Michael
Forum Replies Created
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The other possibility is that your audio sync isn’t stable. Pops in a digital line can occur if there’s an unstable clock source or a defective cable. I used to get them occasionally when using the optical outs and my word clock wasn’t stable or in sync. Selecting the optical line for sync would clear up the trouble. You’re using AES, so I’d make sure the cable isn’t the problem.
My 2 cents…
-mjd
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Wow.. Didn’t even know that button existed! Thanks a ton.
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I do a ton of eBay purchasing, and here are the rules of thumb to which I subscribe:
1) Don’t buy from anyone with fewer than 25 transactions. If a seller has over 1000, a few bad transactions are acceptable, as long as his satisfaction rating is at least 98 percent.
2) Check the sellers last few transactions. If the seller sells dolls, for example, make sure you e-mail the seller and ask why they’re now selling software. Sometimes seller’s names get hijacked. Consistancy in items sold is usually a good sign.
3) Open a PayPal account and deal exclusively with folks who use PayPal. Yes, it costs a little extra, but PayPal guarantees all sales. If something goes wrong you can get most of your money back, if not all.
4) If something looks too good to be true, IT IS.
5) Be careful about acedemic versions. Ask to make sure it’s the full licensed version before bidding. Acedemic versions sell for half price and can get tricky to upgrade to the next release.
That said, I bought my first legal version of FCP on eBay, I bought FCP 1.0 when 2.0 was already in stores. There were fewer bidders for old software and I got a still sealed version for $250 dollars. Then I bought the upgrade and wound up with a fully licensed legal version for about $600 dollars. Good deal. I’ve done this with several pieces of software and it’s a good plan to get software for less.
-Michael
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Never mind.. just found an online primer.. Thanks.
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I agree totally. Aja is the closest integrated of the I/O companies with Apple. I’ve heard
great things about Black Magic, but as a user of AJA products, I can’t give them a high
enough recommendation. Their gear is excellent.I also have an SD-Connect. It is not a perfect box. It has no software controls within
your computer, everything is outboard and controllable by a single scroll wheel. This
is a grand idea, one wheel to do everything. In practice, there is submenu after submenu
and it’s a tedious contol scheme. I’ve also had problems with the SD losing deck control
at times, especially when I’m shuttling back and forth. It will do the job, but there are
better products that are integrated with FCP. I bought it to convert DV over firewire to
SDI. If I had to do it over again I’d have just bought an SDI DV deck.Stick with AJA products. They are rock-solid.
My 2 cents.
-mjd
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It depends on how you’re editing. Is your FCP project 24 fps or 30 fps? When you capture in FCP, it will capture 30 fps with a pulldown unless you tell it to remove the pulldown and set the project to 24 or 23.9. Bring the footage into AE and make the comp equal the frame rate of the video. Don’t forget to field interpret lower field first. When you render, make the output fps match the comp rate, though I’m pretty sure it does this by default anyway.
The cleanliness of the video has nothing to do with the frame rate. It has to do with the codec and quality settings. This will get a little confusing but stay with me… When you render your composition (make movie) in AE, you have to choose a codec (selected in output settings in the render queue). There’s also a quality slider under options. When I’m working in AE I generally export the clip from FCP so it creates new media for me to work with in AE. When I export, I use the Animation codec because it’s a lossless codec. You won’t increase quality, but you’ll keep the footage from degrading any further as your renders pile up. You can simply open DV footage native in AE, but you’ll be working in DV. Every time you render (by selecting make movie) a comp, it will re-compress the footage and degrade it a little. The downside to the Animation codec workflow is that once you re-import into FCP, you have to render the clip in the timeline back to DV before it will play, whereas DV will play native. Make sense? Every time you make a movie in DV, you re-compress the media, making it less clean than before you rendered. Not bad for one or two generations (indeed you will have one compression even using Animation because you have to render back to DV in FCP), but as the passes pile up in DV, as you work with a rendered comp inside of another rendered comp, you’ll see a difference over time. With the Animation codec, you can in theory make a thousand nested movies and never lose any data.
Other things to watch for is make sure you have all of your comp layers set to full resolution. The default layer setting is draft mode. You can create a preset for your renders to make everything render at full resolution. If you don’t, you have to remember to change the layer setting manually every time you render.
-mjd
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No quality loss with the capture. DVCAM and Mini-DV are the same. The transfer is lossless. You will degrade a bit every time you render an effect in the sequence. Rendering requires a re-compression of the image.
-mjd
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Go to the AJA website (www.aja.com) and download the AJA Kona System Test. It is an independent app that will test your drives’ speeds. It will tell you MB/s and also can display how many streams in each resolution the drive will support. If it dips below 1, you know the drive isn’t fast enough for that resolution.
-mjd
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What I do is either bump the footage to another format and capture, or use a DV deck with component or SDI on capture. The problem in DV though the capture is clean, when you render the codec recompresses. Some DV codecs are better than others, but generally (especially with Apple’s DV codec) the codec introduces aliasing and artifacts in the render. Long discussion and argument about this in other forums. If you use a Kona or Decklink or similar and capture uncompressed, you’ll bypass the DV recompress on render. You’ll wind up with a cleaner product.
-mjd
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Now as to your question, the 1500 is great for playback. Since you’re capturing component, you’re not going to be working in DV anyway, so don’t worry about the codec issue.
Still check on the delivery format with your stations, and consider a Digibeta master for an archive. Expensive for a day, but you’ll be happy in the long run.