[Massimo Verona]

Thanks, pretty sure I renamed them all and then couldn’t undo far enough to get rid of the rename step.

Luckily paranoia prevailed and I had a recent “duplicate project” lying around.

Have just backed up to working on that now.

Failing as fast as I can at writing producing.

[Massimo Verona]

I’m a happy customer of Neat as well . Very sophisticated and the author/guru actually has helped me with tuning it for difficult clips, he requested a clip and tried out settings or gave advice.

The interface is a little clumsy but that’s cause it was hard to rewrite for X I’m sure he’s working on it

Failing as fast as I can at writing producing.

[Massimo Verona]

I don’t know, but I read about and had some success with simply using a cheap softening filter.
Of course you lose sharpness, but my limited understanding is that is may reduce stairstepping in a way that you can ‘t really simulate in post.

I also tried test shots with patterned sweaters, etc, and sometimes things that look moire-prone actually didn’t generate it.

This is all micro-budget desperation I admit. At our level,poor focus is a worse problem.

Failing as fast as I can at writing producing.

[Massimo Verona]

not to hijack the thread, but does the 5D have less of a problem with this? It does a similar sort of line-skipping right? I have tried to avoid this by using a softening filter to begin with but there is a obvious price to this in sharpness.

Failing as fast as I can at writing producing.

[Massimo Verona]

We actually have very similar rigs. I’ve been editing shorts only on FCP X.

Early 2011 2.3 Ghz i7/1GB VRAM/Boot Drive 300GB SSD / Optical Bay filled with 500GB 7200 which tests with
Black Magic benchmark at about 100 MB/Sec. SSD about 200MB/Sec.

My external AC FW800 only gets about 40-50 MB/s but it’s way too full.

Just upgraded to 16GB mem, but with shorts I haven’t used more than the 8GB I had before. I think a feature would eat more.

Battery life sucks if I’m trying out color correction or FX; only about an hour of rendering time, rendering triggers all the cores and bleeds the batteries very badly. Just looking at footage of cutting seems way less draining.

Can the person that used gel batteries tell me how you convert voltage? A 12v-110 converter? What brand?

Failing as fast as I can at writing producing.

[Massimo Verona]

One thing I found useful as a pretty novice user was NOT to try to learn fast. There’s a certain amount of time needed to learn, for the neurons to make the connections. Feeling anxious and worrying about how fast it was coming just made me not want to practice.

I spent some more time just nosing around the interface, trying things out without feeling pressure I had to get this chore done right now… I learned some good stuff pretty quick that way.

Failing as fast as I can at writing producing.

[Massimo Verona]

Through assiduous study, I was able to solve this one.

This also solves a related error message “can’t merge events ” caused by the same thing.

1) The problem is caused by having the filename ( i.e. “mvi_0001.mov”) referenced in two different events which are both used in the project. In my case it was my company logo ( like the Universal flyover thing you see at the beginning of all their movies)

2) This causes at least two possible errors: When you try to:

a: Duplicate the Project on another drive as backup ( The Project has two or more events all containing the filename)
b: Merge the two Events ( each of which has “mvi_0001.mov” in it) …

…It throws an Error, but doesn’t tell you the names of the Events or the Filenames in them.

To Fix:

1) Select your project and open the Inspector (will be upper right hand corner)

2) See which Events your Project contains

3)Select the Events listed in left Event list and switch back and forth between viewing different Events to find out which filename has been erroneosly imported into more than one event.

4) Trash the duplicated filenames in Events.

5) This cause a “source gone ” red spot on timeline when I deleted the dupe, but I then Merged Events ( File Menu after selecting the Events you want merged) and it automatically refound the needed, previously duplicated File.

Use at your risk, it was scary when it it trashed the file but I have so many backups it doesn’t matter.
But it DID allow me to then merge the events and I believe dupe Project to another drive.

Failing as fast as I can at writing producing.

[Massimo Verona]

accidental duplicate post.

[Massimo Verona]

Thanks for all the input. Although I had gotten to [very] basic competency in FCP 7; I played a bit with FCPX and am going to use that.

I have some attention problems, and the repeated interruptions for rendering , even for minor changes such as shortening an audio clip, made FCP7 almost impossible for me not to get too discouraged.

I know there are workarounds to avoid constant rendering to some extent, but why learn the workarounds on a 32 bit architecture that will get relatively worse and worse.

I also see the confusing nature of FCPX media management, but there is some system, it will just take time to learn.

The overriding factor in my decision is just how much easier placement, shortening and lengthening, and maintenance of audio sync is.

I can just throw clips around, change lengths quickly, and that part happens at least 3x faster ( for me anyway) than in FCP7.

At this point I’m wondering if I should spring for the extra $100 to go from 8 GB mem to 16.