seem to see it having any effect on a particular record.

-Keith

[Keith Moreau]

Yeah, sorry about ‘global’ vs ‘selected,’ I was wrong about that in my previous post. But I did try it first and I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted. If I wanted to add 4 days to the date recorded, how would I go about that? It seems that tool goes up to -12 or +12 hours and that’s it. I’d also have to bulk replace the record date field with the location or GMT date field, right?

Thanks much!

[Keith Moreau]

Thanks Rolf, I did try this but it affected all clips globally. I wound up doing a search and replace for the various sets of clips affected for that field, which worked out. A bit more manual than I would like but it worked.

[Keith Moreau]

Thanks for the info Walter!

When you create a field like “Interview” do you put “Interview” in one field, then “Sit Down” in another, or do you load all that sub-category information in the one ‘Interview” field? I suppose 2 fields would be better than one, such as an “Interview” field, and an “Interview Type” field. However you could imply that if an “Interview Type” field was filled with anything, that clip is an interview, and then you can just search for anything in that field “Sit Down,” “Walk and Talk,” “Run and Gun.” A “interview” only field would just be a boolean (meaning “Yes” or “No”) and maybe that’s a waste of space?

Most of my media is on hard drive, my ‘labels’ are folders with date, subject and acquisition camcorder. I hope to be able to automatically parse those into fields into CatDV.

I also am seeing that the 13 or so FCP fields would probably not be enough to have Nascar level search-ability. I can see how you’d really need the clips to contain a lot of statistics so you could quickly cull together a shot list for a particular subject, like speed, car make, model etc.

Does anybody out there have the Nascar schema? (I assume the CatDV folks have it – want to share?)