[Matt Gerard]

Sounds like the settings in the capture window need a little work. First off, can you do a “capture now) function just to see if your compter will see the video stream?

second, look in your system profiler to see if the computer is even recognizing that something is attached to the FW bus. if it doesn’t show anything, there’s where to start troubleshooting. Cable, the 4pin connector on the camera is pretty fragile.

If it does show, Then it must be a setting on the camera. I don’t have a 200 infornt of me, so I can’t get to specific, but its a matter of going though every button to make sure it is in the right position, and read the manual. Most of my frustrations have been from a switch being int he wrong setting or something dumb like that. Can’t tell you how many time the other editr has come in, looked, flipped a switch and it worked. Operator error.

Good luck.

MAtt

[Matt Gerard]

All that sound liek the way I work, except I admit for the simpler stuff I am going into motion instead of AE sometimes.

Also, when exporting your seq to and from AE, be sure to leave pleanty of heads and tails so you can trim your shots after you render out. Adding 2-3 sec on the front and back shouldn’t add too much to your render time.

matt

[Matt Gerard]

We just took delivery on the PCD20 – 5 card reader, same thing, except has FW800 (SWEET!) and all my 16 gig cards work just fine. Fast, fast fast. Had been pulling straight off the camera via the USB port, uhg.

MAtt

[Matt Gerard]

We took the dive on the 2000, and haven’t looked back yet (except for those monster CCD’s in the 3000). I love it, have had it for only 3 months. Workflow and archiving takes a little getting used to, but I think we have gotten that worked out.

Matt

[Matt Gerard]

I would be most interested in hearing your story in how you were able to do all this, and what issues you encountered along the way, Could you post a short tutorial in how you accomplished it? I would LOVE to take advantage of this, even with just he 5 office computers we have, as you know, any time savings is GOOD time savings.

Thanks!

Matt the P2 Rat

[Matt Gerard]

And, i think you nailed with the file transfer thing. Network rendering is best suited for framestack type rendering, where each computer gets a set of instructions, and creates a frame from those instructions. 3d rendering is the best example of this. But when you render to a QT movie, you can’t have one machine render the 1st half, and the 2nd render the 2nd half at the same time. one machine, one movie render, thus the limitation. So, encoding works the same way, especially with mpeg encoding. We had a combustion artist at my last compnay I worked for secretly install the combustion render utility on about 20 business computers that stayed on all night, and he worked 2nd shift. i saw him rendering a very complex 60 second spot for the station, and it was done in about 3 minutes, whereas his single machine would have taken over 2 hours. But, he would render to a framestack, so each machine only had to worry about its little bit of the pie, and his machine would divvy out the instructions and the neccesary frames to each computer, then recieve those frames back and place them in order.

might not be the most technical explanation, but that’s how i understand it, and therefore spend my time bugging my boss for a faster machine and more ram, and I leave Qmaster alone to weep for itself.

Matt the P2 rat

[Matt Gerard]

Yeah, I have all my prefs, window layouts, keyboard layout, (and some plugins) on my 2 gig geekstick, so I can have them with me wherever I am. I even posted them on my company’s FTP site so I can DL them if someone snags my geekstick.

Matt The P2 Rat

[Matt Gerard]

Man, I wish I had the time to think about stuff like that. I have software that I don’t use because i don’t have the time to learn it (Color, LightWave). Deadlines are deadlines! I get paid pretty well for what I do, but how do you make any money working on Micro budget films?

Don’t get me wrong, i am always looking for ways to do things faster/better/cheaper while keeping quality and creativity up. Good for you for brainstorming, its the way things get figured out.

[Matt Gerard]

You can map virtually anything to (nearly) any key combo on your keyboard using the KEYBOARD tool in the menus. I have made extensive use of modifying my keyboard to the point that having a color coded FCP keyboard is almost pointless at this point. There’s not much I can’t do with my shortcuts I have programmed in, and anytime I don’t have to touch the mouse is a good time.

I love key commands, I admit it, I’m addicted.

Now I just need scripting knowledge to start linking events in FCP to automate certain functions, and I will be in heaven.

Matt The P2 Rat

[Matt Gerard]

Create a text doc in textedit, and paste this into it

00176V
1.0
18

That’s it, then save it with th name “LASTCLIP.TXT” (no quotes), and for good measure cmd-I and lock the file. that should be able to get you somewhere. You need to modify the first line to match the last created video file name in the video folder. Then take the total number of clips and add 1 to it and replace the 3rd line with that number. Not sure, you might not have to modify the 3rd line. But the file structre should look like this-

Create a “Card 1” Folder (or name it whatever you want) then inside that folder there should be a CONTENTS (all caps) folder and the text file named LASTCLIP.TXT, then inside the contents folder should be all the other folders-

AUDIO
CLIP
ICON
PROXY
VIDEO
VOICE

Hope this helps!

Matt The P2 Rat