[Mutant0]

I haven’t had any experience in the professional “Color” realm.

I actually did work as a color professional in PhotoShop when it first came out — though I am not up to the level of top professionals in the field. I just know how to make people look better, but still it’s a challenge not to get too orange or green.

Having been in the early days of desktop publishing — when the debate was made from people who marked up page layouts in something that looked very much like trying to build web pages in html it was about; “this Quark program won’t work — you cannot kern to a thousandth of a point. Look at the shoddy headlines on the New York Post. Won’t ever work.” Well the desktop publishers rose up “good enough.”

I can say, there probably isn’t any MORE well-kerned headlines. And the salaries of those specialists who worry about the space between an “e” and an “n” is lower.

So I agree and disagree with everyone; There will be more colorists. Good Enough will win. Salaries for the top colorists will go down. Welcome to not the Democratization — but the “Globalization” of color.

But overall — there will be a phase of “bad color” before there is more appreciation of refinements. The analogy of desktop publishing is again very apt; The first Macs brought a lot of Fonts into print. Where before each and every font was dreamt of, and thought out, before your press would get one — a Mac User might use two Serifs and 3 san-serif fonts in a Resume. Plus add in that shadow font — just becasue they could.

You will get the crushed blacks and blue tint of Matrix in the next edition of a Business Meeting — yes you will.

Desktop publishing earn good figures in the early days — when it became part of “what businesses needed to look established.” Guess what? I moved from Desktop publishing, to Computer Interface design, to Web Design and Multimedia, to Video Editing to Presentations (with all that goodness inside) — now I’m going into Kiosks that use Quartz Composer, because it is cool enough and reasonably difficult.

I guess I get bored easily — but from the perspective of multiple fields and perhaps not master of any, I can say that it is always the same pattern; Some decent money, and lots of arcana, then technology makes it cheaper/better/faster and salaries when up for Newbies and Down for the Masters as businesses decided you had to have a “brochure” or “web page” or “3D spinning logo” — and your Cool Tech moment here. But where is the money for the Masters? In training. Walter is poised to train these un-washed wannabee colorists. There is no reason that the “good enough” doesn’t have to have some decent quality.

The Desktop Publishers eventually started to calm down on the fonts. Stopped using Helvetica or “gag” Arial for everything. Professionalism rose — and there is a difference between the experienced and a new user, and perhaps businesses know it. But the salaries go down at first, then go up as the education goes up (of the customers), but the salaries at the top will settle at something lower and the bottom will raise.

What are the salaries for Good web masters now? Not many jobs for bad ones. But there are people who are “masters” that oversee others who follow their direction. The experience with Workflow, Process, and how to run a Business — coupled with some taste will rule the day.

It is always going to require people to differentiate themselves with “what is difficult” even if they have a skill that has subtlety and discernment to command top money for Their Work. But as more people enter the field — you become a manager or you train or you move to something rare. People can have teams of Colorists now.

So while I agree that “talent will out” — it just won’t “out” for the same money. It can make more money, by organizing the new talents. So it is both good and bad. But the overall quality and depth of media will increase. We have 3D graphics and textured washes in Magazines, used with a photo of a model without calling attention to itself — it’s part of the “whole experience” and is nothing special. Only the image matters. So from that standpoint — video will only get better.

Story telling, ideas, creativity become more important and the “skill” less so. You don’t have to be a programmer to animate in 3D or build a web page.

But you won’t be able to do the same thing as you did yesterday, if you want the top salary.

>> But at least CEOs and people who control money will get a raise.

[Mutant0]

I had the same thing happen to me. I looked everywhere to find a RAID repair utility. Either it came with your RAID card or you used SoftRAID which has some options. Otherwise, I could find no utility that repairs RAID arrays. Looking at the low level of the drive mounting, I could see that one of my drive pairs was just set as something else — the data could have been fine. I still think it was a simple drive identifier that got set wrong. But since one drive was still “RAID” and the other wasn’t, the pair wouldn’t mount. Using “Data Rescue X” I was able to get some of the files recovered, even though it isn’t designed for RAID (it had to be looking at one drive at a time). Diskwarrior and other utilties did nothing.

There could be something to repair the drive settings out there … but I haven’t found it. I had to reformat the drives. They work fine now. But when I do a RAID again, I’ll probably use SoftRAID, or find a device that features some repair options. I believe the RocketRaid sports a repair tool.

good luck.

Mark J

[Mutant0]

The procedure I recommend is to “Export Using Compressor” from Final Cut Pro– this is slightly longer than exporting a reference file and converting it in Compressor — but it makes better compression decisions based upon the original content and actual cut points in your timeline.

In Compressor, you’ll just convert the video to MPEG 2 (about 7.5 meg peak data rate). There are more detailed articles about settings. You’ll produce a “.m2v” file.

Export the audio from FCP as “audio to AIFF”. Open that obscure application called A.pack that FCP installed. Create a stereo audio file to go with your MPEG (again, detailed articles are available).

However, not having used the lates FCP production suite, I don’t know if Apple embedded a decent audio compresser inside of Compressor.

[Mutant0]

The simple answer:
On your project and video drives, I recommend “getting info” on the selected drive (Command + I) and under “Ownership & Permissions” you check “Ignore ownership on this volume”. Security is probably not an issue in this case.

