[Paul Dickin]

Hi
In your Browser you can Search for any descriptive term, and Sort any Column like Reel # or a Comment field with dates or times entered into it.
So its best to organise your assets in the Browser, into meaningful Bins, with all the appropriate Columns filled with keyword information.

FCP works much better with as few Sequences in either timeline tabs, or nested, as necessary. If you nest a long sequence full of shots and cut that into your current assembly sequence it will take a whole lot more RAM for FCP to work out what to do with the nest. Do that a few times, sequence within sequence within sequence, and you’re editing in treacle…

600 shots is nothing 😉
I am currently working with shots digitised from that many DigiBeta tapes 😉
I set up an organised Browser, then do some assembly/sorting into a timeline sequence. Once I’m happy with that bit of work-in-progress I either leave it for the moment and work on another preliminary-edit sequence, or move on to set up a more formal Assembly Sequence One, where I copy and paste clips from inside the first sequence(s) – so its not a nest.

This means that the first older sequence is now frozen in time, a backup. I never use it again for editing, and it needs to be closed from the timeline tabs to free up RAM resources.

When I Save As the project to move to another stage of the edit – Assembly Project Two – I can delete from the new project any very prelinary Sequences that I know have been incorporated into later assemblies. That way I try to keep my projects uncluttered.

My hour/hour-and-a-quarter programme editing projects never go much above 20-30MB, yet a beginner FCP colleague who edited nested sequences into nested sequence into nested sequence ad lib got to 200MB+ in a fortnight, and ground a well-speced G4 Mac literally to a standstill…

BUT, there as many ways to edit with FCP as there are editors…

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
OS X allows different audio I/O devices to be combined – in the Audio MIDI Setup utility, create an aggregate device driver (in Audio MIDI Setup>File>Open Aggregate Device Editor).

But as I understand it the Kona card’s driver probably doesn’t report itself to OS X as a core audio device.

[Paul Dickin]

[Tim Wilson] “IT-based ingest, …scalable collaboration tools, …live-to-air playout servers.”
Hi
As a small-as-it-gets one-man-band facility producing low-budget cable/satellite programming your list forms EXACTLY whay I see as the future needs of my business.

With the video production world moving to IT-based server media stores, frame-by-frame embedded metadata is ESSENTIAL. Everything has to remain with the clip forever more

FCP is stuck in the old world paradigm of tape in/tape out – with any clip information held in a computer equivalent to the tape library’s original paper-based archive database. That’s not good enough anymore.

I don’t underestimate the amount of work (ie the costs) needed to bring the back-end concept of any NLE up to date.

As I see it the same metadata handling needs apply to the iPhone and iTunes, and especially to a mobile Wi-Fi world of continual communication with datastores elsewhere.
The more Apple can add an effective data and metadata-handling engine to OS X, the more any device, and any software like FCS, can benefit.

So Apple is essential to a thriving future for FCP – any other owner would end up marginalising or fossilising it 🙁

Since the days of CP/M and MS-DOS, a DOS and a GUI have been enough for a computer application.
Not in future…

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
As a low-end-broadcasting user of FCS, what I hoped Apple would have announced they were about to ship after NAB was:

a) Final Cut Server – ie FCP’s Media Manager totally fixed and made bomb-proof with an internal asset database, AND fully integrated into a scalable external databased media storage solution, and

b) Apple Xnas – a state of the art lower end (lower cost) shared storage solution, NAS rather than SAN, that would allow us smaller edit facilities access to a shared storage solution that we can afford, and manage without expensive specialist support.

c) Also QuickTime needs to be updated to fully cope with clip management and databasing in a MXF-metadata world. I guess this is part of the problem in getting FCServer to market, as the preservation of metadata is crucial to server management of assets. Timecode was a tape-based solution which is inadequate in a tapeless workflow – I mean VITC hasn’t even made it into QuickTime, we’re all working in Tape Counter mode 😉

d) Lastly DVD SP brought into the Blu-ray era, but fully, with control over the whole navigation interactivity of the new format. And with the DRM nonsense reworked to be of benefit to a small corporate edit facility, not just for Hollywood production studios.

If Apple can’t deliver on all (or any) of that then they might as well dash my hopes now by not appearing at NAB 😉

One of the guys on the CatDV developement team said of the delayed delivery of Final Cut Server, “Apple thought that by getting nine women pregnant they could produce a baby in a month, but it don’t work like that…”
In the end the healthy delivery of the offspring is all anyone really cares about, so if it isn’t to be this spring, so be it. 🙁

[Paul Dickin]

[Mark Palmos] “..set the fields to UPPER (as it should be for PAL dvd)…”
Hi
After years of being confused with the Field Dominance option in Compressor’s output preset settings I had a revelation:
The programmers who wrote the application code KNOW what the correct output-to-DVD setting should be, so they can write the code to get it right.
What they DON’T know is what I am feeding in – so that setting can only apply to the SOURCE footage….

Now I don’t know whether that logic is right or wrong, but it seems to me to be the only workflow that IS logical 😉

[Mark Palmos] “…it was a project i had done on Premier on a PC and had rendered all the AVIs to MOV’s.”

How was the conversion done? Because I’ve found with earlier versions of QuickTime 7 that there is something screwed up with QT’s understanding of the DV PAL field order.
If you use an application (not an NLE) that can play QT movies directly down the FW channel to an interlaced video monitor then DV NTSC will play fine, but a DV PAL movie’s field order is reversed, and jitters.
So QT on its own doesn’t (didn’t?) know enough about adhering to field-order standards – its only within FCP that the anomaly is corrected.
So is it possible your transcoded AVIs may be being misidentified in some way during the timeline rendering process?

Us regular FCP users don’t see usually such problems because:
a) we have regular well-used workflows, and
b) when I do something spot unusual I’m ready with the whole range of my desktop Mac’s suite of troubleshooting tools to pounce on, and identify, any anomalies.

Hope you can sort it out…

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Quote: Cassettes that have been recorded by a DV-format recorder can be played back on this unit but cannot be used fro recording at editing operation.
DSR-1500 Operation manual Page 23.

Although this normally refers to insert editing functionality, it seems to be the only reference in the manual to DV format tapes.

There doesn’t seem to be a Menu option for Rec Mode, as in the DSR-11/25 models.

On a FW-based system the QuickTime DVCAM/DV setting option found in FCP’s Audio/Video Settings>A/V Devices>Playback Output/Different Output>Video>Options has an effect on this, if the deck is functional in this mode.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
And Logic Studio.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Look in Safari’s Avtivity window (Window Menu). Option double-click on the movie – down it comes to your hard drive…. Then use Perian’s Flash Component, and MPEG Streamclip to manage the conversion to the codec of your choice.

[Paul Dickin]

[walter biscardi] “nothing really jumps out and says “Dang! I have to have that!”
Hi
The new Apple TV (computer-independant broadband-connected) is going to lead somewhere new I would suspect.
Podcasts – SD or HD – and YouTube movies – now H.264 – direct to a TV near you with the computer switched off gives a whole new opportunity for video content to be delivered direct to a viewer.
For $229….

As to the Air, lots of airlines still enforce a 5Kg hand-baggage rule. Everytime I travel by air I long for a lighter laptop…

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
H.264 is a codec using a macroblock compression algorithm – which means its movie-frame pixel dimensions should optimally be divisible by 16, or at least by 4, for the macroblocks to be defined correctly.