[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Neither, 20-bit depth@48kHz.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Correct. mini-DV or DVCAM are always 12-bit for 4 channel recording. For broadcasting DigiBeta is the normal tape format for digital 4 channel recording, and before that Beta SP was used for analogue (analog) recording.
(British spelling…)

[Paul Dickin]

[Post Office Video] “4) Had too much coffee?”
Hi
No. Rather I’ve been out of kilter today at my inability to be of any meaningful assistance with yesterday’s Mark Palmos thread. His crash-before-deadline experience is every editor’s worst nightmare.
Sorry for picking on your thread to vent my frustration… 🙁

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Presumable a broadcaster who transmits a SAP (second audio program) will just require a normal 4 channel master tape, with the SAP audio on channels 3 and 4.

With DV or DVCAM this will be a compromise, as 4 channel audio is only supported at 12-bits, rather than the usual 16-bits of a stereo channel.

Also I guess a Sony DSR-45 or better DVCAM deck is needed to record all 4 channel at the same time.

So mostly this issue will be side-stepped by mastering to Beta SP (on a BVW deck) or DigiBeta, where 4 channel audio is commonplace.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Lol!
“The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar forms the basis for a New Age belief… that a cataclysm will take place on or about 21 December 2012.”
Ending with ‘One more thing…’ 🙂

[Paul Dickin]

[Post Office Video] “Apparently there is new plumbing in Leopard that will enable cool new apps and plugins for us video folks.”
Hi
Like a fully working FCStudio for instance… 😉

Google draws a blank with Alex Linsey, and Alex Lindsey of Pixel Corps seems to impart his wisdom to a closed forum, so I’m none the wiser…

However drawing several strands from this and other web sites together I feel it behoves us not to be too gung ho about Apple’s ability to boldly go where no man has been before. 🙁

What Leopard seems to be about is developing software technologies that were built into Tiger, but not fully realised. Probably the kerfuffle of OS X 10.4.10 and QuickTime 7.2 were caused by the need to pre-release Leopard’s underpinnings to get FCS, Logic Studio, the iPhone, Safari beta 3 et al out there to support this summer’s new products whilst Leopard was still being finalised.

Lots of us more cautious Mac users aren’t playing that game, although as a long term Mac user I’m fascinated by the trials and tribulations of the crew of the Starship Apple Enterprise and its 5 months>5 year misssion 😉

I went from the Graphite Dual 450MHz era all the way to the 1.25GHz MDD era without upgrading because I didn’t feel it ‘in my waters’ that it was right.
My currrent PCI-X non-liquid-cooled G5s will see me through to the introduction of Penryn SSE4 Macs (ie an architecture that Otelini developed after Steve commited to Intel. Next year?) for exactly the same reason – the current lot aren’t ‘quite right’.

My problem, I admit it. But its also Steve’s bottom-line problem, because I don’t propose to upgrade my old FireWire iPod as I only use it as a portable self-powered hard drive, and I will never be buying an iPhone until I can have one on my £10-of-calls-for-3-months tarif (incoming calls don’t cost me). Sure I paid £39 each to upgrade my FCS licences to UB, but that’s about it until they release another killer GarageBand Jam pack.

FCS needs a major infra-structure rethink if its seriously going to take on Avid at their own game on any other attribute than give-away costs. Mac OS X needs to be beefed up to provide the core database services that a multi-simultaneous-user editing application is going to need in the future.

So to get back to the web page info that has caught my attention:-
1. https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/960509
“Basically, no MetaSAN for Leopard for a while. Up to 90 days. And it’s Apple’s fault according to them (which I don’t doubt). “
https://www.tiger-technology.com/article.php?story=leopard

2. “The most logical reason that I can think of for Apple’s refusal (thus far) to publish the source code to the x86 version of the Mac OS X kernel is that the kernel shipping today in the x86 versions of Mac OS X Tiger is an evolutionary dead end, and therefore not worth the effort to pretty up and publish.”
https://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/5

Well events haven’t (so far) born out that line of speculation, so we’re seemingly in for more of the same – more of the shortlived FCP 5.1.3 scenario, though presumably the reason why we haven’t seen a maintenance update of FCS so far is that some beta testing might be going on… 😉

And the next page of that ArsTechnica article has some gloomy predictions about the timescale of Adobe’s (and Microsoft) need to rewrite all their legacy Carbon code…
https://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/6

Being as I’m a simple end-user sort of guy who doesn’t understand any of the finer points of Objective C (or any other computer coding) I’m hunkering down for the long haul – the Ars article puts it at 2012 before these things – whatever they are 😉 are sorted – and who am I to disagree.

