[Paul Dickin]

Hi
I use a J-30SDI with FCP 5.1.4, and it functions just like my DSR-25 and DSR-11 decks – no change to a standard DV project, the J-30 is functionally identical.
Are the J-30’s menu setting appropriately set?

One point, the J-30 is sensitive to having several other FW hard drives on its channel, so its best to add a card to the Mac to give it its own channel.

Also mine fried the front FW400 port on two G5 Macs, even with powering the J-30 down before connecting/disconnecting it, so now I ALWAYS use the rear FW ports, and only connect it switched off, and power it up with the Mac powered down.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
https://www,perian.org/ fror the Flash player component for QuickTime
https://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html for the conversion software.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
You need to be working in a PAL sequence, if it isn’t it hasn’t got the right settings.

[Paul Dickin]

[Ron Lindeboom] “Avid is taking it a step farther, insuring that their customers see what they need to see…
This is an approach that Avid found to be extremely successful in Europe

[Paul Dickin]

[Peterd] “I think apple needs to completely overhaul media manager and possibly how FCP works with media altogether.”
[CharlieX] “FCP would need to be re-written from the ground up to fix it’s Media Management problems. It’s a house built on the sand….
…maybe Apple should buy Avid. Avid has strong media management if nothing else. “
Hi
What Avid and Fast (now Pinnacle>Avid Liquid) introduced in the latter 1990s was a clip management strategy where captured clips were the total responsibility of the NLE, not the computer’s OS. That way a rock-solid database would be available for ‘media management’, and Windows (or Mac OS with Avid on a Mac) was excluded from the process.

Apple rightly saw the limitations of this strategy – all data in such a locked system is eternally proprietary, and will carry an associated cost premium. With a Mac all data is managed by the OS, with freely available management tools.

But to drag Final Cut kicking and screaming into the 21st century, some such rock-solid asset database is essential. The Mac way of doing things means this has to be a shared responsibility, with Mac OS X being the main factor.

There seems to be signs that this development is under way… 🙂
There are also signs that integrating Final Cut into all this is not a trivial matter, so it may be we’ll have to wait for Leopard’s successor for it to happen 🙁

QuickTime, the OS X system component upon which all video on a Mac depends, also needs a rebuild. From its inception it has allowed variable frame-rates and frame durations within the same movie – this allows it to do slide shows etc.

But to work properly with an NLE where constantly variable frame rates and frame durations are not acceptable, due to sync issues, QuickTime has had to be kludged, variously by Radius, Media 100, and Avid, to give the stability that those NLE systems were renowned for.

Now, with Open Timelines, and the multitude of new frame rates and pull-down options that HD has introduced, there is plenty of scope for QuickTime’s legacy architecture, in partnership with FCP, to screw up.

On top of that there is the necessity for transparent future-proof compatibility with MXF and other new-format video.

Because Leopard was delayed, QuickTime had to be prematurely upgraded to v7.2 to introduce Leopard-based core code, in advance of Leopard itself, so FCS 2 and iLife could work.

This has meant more opportunity for conflicts ;-(

Then there’s the current security-issue scaremongering, which means that a new version of OS X and QuickTime are needed ever few weeks to repair notional security weaknesses… ;-(

There was a tiny rumour at the time of the big FC-Extreme/FCP6-at-NAB-2006 rumour, that reported that Apple had a second Final Cut development team working, independently and in isolation from the main maintenance upgrade team, to produce a completely new version of Final Cut Pro. Well rumours receive short shrift in these parts, but….

….wouldn’t that be nice! 🙂

[Paul Dickin]

[CharlieX] “there’s something in QT and FCP reading frame rates, I think, that’s at the heart of the issue.
…we’re loading 30fps material into 24fps DV files….and something freaks FCP6 out..
…clip analysis revealed several frames that were 1.5 frames in duration (according to FCP), …and even when batch conform got rid of that problem, the clips still were corrupt. “
Hi
I’m nowhere near FCP 6 yet, but I reckon that about 90% of the instabililty issues with FCP, and probably 99% of Render Error and Media Manager quirks, are directly caused by frame-rate/frame-length/frame-count irregularities.

Why hasn’t there been a maintenance update for FCS yet?
Well, you and Apple are working on it, and maybe you have made better progress 😉

[Paul Dickin]

[CharlieX] “DPI has no meaning in video. At all. Whatsoever. “
Hi
In the depths of pre-history Adobe Premiere 3-6.5 imported 10 inch wide images correctly, creayting a 720 pixel wide image, importing the same pixel-size image at 300 dpi produced a quarter-size import surrounded by black.

So to Adobe in that era, only 72dpi images imported as expected. I don’t know if Adobe still maintains that workflow in PPro.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
I do the same. being UK based and not knowing what the USA viewer will see I spend the time making a proper NTSC DVD.
a) Convert all the movie content to NTSC in FCP, using the Nattress standards convertor (or outside FCP with Compressor or After Effects)
b) Encode the NTSC movie as an NTSC MPEG-2 in Compressor
c) Remake all the DVD SP menu assets at NTSC framesize.
d) Completely reauthor the NTSC DVD in DVD SP.

Without proper NTSC monitoring it is difficult to get an accurate assessment of the result – although PAL DVD players output a PAL60 signal off an NTSC DVD, it will most likely be of degraded quality.

A burnt DVD-R will be ‘All Regions’, so that isn’t a factor.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
The DigiBeta deck can be set to monitor channel 3 & 4.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
It doesn’t say that, there’s no mention of Universal Binary on that page:
Requirements
Macintosh computer with a PowerPC G3, G4 or G5 processor

There have always been seperate PPC or Intel update downloads on Apple’s download pages – no Universal Binary version (that I’ve seen…)