[Michael Adante]

“3 Edits in 40 mins”… I think the old film splicers, the Steenbeck’s worked faster than this.. 🙂

We had the same happening here… totally sympathize with your pain Phil.

Prores422 should read off your drive, we have a similar FW800 and it plays fine. If you’ve gone LT or Proxy it should be faster.

[Michael Adante]

Yes.. It\’ll be 4-5 times larger, depending on which flavor of Xdcam you\’re working with. Our 35mb 1920 25p was 4.

How big is the total media? Have u considered putting together a JBod?

I don\’t know the prices where u are, we put a 6TB one together here in Aust. for less than 800 bucks.

[Michael Adante]

Yes.. It\’ll be 4-5 times larger, depending on which flavor of Xdcam you\’re working with. Our 35mb 1920 25p was 4.

How big is the total media? Have u considered putting together a JBod?

I don\’t know the prices where u are, we put a 6TB one together here in Aust. for less than 800 bucks.

[Michael Adante]

You couldn’t have said it better Jason..

Have you tried Media Managing the entire timeline to Pro Res Phil or going through compressor?

Michael

[Michael Adante]

Hi Raf,

This has been my experience with long gop. I do agree with you that this is no way to work, especially with deadlines and release schedules.

Hence, we’re now transcoding to ProRes422.

We would like to thanks everyone on the COW that commented with their suggestions/experiences. Walter, Phil, Steve.. thanks a lot guys.

If anyone finds a solution to this problems, we’d be very interested..

Thanks,

Michael

[Michael Adante]

In my experience, the codec is fine for smaller project. (Under 30-40 mins) 15-20 hours of material. (That was also on Dual G5.)

This project has 100+ hours.

BTW: Raf, the project is perfectly fine on the Macbook Pro (Intel 2.5 Duo, 4GB ram), no crashes, nothing.

The Quad (PPC) and Ocotocore (Intel) seem to be having problems. Which is weird cause of their specs, they should eat it up.

HDV, XDCAM, all Long Gop codecs have traditionally had problems in the offline stage (at least in my experience), but like Walter pointed out, it’s a Cost vs Quality issue.

Again, In my opinion (heavily swayed by the recent crashes) XDCAM is a great cost effective acquisition format. But nothing beats the stability of 1-frame codecs. (Prores, etc) for cutting.

BTW: It seems like I spoke too quickly about our system.. the crashes are back. 🙁

Michael

[Michael Adante]

Thank god we are not alone in this, Phil.

The Octocore has a LOT of firepower. So, yes, it’s DEFINITELY the XDCAM codec. It’s fine for smaller jobs but on a big drama or docos, where timelines are over 90 mins (and we have 3 to 4 open at a time) its totally freaking the Mac out.

“Look at all that XDCAM Long GOP… Ahhhhh… CRASSHH”

Touch wood, currently our system is holding.

After a complete reboot, fresh OS, fresh FCS 2 **PLUS no Imovie, IDVD, ILIFE, etc. What the VA Driver’s main function is (so we’ve been told).

We’ve made the following changes. And it’s holding.

1) We’re doing constant saves (as you suggested).
2) Have cut the project into smaller sections, taken thumbnails off the timeline. Giving it the least amount of processes.
3) As mentioned above, taken the ILIFE stuff out (IDVD, Imovie, etc).

*** In FUTURE, we are NEVER going to cut in this Long Gop Demon for a project this size!! 😀 ****

It’s fine for shooting but we’ll get out of it at the initial offline/project set-up stage.

We did tests on the Prores422 and it’s sweet as, a bit chunkier but the 1-frame process really makes a difference.

Anyway, thanks for sharing Phil.

Michael

[Michael Adante]

Hi Casper,

I think you’re spot on. And Steve is correct too.. “not using thumbnails in the timeline”

We’re going to take this advice… Let’s see how she holds up.

Thanks for all your feedback guys.

Michael

[Michael Adante]

Thanks Jeremy,

We’re in FCS 2 on the Desktop.. so ProRes 422 LT isn’t an option. FCS 3 is on the Macbook Pro.

Is the Pro Res 422 going to be fine for the below workflow?

“1) Media Manage the entire rushes media to Pro Res 422 (keeping same clip names), relink the clips, so it doesn’t effect our current progress…

2) Edit…

3) Export to Color for Grade..

4) Export from Color (using Pro Res HQ or Uncompressed 10-bit) back to FCP..

5) Master to HDCAM SR and create DPX or Cineon.

What do you think? Now the only issue/snag one of my colleagues has brought up is.. if we’re cutting on Pro Res 422, sending to Color.

Would we need to RE-CONFORM the entire project in the original XDCAM EX codec, media manage to ProRes HQ or Uncompressed for the grade? So the images going into Color are 10 bit?

Or is the Pro Res422 good enough to ‘Send to Color’, ‘Grade’ and Output to Prores HQ or Uncompressed 10-bit?”

[Michael Adante]

It’s very strange..

There’s a “GHOST IN THE MACHINE”.. 😀