Michael Peele
Forum Replies Created
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To get your file into compressor, go straight from FCP file menu – export to compressor. Then set your settings and compress.
If you want to run compressor solo, w/o FCP in the background, export a quicktime movie with current settings, either self-contained or not. A non self-contained file is MUCH smaller but references the original media and render files – so it needs to be on the same machine. Open compressor and import the QT movie.
Mike Peele -
Shift-N if I remember correctly (sorry not at a FCP machine right now) – makes a freeze frame.
If you still see motion/blur/comb effect, you could deinterlace the clip in the viewer and freeze frame that.
Mike Peele -
It sounds like you may want to force a re-render of the audio before you export.
Delete your audio render files. Another option that may work is to make a change to the audio that is dropping out, then change back (not undo).
After you have done one of the above, render with all audio render options turned on.
I have had this issue when I have made nests that included audio that were subsequently edited. Not everytime, actually only twice, but re-rendering the audio seemed to fix the issue.
Good luck,
Mike Peele -
Formatting. Your system drive should be HFS+ with journaling. There is some debate about whether or not the scratch disk/G-RAID should have journaling. I have not found issues with either setup, but no journaling should slightly reduce overhead.
Looks like you have to use the latest drivers from Blackmagic if you have FCP 5, and at that they require 5.0.3. So you will pretty much want all the latest updates for 10.4, FCP 5, Pro app support etc. Just let Software updater do its job. Once all the updates are installed, install the blackmagic drivers.
Mike Peele -
Probably not the end of the world for your Tascam to be on the same bus as your drives. Will the Tascam be used at the same time as the IO? If not try the Tascam on the G5 FW800 port, given that the G-RAID is connected to the FW card and the IO is on the G5 FW400 port. You may need a 6-9pin or a 4-9pin cable for the Tascam. I don’t know what type of connector it has.
If this doesn’t work the other option you described is probably the best solution (using an additional FW card). This is going to give you the most seperation of FW busses and the PCI bus should be able to handle that bandwidth. Also, depending on the cards, putting them in slots 2 and 3 allows them to transfer data directly between themselves. (https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=32480)
Hey you won’t hurt anything by trying, and the cost of a FW card or cable is minimal compared to what you have already spent, so you are probably best off just trying and seeing what works best. 😛Mike Peele
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SD Uncompressed or DV format?
HD Uncompressed or HDV or DVCPRO HD format?If DV, a single firewire (preferably FW800) should be just fine.
For SD Uncompressed, you need to sustain about 30MB/sec, more if you want realtime transitions. Plan on a single channel SCSI drive – check out Medea’s solutions or other similar solutions. Another option is a RAID array of 2-4 SATA drives. Search this forum for more info on these types of arrays. Both single channel SCSI and SATA RAIDs are also suitable for HDV and DVCPRO HD storage.
For HD Uncompressed, you need to sustain 165MB/sec for 1080i for this you will need a dual channel SCSI RAID array or a Fibre Channel array with 8 drives or more. For HD formats that require less of a data rate. You should be able to get aways with a 4-way SATA RAID.
Of course, you can always get away with less, but you will suffer from less performance, i.e. less frames visible when scrubbing timeline. You will also be placing more of a workload on your drives, increasing the chance of data corruption or drive failure. On the subject of drive failure, a RAID array that is created with RAID 5 or 3 can withstand the loss of a drive and still maintain data integrity. This is a good thing. A RAID 0 will lose all your data if one drive in the array. That is a bad thing.
Hope that helps,
Mike Peele -
Keep an eye on barefeats.com, they recently did a review on Highpoints RocketRAID for PCI-X and mentioned that Highpoint has a PCIe card that is currently lacking Mac drivers. You may want to email them to see if there is anything else out there.
Mike Peele -
Also, if you have layers at the beginning or end, they will fade in (or out) at different rates according to their brightness and layering order.
My favorite example is a resized/cropped layer on top of a sunset (as a background) for example. If you use a cross-dissolve or simply keyframe the opacity, the sun will show through the top layer before the fade in/out is finished – even if the dissolve/fade in/out lengths are exactly the same.
One trick is to nest your layers and then fade/cross-dissolve the nest.
Another method for a fade out would be to put a black slug above the top layer, and FADE IN the black slug at the rate and length that you want the video to FADE OUT. Reverse this method for a fade in.
Mike Peele -
No problem, glad it worked out.
Mike Peele -
Hey thanks for the info on where to look for VariCam resellers!
I am intrigued by the gamma ray concern. Is this more of a concern for HD cameras (smaller, more sensitive pixels?
Researching gamma ray shielding on the web has turned up info such as this…
The most effective gamma shields are materials which have a high density and high atomic number