Well, Media Manager is one of the ‘things’, and simultaneous project access for multiple users is another, quite basic, requirement. And the handling of MXF, or DPX, or any other sort of file-wrapper that QuickTime can’t quite cope with natively at the moment. XDCAM proxies, anybody else’s metadata really…

So while Alex Linsey (sic) is enthusing about Leopard’s new core animation whiz, or whatever, I’m sitting it out waiting for a new version of FCS that says it does what it ought to do (needs to do) on the tin.

/rambling.rant

Of course being a Mac fan boy I’ll cave in and buy the lot a few months down the line 🙂

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Do a Google search for 702 pixels, and you will find a ton of stuff about CCIR-601. now ITU-R BT.60…
The problem with a ‘Standard’ is that it is immutable, and hasn’t been changed for today’s situation.

Here’s a quote:
“Full NTSC is actually 486 lines (@29.97frames/sec) but since the DCT algorithms used in the DV codec use a block size divisible by 8 or 16, the frame is cropped to 480. The NTSC active line period actually represents about 710 of the 720 total samples. An analogue source or many digital camcorders blank the outer 10 samples. This active period and the original 486 lines represent the 4:3 full image. If we crop 6 vertical lines to make 480 then we ought to crop 8 horiz samples to leave 702.
It happens that in PAL, the equivalent active period is also 702 samples (even though no lines are cropped) so it is a curious coincidence.
So to repeat, the active 4:3 picture for NTSC occupies 702×480, and for PAL 702×576.”

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
With a Sony device that does not support Insert Editing – which will include your camcorder – read this thread where Shane Ross describes a possible solution.
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/957568

[Paul Dickin]

[mark palmos] “my system is only a few months old”
Hi
My commiserations on your nightmare, but your system is gazillions of trillions of clock-cycles old, and the damage can be done in a mere cycle or two. 🙁

[mark palmos] “I dont know how to repair permissions and dont know what PRAM is… please tell!”
The wise shaman may not understand the gods who animate the fields and hedgerows of his village, but he fills in the pot-holes in his mile of road lest someone fall off their cycle and breaks their neck.

Unix (and therefore OS X) is inherently awesomely stable, but this is achieved by awesome internal security powers – when OS X or an application quits (or fails to load) it seems always to be a result of a localised file corruption or file permisson-setting anomaly, which causes unix to pull the plug for its own well-being.

So, as Rafael has explained, a simple trouble shooting procedure – with the appropriate tools – will normally get things underway again.

After Repairing Permissions (from the OS X Install DVD in case there is a System Drive problem)) and long before I would contemplate a complete re-install of OS X, I would run the appropriate Combo Updater to see if that is enough to eliminate the corruption.

DiskWarrior is essential in helping to identify any corrupted media files, or more generalised disk directory problems, and Apple’s Hardware Test on the system DVD will eliminate the possibility of a hardware fault.

In your case the Motion project and/or render files are obviously suspect, and should be got rid of (the project transferred to another drive, then unmounted to get it out of the way).
This means a) understanding, and b) working within, the Finder to do the troubleshooting and file management.

What has happened to you has happened to me a couple of times in my 14 years of Mac editing, and after the second time I’ve always had a second Mac system waiting to be brought into action if my main edit system fails. That was in 1997, but so far I’ve not had to use it…..

I know that’s no consolation to you or others in your situation, and with as Mac-savvy a person as JeremyG being forced into a FCS-performance situation where “clients who just don’t understand the technical hang ups … think that I can’t drive” then there is something bigger going on here 🙁
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/960543

Whilst Walter is waiting on the top of the mountain for the tablets to descend, in the form of Leopard-friendly updates to FCS, Apple’s oompa-loompas have already shipped OS X 10.4.10, and QuickTime 7.2, both of which presumably brought forth key Leopard code elements into broad daylight so that FCS 2 would have the sub-structure it needs. and could brought to market even though Leopard was delayed.

But 10.4.10/7.2 has meant that we are currently living through ‘interesting times’, and your problems are not in part or wholely your fault 🙁

Sorry I can’t help more specifically.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
This has come up here repeatedly, but the whole answer never seems to get collated in one single thread (to my knowledge).
So what I do:
1) Edit a duplicate of the Capture Presets settings to 32K audio, but only a 16 bit setting is available.

2) In Audio/Video Settings-A/V Devices-Playback Output-Audio-Options you can select a Bit Depth of 12 bit (with 4 Channels).

3) Once the video has been captured use SoundTrack Pro (or another audio application like Peak etc) to change the sample rate of a copy of the clip audio to 48kHz, replacing the new audio into the duplicated video .

4) Then these audio conformed clips can be used in FCP for a standard 48kHz edit.

I’m not sure if 2) matters for straightforward capture – maybe its only appropriate for 12-bit/4-channel editing and output.
Cheers