Semi-Detailed Answer:
Permissions can be set on anything in OS X. The big difference is that on the “boot volume” that contains the OS you are running, there are files that control the settings of installed applications and system files. The confusion about Disk Utility is that it only fixes permissions on the boot volume… but it doesn’t really “fix” permissions for files it doesn’t know anything about. Installed applications and system files store a special file that Disk Utility consults when doing a repair. It is just limited because it protects people from having to use the terminal to make the same commands. Not to get too geeky, but there is a default “permissions mask” setting for each user. This is why, sometimes if you log in as a different person, you’ll try to move a file or delete a file that you just made under another account and the OS won’t let you. I used TinkerTool on my machine after it seemed to make too many “locked files” to set new files I made to be read or write by everyone. Anyway, you probably don’t need this much detail.

On early versions of OS X, I had to fix a lot of permissions and ownership issues by the terminal. There are free utilities on version tracker that can make it easier for non-commandline people. You’ll want to search under “permission utilities”.

[Mutant0]

I like to use 8bit RGB (maybe a 75% compressed JPEG timeline) when I incorporate RGB color graphics. I find that trying to put any art or text over DV tends to suffer. Exceptions are some plugins that pre-compose the graphics… meaning, something like Boris will lay the CG over the video in a 24bit RGB color space, then flatten it back to DV. Often I’m outputting to DVD, so the DV color space of 4.2.0 (depending on camera) is not as good. I add in a lot of graphics and Powerpoint (not doing features but business video).

My two pennies.

[Mutant0]

I think Apple HAS TO CHARGE due to licensing issues. If you want to write out a check for h.264 encoding licensing, Sorensen, and about 6 others (at a guess), then be my guest. I have used an MPEG 4 optimized codec in the past (called 3ivx), and I had to pay $90 for the encoder and $7 for each playback machine. If Apple “bundled” in the h.264 encoding with every Mac (buried the cost) and made the whole thing automatic, then that would raise the price of every Mac by almost $30 because the licensing would assume that everyone was encoding.

This is not a FACT, but it is an educated guess.

And I would have to say that QT 7 could not be worse than QT 6.5. All the codecs are supported and there are massive architectural improvements underneath. There might be a few bugs that have to be worked out over time because of that–so if quality is lost or performance lessened, it is not inherent to QT 7 but a bug that needs addressing. So if that is essential, you probably should wait for the dust to settle.

There are posts that reference you can copy back the QT 6.5 player over the QT 7 player and get the save and encode functionality back (but not h.264) — I don’t know for sure.

But since everyone, of course, will be getting the FCP 5 Suite–what is the issue? If you aren’t getting the new suite, then you don’t really care about what you are doing (OK, I’m kidding, many pros will have to wait to make sure their projects will transition and things are stable). But really, if you are making money, you can’t just jump in–and if you do go to FCP 5 suite you will get it anyway. And if you get FCP 5, you’ll want/need Tiger and you’ll need QT 7. It is the cost of business.

But the value is there. And the money probably goes to licensing and saves you from headaches. Microsoft doesn’t do this, because they are too big to sue, so everyone assumes that the encoding is for personal use only and not going out on a P2P network (right!).

[Mutant0]

SoundTrack isn’t gone, it is now “SoundTrack Pro”. It also allows for grabbing up to 24/96hz tracks at a time (think Digital Edit boards). You can also turn on and off tracks from a SoundTrack Pro project in FCP 5 so that you might listen to different announcers or different sound FX tracks (think, real movie editing usefulness). Seems that a bit of “Logic” has crept into SoundTrack (no pun). I think for audio buffs, this is a big upgrade.

Link is here;
https://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/soundtrackpro/

It makes it just a really “Sound” investment (darn, that felt so “Austin Powers”). 😉

[Mutant0]

I thought I read on one of Apple’s web pages that you ccould now drag a FCP project into AE 6 and above (with some limitations). Don’t know how they achieved that or where it was… but it sounds exciting. They didn’t mention dragging AE into FCP 5, however.

–OOPS. That reference was in Motion. Check out Motion to AE compatibility. I guess the workaround is FCP to Motion to AE, or else Automatic Duck of course.

[Mutant0]

I thought I read on one of Apple’s web pages that you ccould now drag a FCP project into AE 6 and above (with some limitations). Don’t know how they achieved that or where it was… but it sounds exciting. They didn’t mention dragging AE into FCP 5, however.

[Mutant0]

OK. I want to admit out front that I am not an expert. But, I am extrapolating from other Apple functions like; exporting FCP to DVD Studio Pro. So when I hear that Apple is saying; “Lossless HDV editing”, I surmise that this means, I am getting the same results as if I converted the HDV to an uncompressed format, added filters and such and whatever else, and then exported. I think that is definitely possible. You might SEE artifacts in the timeline while you edit, but when you render out the file, it will render from the original. So this saves you time and drive space.

The same thing happens when you export to DVD Studio Pro. Compressor grabs the original images and applies effects and transformations in FCP, or grabs the original file if just a cut is made. You don’t get any better than what the original file was, but you don’t get worse either.

I think the big question is; what is the color space that FCP composites in. When laying RGB graphics on a YUV timeline… you would get horrible results in FCP 4.5. If you used Calligraphy or LiveType, you would get much better results because those packages actually pre-composite in a full 24 bit RGB colorspace and then output back to whatever your timeline is set at–giving you better results. My guess is (and hope) is that Apple composites everything in 32 bit space. Currently, that colorspace has a big effect on diminishing projects that I’ve done in YUV with the 4.1.1 colorspace.