Nic Adlerton
Forum Replies Created
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Hi
You posted this same question back at the Apple FCP forums and I refer you to their replies. You might not get so many guffaws of incredulous laughter here, but the misinformation you have been given is still fascinating.
WAV export from Quicktime is simple. I do it daily. Select your audio format and export as normal.
Avid & Final Cut have given me equal reliability to tape.
Avid Network System = Unity. Final Cut Network System = XSan. They have their own caveats and quirks. FCP is about 1/3 the price for a network setup.
R.E. Timecode. Nonsense.
I think the main difference is that FCP is cheaper, thus can be used by more people, thus can be set up by people without as much experience or technique as Avid, thus is subject to greater instance of user error.
As with all things, if you know what you’re doing, you have won 90% of the battle.
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Sean
Take a look here:
https://www.simplicityfilms.com/video/PES5Spot.mov
It’s in Quicktime 7 (H264) format. If you can’t see it I should be able to do a WMV. Forgive the poor resizing and the dark gamma – I didn’t encode it myself!
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You can simulate faster frame rates in post and the results vary depending upon the footage shot and the software you use.
Take a look at Twixtor, which will run in After Effects, Final Cut and Shake. Also take a look at The Foundry’s Furnace package for Shake (and others) which has some excellent retiming algorithms.
We shot a spot on film at 25 and 50fps, did the post in HD and managed to slow the footage down an incredible amount. It took a lot of tweaking to avoid artifacts – and it’s not perfect – but cost less than hiring a high speed camera. I could link you to a clip if you want.
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That’s great information, Steve, and thanks for the response.
It does seem that Panasonic has the edge at the moment in both the Prosumer and Pro tiers of HD.
Do you happen to know if Panasonic has some datasheets on the Cinegamma the HDX 400 offers, and perhaps those of the VariCam to compare and contrast? Online if possible.
Many thanks.
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Take a look at Videoscope: https://macupdate.com/info.php/id/3262
It can take a feed directly from the Blackmagic card – I don’t know if it does HD and I’m away from the office at the moment, but I can check it out when I return. What would be extremely tasty would be if it did do HD and we all wrote to the developer to add bits and pieces that would make it complete.
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Not sure what you mean by ‘standalone’. Do you mean the multibridge or something?
I run a Decklink Extreme PCI-X daily for broadcast and film work. No problems whatsoever.
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Oops. Just noticed you were talking feet, not meters, but the info remains the same. Above 10 – 15 meters or 30 to 45 feet, copper fibre channel is extremely expensive.
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You are probably using copper, if you are using the X-RAID straight out of the box. Copper fibre channel cable has a much shorter run length; copper it is also insanely expensive.
We also moved our X-RAID out of the edit suite and into the server room. The longest copper cable I could find was 15 meters and that was upwards of 300 dollars. Fortunately, due to the topology of our offices, with a central server room, that was enough.
If you want a 100 meter run, you are going to have to use optical fibre. In addition to this pretty standard cabling, you will need a media converter at either end of your cable which plugs into the X-RAID and into your fibre channel card and converts the electrical signals into opticals.
Something like this: https://www.selectronix.co.uk/series.asp?did=30&sid=13
Or this: https://www.cs-electronics.com/gbic-mia.htm
Apple sell media converters right out of the Apple store, but they are a little more expensive than third party units. (Actually, I just checked this and perhaps they’re not. Shop around.) Apple also sell optical fibre, but again it’s at a price premium. In fact, I just checked and Apple simply resells cable from CS Electronics.
Check out that second link, CS Electronics. They will be able to supply everything you need. You don’t mention if you have a first or second generation X-RAID – but if you have a first gen unit that comes with the older HSSDC2 connectors rather than SFP. The newer machines are SFP which match your fibre channel card, making things cheaper and easier.
The media converters you are looking for are Optical SFP Transceiver Module – 850nm/Multi-Mode – LC, 2GB/s which are 99 dollars off the Apple store. You will need four of them, one for each end of both cables of your fibre run.
The optical cable you want matches the above. LC, 2GB cable at 850nm/Multimode. Apple do 25 meters for 200 dollars. CS Electronics claim they can make up custom lengths for you.
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Strangely enough, we just finished a 35mm commerical for a client who, when looking at the footage in post, said that it ‘looked like video’.
We spent a long time trying to work out what they were talking about – finally pinning it down to that fact that we had used a narrow shutter angle for a staccato visual feel (which they had requested) and now seeing it in front of them they were nervous.
As regards ‘film look’, a great deal of people (in my case read: clients) don’t know what the hell they are talking about or looking for; this is simultaneously reassuring and worrying.
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I suspect he means a floating window in the application that will display the current playhead timecode as seen in many audio sequencing applications.
I don’t believe this is possible in Final Cut.