Michael Alberts
Forum Replies Created
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We had far too many problems with blacks dipping below 0 in FCP even after using the Broadcast Safe filter. These were archival BetaSP tapes that mostly bit us in the behind. The occasional graphic as well. After getting rejected by QC one too many times we bit the bullet and picked up the Harris DL-860. Works like a champ.
We’ve even seen luma+chroma clips that no matter how you tried, you just couldn’t bring into legal spec with the 3 way CC filter, but the DL-860 worked it’s magic on. The DL-860 looks much cleaner as well.Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
FCP has been doing HD long before Avid was doing HD. Thousands of shows have been cut with FCP and the F900 and it’s various iterations. We’ve done at least two dozen programs here alone. Since the HDCAM format only shoots 4:2:0 8 bit I can’t see any reason you would want to work at 10 bit; unless this is an FX heavy show with lots of precision color correction. Besides, the editor will probably be working in ProRes. In that case ProRes will capture at 8 or 10 bit depending on the source.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
That’s a decoder only. Why only the half step forward Apple? Why not release a QT component for Mac and PC that allows encoding to ProRes as well? Now I can hand off ProRes to various FX companies, but if they’re on a PC platform they can’t render out to ProRes for delivery back to me. Avid makes the DNX codec freely available to all, why not ProRes?
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
The Log and Transfer method has always worked fine for us. However, if you want to speed up the process you can create a render cluster through QMaster and render the files out twice as fast. I was told this was possible at an Apple sponsored even here in LA, but they didn’t actually show how it was done. They did say that with three Xserves it was possible to get real-time transcoding into ProRes HQ.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
FCP 2.06 came out about seven years ago! Is this what you are using? Other things to look at are the size of the photo’s themselves. What is the resolution of these photos. With that many photo’s on a timeline you should really try and keep the dimensions down. If these are 4000×3000 sized photo’s you’re in for a world of hurt when trying to render.
We need some more details to go on in order to offer up some useful help.Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
[Dennis Dean] ” One problem I’ve discovered is the G5 I’m using is PCI – which limits the cards it can take to SD, apparently”
Totally incorrect. How do you think all us Kona users have been doing HD for the last five years. First with the KonaHD card and then the Kona2. We’ve been using a Kona2 for HD since it first came out. The computer it has lived in since it’s inception was a dual 2.5 G5 with a PCI-X slot, which is what you have.
We’ve also got a Kona3-X in a dual 2.5 G5 and a Kona 3e in a Mac Pro. All our machines do HD. Uncompressed 10 bit HD down to DVCPro HD. There are no tradeoff in quality when you go with AJA.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
Way back in FCP 1 and FCP 2 days we invested in the Aurora Igniter uncompressed SD cards for FCP. The breakout box had every audio and video patch you could ever want, including an LTC out port. That port worked great for outputting LTC timecode out of Premiere, but didn’t work when using FCP. Aurora engineers were always trying to figure out how to hack FCP and enable LTC out but were never successful. Finally, in a rev to the breakout box, they converted that port to an additional SDI out port and gave up on LTC out. Like I said, it worked in Premiere, and this was the year 2000. Fast forward eight years and we still don’t have LTC out of FCP regardless of hardware.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
Also make sure you don’t have the FX Factory v1.0 FX plug-ins installed. Either upgrade them to 2.0 or trash them.
If you don’t have those plug ins installed what version of the OS and QT are you running?Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
On the last several series we’ve done for The History Channel they have required 23.98 HDCAM using drop frame. Try and wrap your head around that one.
They won’t budge. However we just ship it NDF.
History Channel also requires an SD of the same show on Digibeta 29.97 drop frame.Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
We’ve noticed that FCP has something of a memory leak. After working on a project for several hours the render time of particular timeline goes way up. FCP will report something like 15 minutes required to render the sequence. After we quite FCP and reopen the project the render time displayed is only 1 minute. This means there is a memory leak in the app. As far back as we can remember this has been happening and we’ve been using FCP since v1.
This may are may not be your exact problem. Instead of rebooting the entire computer just quit and restart FCP and see if that solves the problem.Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net