[Mark Suszko]

It’s still a color sensor, you’re just telling the intervening electronics to only record luma info. If you decide to do the B&W effect in-camera, consider taking along old-time yellow, red, orange and green filters to help control or bring out contrasts. This can also be done in post with color-correction curves and histograms.

If you shot in color and did the B&W in post, you preserve a lot more options, in case you change your mind or another purpose for the footage comes up. What I might do in this situation is bring along an external monitor and set the *monitor* for monochrome, to get a sense of how the shots will look later, and to test out the effects of the clothing and lighting color choices you make on the set, as well as what the color lens filters can do for you… but I’d shoot in color originally.

[Mark Suszko]

Glad to hear you’re working. Doesn’t help your immediate issue, but consider building in the cost of an archival drive for billing each job you do. We’re talking $50-$90 bucks here for a couple terabytes.

[Mark Suszko]

What I might do is… use just the mac pro’s internal drives, but USE PROXY FILES for everything. When you get back to base, or are happy with the edit, synchronize and update the project files with the home setup, and render out master files. I don’t know for sure if the bundle includes the Library or not, partly because I’m not an expert, partly because, you can choose where the real library lives, internally or externally. I keep all my libraries on the external RAID with the source material.

[Mark Suszko]

“David, I’m in Los Angeles. Why do you ask?”

To see if you’re Canadian, because you’re starting to sound like you might be Ryan’s alt.

I don’t think there’s anything left to discuss here. You’ve made your position pretty clear. Best of luck to you.

[Mark Suszko]

If you’re really going to deliver in monochrome, lights are a secondary issue…(colorist joke). you should know that your colors for things like walls, clothing, props, etc. are all going to need tweaking. Because the contrast of standard colors is not the same in B&W. You can see old color behind-the-scenes stills in things like the B&W Flash Gordon serials, where he’s actually wearing bright Pepto Bismol pink, and even color amateur footage of I love Lucy, where they used lots of pink in unusual places, because it “reads” correctly in terms of value and saturation.

https://www.thewrap.com/watch-rare-i-love-lucy-behind-the-scenes-color-footage-video/

[Mark Suszko]

I don’t say that because I’m especially wise now, but because in the past I have been excessively foolish. ☺

Been there/donethat/re-did that/

[Mark Suszko]

You’d be wise to follow what David’s saying; he’s a pro.

It may be that at some point along the way, during ingest or edit, the footage from one of your cams had it’s frame size “baked-in” in the wrong ratio. And probably the wrong codec. No telling how much resolution you gave up. However it happened, if clicking on the shot, going into the “motion” tab and and undoing any and all pre-applied scaling and other effects doesn’t bring it up to size, it’s something you’re going to have to manually re-scale, if you insist on using the existing shot. For every such clip. The good news, if any, is that, once you re-size *one of these, select and copy it, then you can (relatively) quickly select and “paste attributes” to the other wrong-scaled clips, greatly reducing the workload. Though the really proper way to fix these, and get the maximum resolution out of them, would be to re-capture/re-import the camera originals in the proper size and codec. Which you refuse to do.

This is what I’m getting at with the term: “Sunk Costs Fallacy”. It’s the kind of thinking that turns a pilot into a stain on a canyon wall, when he doubles-down on making it thru the mountain passes in wrong conditions because he’s half-way to his destination already, dammit. I could give many more such examples. But this is where you are. You feel that you just can’t go back and re-do it right because you’re too close to being done. Actually, you’re nowhere near. Not if you have standards.

The question I have for you now though is: what’s the hurry, all of a sudden, that you can’t go back and do it right?

Did you think you could make this ready for some festival or contest coming up? Is there funding with a hard limit? Did the doctor call with really bad news? You said this was a passion project that took years of your time. But now it’s not worth going back, no matter how inconvenient or tedious, to get it all Just Right? Be honest with yourself, and ask yourself; “in my rush to complete this, am I baking-in all kinds of mistakes and problems that will stand out and make me look incompetent, make the work look flawed, every time it’s viewed, forever, and is that truly what I wanted for this project? For myself? That’s not what I’d call a Passion project. Passion projects are heartless, cruel, unrelenting things that demand you break your heart and wallet, over and over again, do hard or unpleasant things over and over again, without reward, until the result meets the standard you envisioned at the start. They make you forsake time with loved ones, profit opportunities, everything.

You know there’s work to be done, you’ve done it before, thanks to experience, you’ll actually be faster and better at it this next time around. If this project was ever worth it, it’s worth doing right. Dave told you how to fix it. I’m telling you how “not” to go about fixing it. But you already knew that, deep down, I’m betting.

[Mark Suszko]

I’d put money on David being right. Though I suspect you also have drive issues.

As to why FCP7 picked the codec of the same footage you out into it, that’s a convenient thing most times, but it’s also a default you can set or change. You should have changed it when you started. Much of the drama would have been avoided. I’d tell you to read up on “Easy Setups” but really your ultimate answer is to get with the 21st century and move over to either FCPX or Resolve or (shudders) Premiere. Really, any of the new platforms are great and way more capable for what you want to do. At least half your misery is coming from hanging on to seven. I get nostalgia, truly, I do. Nobody more nostalgic than I am… I also get the “sunken costs fallacy”; you wanna finish this project on the same platform it started on. Jumping away now seems like too much.

I’m picturing you in the scene from the first Pirates of The Caribbean, where Jack Sparrow enters the harbor on a slowly-sinking little boat that’s completely submerged to the mast-top by the time it hits the dock.

That’s you now. The dock’s in sight.

Promise me, if you can’t bear to jump ship yet, that you will, once this last project’s done. Even I’m doing it this year, at least at home. (I keep a bell jar legacy seven setup at work strictly for authoring interactive DVD’s. Which nobody’s asked me for in 5 years. But DVDSP was THE BEST, and the shop can’t afford the new stuff.)

[Mark Suszko]

Might be a conflict coming from trying to resolve old and new versions of one of the apps copied-over, or a bug in an update. When you run old FCP7 suite systems, you really need to put the entire machine, OS and apps in the equivalent of a bell jar, if you want them to stay stable. No updates. No changes. Hotel California.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m not an expert. I do know that the way you’ve set yourself up, the codec choices and whatnot, it’s a more processor-intensive and RAM-intensive process than necessary, handling the format conversions and rendering. I think step one has to be, protect the assets, assuming you have no other back-ups. Get that stuff laid off to another drive, or whatever. Then get under the hood and start yanking on things. When your system has insufficient RAM for a task, it borrows space on the hard drive to act as virtual RAM. If the disk has too much stuff on it, or if some sectors of the disk are faulty and unavailable to the system, you could maybe run out of space. This used to be a common problem back in the day, but since you’re running obsolete apps and formats, maybe it’s not far off.

That fact that running disk repair clears it up, at least temporarily, suggests to me it’s a mechanical problem and not software. But again, I’m no expert. Except in very rare cases, I’ve never known a sick drive to get better again, only worse.

Hey, have you changed or done anything with any of the cables lately? Has *anything* happened in or around this system between when you were running okay and when it started going bad? Power surge or brown-out, accidental re-start, new hardware added, old hardware moved or removed, no matter how insignificant it seems? Any software updates done manually or automatically in the background? Did you say all this stuff was in Time Machine and “grafted” into a new (er) macbook? Have you sprinkled the blood of a chicken over the drive enclosure? Anything?