Matt Killmon
Forum Replies Created
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Fantastic! Glad to see the setup I envisioned is working successfully for other people. It’s always a relief to have some “real-world” feedback (even if it is anecdotal I suppose).
I just worked up a rough price-list to submit to the higher-ups based on all the feedback here, so thanks a lot!
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Fortunately I’m not using Color, even on my main setup—I’m doing video game trailers, and there’s a pretty strong push to keep footage captured looking “as-captured,” so we accurately represent the games we make. I wish I was doing work that DID let me play with Color, but it’s a pretty imposing app and there’s no real call for it in my current position, so.
LaCie’s 4big Quadra is an eSATA device that has built-in RAID 5, so that’s what I’m referring to. I’ve had good luck with LaCie’s regular external products in the past, although I also use G-Technology stuff at work and have found it to be very nice as well. Guess I should look at some consumer reviews around the web (though those can be deceiving due to unsatisfied people being “louder”).
The reason I’m “going laptop” with this is that I see this machine as eventually serving multiple people around the office. Educating producers on how to do “quick-and-dirty” capture sessions in Final Cut would free up myself (and my future assistant) to focus on larger, more intensive projects. Having a station that could “float” more easily would be great. Plus, being able to work with ProRes 422 HQ up-front would allow the machine to do full-scale projects in the interim (also a plus while we wait to move into new space in the upstairs section of our building).
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Wait a second. You’re saying your sequence is progressive, so 23.976 progressive frames per second. If broadcasters want “interlaced” material, does that mean they want a 29.97 sequence with 3:2 pulldown already in it? In that case you’d be best exporting your sequence in its native format from Final Cut (full res, 23.976 progressive) and then using something like JES Deinterlacer to do the conversion down to standard def/apply pulldown (change frame rate) appropriately. Or, if JES’s scaler isn’t good enough, use another scaler to go down to 720 x 480 and then use JES to simply add the pulldown.
I’m not sure I’m understanding the target format well enough though, so if when they’re saying “interlaced” they don’t actually mean “a 29.97 file with 3:2 pulldown from a 23.976 source) then never mind all that.
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Considering you only have an iMac with no internal expansion options, I think that’d limit you to solutions like AJA’s Io.
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Only problem with that idea is that no one in this production has any HDV decks/cameras. We’re all just working with the same already-captured files, so it’s digital solutions only.
I actually found a free utility that writes MPEG-2 timecode in the GOP headers of a given elementary stream. It’s called ReStream. Problem is—Premiere doesn’t seem to read this timecode. I’m assuming however Premiere captures HDV, it stores the timecode as it was in the original subcode section of the DV tape somehow, as part of the .m2t in some non-standard way. Any timecode-added files simply show up as having a Media Start of 00:00:00;00 in Premiere.
I’m about at my wit’s end on this one. Maybe all the Premiere users will just have to offline with QuickTime DV files?
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Well, we are top-tier in that our last two games have sold millions of copies and been named games of the year by many publications… but we’re still a pretty small company, all things considered. We only have one internal development team so it’s 2 to 3 years between major title releases. Our parent company has other publishing imprints but those are mainly for much smaller games for handheld/family platforms.
I don’t know. I don’t have a good handle on what our financial situation looks like because we’re a private company, so that stuff isn’t published. My GUT says yes, we ought to be going to a good systems integrator (and judging by your link, those folks are certainly good). I just can’t see management agreeing with me, since their goal seems to be to spend as little as possible (and in doing so, tend to do things wrong). And considering I only came on in May of this year (and am pretty young), I don’t have quite as much pull as I think would be necessary.
I guess that asking for advice for how to navigate that political solution would be outside the purview of this forum. 😛
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Yeah, I know what you mean… fortunately he’s not directly my supervisor(s) and he doesn’t sign my paychecks. Strictly speaking he’s lower in the company than the president (whom I’m on good terms with), but higher than my supervisor(s). So, I’d imagine politics will come into it somewhere… I do get the impression that he can be rational when confronted with facts, especially if I can make a case that a larger up-front expense in (if nothing else) room design will save further expenses down the road.
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It’s a MacIntel—a Mac Pro (Early 2008) with two quad-core 3.0GHz Xeons, 8 GB of RAM, and a Radeon HD 2600 running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.4. Both After Effects CS3 and Final Cut Pro 6 are running the latest point updates as of today.
Boris support is working on this issue with me and they’re just as confused as I am. I haven’t tried updating the trial version running on my personal MacBook Pro in After Effects to see if that solves the issue, and I’m not sure if there are any old preferences or things lying about that might affect the currently running versions negatively. All in all it’s just weird. I did an ugly hack of sorts to get the effect working temporarily but it consumes a lot of RAM (I actually had to tweak AE’s multithreading options to get it to render without crashing).
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I’ve installed the latest updates for both FCP and After Effects but the problem persists in both versions. That’s 5.0.1.50 for After Effects and 5.0.7 for the FxPlug (FCP) Continuum Complete plugins. Is this a color space of the project issue, perhaps?