[Neil Sadwelkar]

If you mean can you move the image in the canvas with arrow keys, then yes you can. Make sure the canvas is on Image + Wireframe, then click in a non-image area of the canvas and option-arrow nudges the image right,left, up, down.

Further, if you choose to alter the image with the mouse and the corner handles, then shift-drag lets you change the horiz-vert scaling, and cmd-frag lets you scale and rotate freely.

By the way, this is in FCP6/FCS2. Don’t know if this will be changed in FCP7.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

The What’s new PDF does give some detail on DVDSP 4.

But what’s interesting is that Compressor has support for Blu-Ray.

Quote…

Blu-ray disc and DVD burning. You can now easily burn a Blu-ray disc3 or a DVD directly from Compressor. Quickly add a menu to your disc by choosing one of the beautiful Apple-designed HD or SD templates or, to achieve a specific look, import and use third-party or custom templates.

The chapter on DVDSP does not mention blu-ray, however.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

The PC version at AMDs page does indeed speak of accelerated H.264 rendering but with this footnote…

“This may vary depending on your system configuration and video formats. Using an Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16 GHz based PC, AMD was able to achieve GPU accelerated transcoding speeds up to 19x faster using Cyberlink PowerDirector than when using the same CPU alone with MainConcept encoder in Adobe Premiere CS3. Using the same system, full 1080p files were converted 1.8x faster than real-time.”

On Apple’s page on Graphics cards for new MacPros, there are comparisons for games and Motion. There’s no mention of the impact of Graphics cards on encoding. But there are benchmarks showing that H.264 encodes are faster with the new MacPros than with older ones.

So, I doubt if, with the current versions of Compressor, encoding is speeded up by graphics cards in any way. If encoding is bread-and-butter for you, consider getting a card just for that. It’ll pay for itself. Also, consider using Qmaster with multiple machines (if you have spare iMacs, MacBook Pros or even other Macs around).

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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Yes I will be at IBC this year like earlier years. And yes we can have a beer at ‘the beach’ – between hall 7 and 8 (I think). I’ll be there for all days.

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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Gregory,

A pull list in Avid Media Composer, Avid Film Composer, and FCP all refer to a list of film lab rolls that are needed to make the negative cut. So it is necessarily a film thing.

What you refer to is a ‘Source table’ that Avid puts out at the end of the EDL. FCP has no such functionality with reference to tapes. And you can’t use Cinema Tools for this as you have no database that was built from logs.

In your case, your material is from Red. So the sources are not referring to any physical tape. Even if you had done this edit in Avid you wouldn’t have got a source table unless you used something like Metacheater to bring the sources into Avid. Because, as you rightly point out “Avid is Avid” so it ‘loses’ reel or tape information and timecode from imported Quicktimes, which is how Red files make it into Avid.

What you need is indeed possible by making a batch list out of FCP, and using something like Excel or Numbers to sort out the sources.

But if all you want is to ‘upgrade’ the selects, why don’t you try the Clipfinder workflow? Clipfinder is free. Or you could check out Crimson.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I too use hard disks like Walter. And I use a drive dock like someone pointed out. The kind in which you can pop a drive in from the top. It connects to my MacPro with a Sonnet eSATA card, and to my MacBook Pro with a Sonnet ExpressCard eSATA adapter. There’s a post on that in my blog.

But of late I’ve had a series of drive failures with Seagate 7200.11 SATA drives, mainly 1 Tb. And if your backup has client projects especially pertaining to unreleased features, you can’t even send in the drive under warranty.

But SATA drives in a dock are mighty convenient. And fast. You can do up to 3 GB/min or more.
If the data is very precious, consider backing up to two drives, of different brands.

SATA drives can fail, but the data on them is often safe and a recovery house can get it all back.

We use LTOs for larger film projects where data runs into Terabytes. If you want a small solution get a Quantum or HP drive and get BRU software. I’ve heard its fast and has good Mac support.

Paradoxically, with film projects one is safer than with P2/Red/XDCam projects. If all else fails, the film will always be there.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I tried a direct export in FCP with Export > Using Quicktime Conversion. But I’m not seeing the ‘squish’ you’re seeing. There must be some Compressor setting that’s causing this squish. Probably in the ‘Geometry’ section where sizing is set.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I didn’t know you and Andy were here abouts. Where in KL do you operate from?

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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Thanks guys.

Its nice to be in good company.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I’ve been through this before. What you want is a ‘Decompose’ in Avid-speak not ‘Consolidate’.

But you’ll have to fix the tape names first, and ensure there are no duplicate tape names.

We routinely send out Avid projects to FCP via EDLs and recapture in FCP. We also routinely make EDLs in FCP and use them for scanning/conform. So the FCP-EDL mechanism works just fine.

You need to just figure the tape names. Maybe even by looking at tapes.

If you can send me just the sequence in a project, I can take a look.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India