[Mark Maness]

I, too, have seen this sluggishness! I edit in the IMX codec on one system (Dual 2.7 G5 with 4.5 gig RAM – Tiger), the other uses DVCPRO50 (Dual 1 gig G4 with 1.5 gig RAM – Tiger). Now, the only things in common are they use Tiger and both are using FCS 5.02. And after about an hour of running, my Dual 2.7 gets real slow. I have to shutdown FCP 5.02 and restart it, then its fine for a while.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

for small quick projects such as yours, I use iDVD. It gets the jobs done and very easily.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Check your render settings. I would have to bet that you sequence is set to “Normal”. Try setting it to “Best” or “Fastest”. The motion quality of FCP is lacking very seriously. It was supposed to be better but I think its gotten worse. I constantly have problems with alpha channel logos. Its a flip of the coin to what the settings are.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Ok… Here’s a question that I have. I’m using the Sony HDV Z1 cameras and have them set to Cineframe30 for the 30p film look. Do I run those cameras at 1/30 or 1/60?

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Well, are you using the AJA Kona2 in your setups? I’m just wondering if its a Kona2 problem with Quicktime. But see the strange thing here is that my system will work very well for about a half an hour then it starts getting slow and you hear the processors winding up when it accesses the drives. So…. I’m leaning to the idea it may be a Tiger 10.4.2 and Quicktime 7.01. I don’t know but I’m guessing.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

I have the same problem, Rupert. I don’t have an answer except that its in the hands of Apple. People everywhere have been complaining of the speed problems of Tiger 10.4.2 and FCP 5.02.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Thanks, Jeremy… I always amazes me how we can forget the easiest things in FCP. Boy, I feel stupid!

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

I have a five button Kensington mouse and I have found that you can disable the buttons you wouldn’t use and those problems are a thing of tha past. You just have to install the mouse software and disable it there.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Sorry… I forgot. Let me know how your project turns out. I’m curious how it will work in a harsh condition.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Yes…. I’ve done both. But I prefer to use the Flip4Mac plugin. Both work great! But I do have a word of warning. The footage absolute has to be IMX 50 Mb/s, not 40 or 30 Mb/s. FCP will only work with IMX 50 Mb/s without problems.

Do keep in mind that anytime you capture footage using SDI or any other output, that you are essentially recompressing your footage because the machine has to decode it to play it. The Flip4Mac option is completely untouched. All it does is convert the MXF files to Quicktime. There is no recompression of the footage. But another word of warning…. IMX footage files are large in size. I just imported a project of four disks that occupies about 65 gig of drive space – which is about 4 hours of footage. 200 hours of footage may take a couple of terabytes to ingest. Also, I do want you to knwo that the Flip4Mac plugin assumes that you have all eight channels of audio. So each and every clip will have eight channels of audio and there’s no way to select the number of channels you want.

Are you using this for broadcast? If you are having a drive space issue, you might want to consider digitizing using DVCPRO50 codec. Personally, I don’t see any difference in my footage by doing this. It just takes more time to ingest. This is just a suggestion since we have been using the IMX on;ly for a coupple of months. We are using Sony’s XDCAM series and its awesome! I love it. No Tape! And the ethernet connection is great except that you really need a gigabit network to do this with (file access speed?).

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions