[Peter Barrett]

I stand corrected. PAL had always been upper field first, until DV came along. Mixing formats was often problematic, hence the field shift filters built into FCP.

Avid’s answer was to swap field order when rewrapping PAL DV into its MXF wrappers – and as I recall it resampled chroma to 4:1:1 from PAL DV’s 4:2:0, further reducing chroma resolution. Nice!

Macs, FCP, Avid, Nitris DX, Color, HDCAM…

[Peter Barrett]

I’ve just run a test and Top Field first is definitely smoother, for HD (effectively 59.94i from 23.98p – just as a Nitris DX does on the fly). Bottom Field first looks just like old DV minus a field shift filter – jarring on movement on those frames containing fields from adjacent frames. My hunch is that it’s true on SD as well – unless you’re coming from and going to DV.

Good trick though – and with a decent deinterlace we have real 29.97p.

Macs, FCP, Avid, Nitris DX, Color, HDCAM…

[Peter Barrett]

Isn’t standard NTSC top field first like everything else except DV?

Macs, FCP, Avid, Nitris DX, Color, HDCAM…

[Peter Barrett]

I’m intrigued by the suggestion of “Bottom field first”, which harks back to the DV days. Given that “Top field first” is the preference for interlaced HD for broadcast, surely that’s the one to pick? Or is “BFF” part of some interlacing secret sauce in Compressor?

Macs, FCP, Avid, Nitris DX, Color, HDCAM…

[Peter Barrett]

Yeah, still very little info out there. We have a 4,1 8-core with 3x GTX680s and a RR in a Cubix box – and I’m beginning to feel we should have bought a 2012 or 2013 12-core rather than hedge our bets and wait for new machines that, while obviously faster than an iMac, may not outdo the best of the old.

Anyone heard more?

Macs, FCP, Avid, Nitris DX, Color, HDCAM…

[Peter Barrett]

Hi Claudibus

Yes, I filed a bug report also, a week later when the bug page unhacked itself. I see no easy answer – except, cautiously, to explore bypassing FCP X altogether for outputs and using instead DaVinci Resolve 10.

It has a number of things going for it:

1. It’s where the grade has come from
2. The Edit page is significantly better than the old Conform page, with three and four-point editing
3. It uses mostly FCP 7 shortcuts, not a bunch of new ones derived from iMovie
4. it has tracks, and they can be locked – the magnetic timeline may be great for bashing a cut together but it’s hell for accurate, conformed output
5. Now that there’s optical flow, text, generators and multichannel audio the only reason to go elsewhere is for complex titles and rolls which can be made in AE or Motion and imported
6. It opens one “Event” at a time, and doesn’t try to scan your entire machine like it’s the NSA
7. It starts with highly developed professional workflow expectations, instead of aspiring to be Pro, which has only a quarter of the letters
8. It’s about delivering accurately in one piece, not firing a gun at the moon.
9. it’s fast or at least ours is, with a loaded Cubix box
10. it’s wickedly fast for DCP creation.

As beta software it seems already very mature and stable. I’ve only had this version for a day but I’ll be testing it for full output today, and hoping to leave FCP X gurgling in its playpool.

Macs, FCP, Avid, Nitris DX, Color, HDCAM…

[Peter Barrett]

Hi Paul

Good to know I’m not the only one having this issue – or maybe not so good! The READ ME for 10.0.8 explicitly states, among the fixes:

Mono audio files in a surround project export with correct volume levels

Did they change something here, and broke it? Correct for what? Earbuds?

I’m in redo mode with a bunch of too-quiet DCPs… we’re not especially set up for sound, and I try to leave it alone as much as possible… this stuff feels very NoPro. Oh well, onward!

Macs, FCP, Avid, Nitris DX, Color, HDCAM…

[Peter Barrett]

Thank you both, these are reassuring endorsements. I guess two is sufficient – I thought there might be more but i guess this space is occupied mostly by the searching, uncertain neophytes like myself – the true devotees are just happily grading away. Time for the laying on of hands!

Macs, FCP, Avid, Nitris DX, Color, HDCAM…

[Peter Barrett]

Hi Simon, thanks Andy for the heads-up.

I built Proximate a while ago to copy the proxies stored in the ~/Library/XDCAM Transfer folder and rename them in a folder named according to the XD disc – which means if a disc isn’t named in the field, naming it in the Finder is a good idea… it’s an AppleScript droplet that parses the SQLite database that XDCAM Transfer writes to, to accurately correlate 64-character hex proxy names to the Cxxx naming convention of the original files. Certainly useful for logging and DVD rushes creation. I’ll see if I can dig out the latest version.

Ü

Macs, FCP, Avid, Nitris DX, Color, HDCAM…

[Peter Barrett]

Joe

Same issue here – did you find a fix?

Macs, FCP, Avid, Nitris DX, Color, HDCAM…