Michael Alberts
Forum Replies Created
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We’ve been having this problem for many years at our facility. After editing for hours any of our systems the editor will go to render a timeline. FCP will report that it’s going to take 20 minutes when it should only take 2-3. Quit FCP and restart FCP then render again. Now it reports the render will only take 2-3 minutes.
This happens in FCP 5 and FCP 6 on both a dual 2.5 G5 and a dual quad 3Ghz MacPro. Annoying, but a restart always seems to solve it.Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
It’s virtually impossible to see the hot video levels in the FCP scopes. Even with the Broadcast Safe filter set to Extremely Conservative there are a dozen or so spots in the program that are coming out illegal. We took the HDCAM output (with the Safe filter set to Extreme) to a QC facility and it’s still registering 720-740 mV in sections. We’ve color corrected the entire show, but using the highlight control in the 3 way CC cuts too wide a swath to use it to clamp too far down on certain shots.
We had hoped that the Broadcast Safe filter would protect us, but all the HD shows are being rejected by the network. The SD’s are all passing. The spec at the network calls for the HD masters to be no hotter than .700mV in the highlights. FCP’s scopes only show IRE, not mV, and I’m not exactly sure how to translate between the two. The engineer at the QC facility told me 714mV = 100 IRE. Yes, the network’s spec seems to call for an HD master with highlights BELOW 100 IRE.
We’re now faced with either renting or purchasing an HD legalizer box such as the Harris DL-860.
We’ve used Color on another program, but the workflow is too unreliable to use on a regular series with deadlines, not to mention the crazy render times necessary.Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
We convert from HDV to DVCProHD via the capture from our HVR-1500 SDI out to the Kona3 in. Just select DVCPro as the capture codec.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
I had a considerable amount of issues when rendering a ProRes 422 SD show. Little did I know that using ProRes would require me to render the entire show in order to output to tape. Every shot in the show had the 3 Way color corrector applied. That’s the last time I’ll ever work in ProRes. I can complete a show faster when it’s in DVCProHD.
Back to the render problem. We found that we had to render in smaller 3 minute chunks from the timeline in order to prevent crashing. If we tried to render a 4 or 5 minute chunk FCP 6 would just crash. We’re working on a MacPro quad 3Ghz machine w/8GB or RAM. We also were having playback issues when tyring to playback ProRes422HQ HD material. We were getting dropped frames. If we scaled the computer back to 2GB of RAM playback was fine.Most of our problems seem to be related to working in any form of ProRes. We rarely get crashing when working in any other SD or HD format. But RAM is somehow connected to the crashing and playback problem. All RAM tests ok.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc. -
Increasing the size of the waveforms is one of the many “Pro” features we’ve been asking for for years. In addition to being able monitor your timecode when digitizing or outputting to tape, level meters active during input/output etc.
You’re not alone.
We just finished a shot that aired last week on CourtTV that was recorded with very low levels as well. FCP only gives you the ability to increase the audio by +12db which was far short of what was needed. In addition the waveforms were virtually nonexistent. Having the ability to increase both the levels and the waveform size would have helped out tremendously.Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc. -
We’ve been talking with the product manager of this product at AJA. No mention of price yet. My guess is that it will be more expnsive than the IO HD and not have built in ProRes support.
Would be a cool box if it can do all they say it can do. We won’t know that until it ships, which I’m sure will be later than they expect.Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc. -
I asked a Panasonic rep at their NAB booth about the paltry P2 Store sizes. He had no idea if a larger P2 store was in the works. I asked about adding my own larger drive to the box and he catagorically stated that it wouldn’t work. With 120 and 160 GB laptop drives standard on most computers these days why isn’t Panasonic uping the storage capacity of the P2 Store? Or at least allowing users to do it themselves. Within six months we’ll have 32GB P2 cards on the market. A P2 Store won’t even hold 2 full cards of that size!!!!
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc. -
If you open the ETT window and select the Black and Code button, FCP will format the tape with the proper code. Then when you punch in a beginning ouput timecode, FCP will recognize the t.c. type (DF or NDF). No futzing around manually with the colon or semi-colon.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc. -
Why aren’t you using Edit To Tape? Print to Tape is for crash recording. With ETT you have precise control over your in-point.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc. -
Yes, you can let a tape with tod timecode just capture from start to tail, however FCP takes considerably longer to process. FCP will cross the break, stop, back up frame by frame, find the break and then start digitizing again with a new clip. Depending on the deck you have this could take between 30 seconds to 2 minutes per break. An HDCAM will be on the faster side of those estimates. A DV deck will be on the slower side of that estimate.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.