[Peter Barrett]

No one having any issues with serial device control? Am I alone on this one?

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

[Peter Barrett]

Have you tried the Calibrated MXF plugin and Paragon’s NTFS drivers?

[Peter Barrett]

We’ve just bought an HP LTO-4 for the purpose, using Retrospect on Macs and the supplied drivers on PCs. I’m intrigued by the Quantum “MXF-aware” argument – does that mean something happens to native MXF files on other drives? Surely not… or just that the Quantum drives can deduce a database from the included metadata?

Quad G5/NVidia Quadro/Kona LHe/Infortrend RAID/Final Touch HD 2.6.1 & Color/FCP 6.0.2/OS X 10.4..11

[Peter Barrett]

Interesting that it’s a drop frame issue – I always assumed it was a 24 v 23.976 thing but this makes sense. I’ve often noticed drift on PAL projects that adds up to about 4 secs every 45 mins, which seems about right… oddly the waveforms in FCP’s timeline sit against existing audio as expected, but don’t reflect the sound played back.

I’ve remedied this by throwing the wav or aif into an NTSC or 23.98 timeline ( (and I now realise, drop-frame) and re-exporting the aiff from FCP, which then imports correctly, as it’s now presumably drop-frame-flag agnostic.

Quad G5/NVidia Quadro/Kona LHe/Infortrend RAID/Final Touch HD 2.6.1/FCP 5.1.2/OS X 10.4.8

[Peter Barrett]

I found that RGB rendering clipped anything above 100% – not so good for grading.

Quad G5/NVidia Quadro/Kona LHe/Infortrend RAID/Final Touch HD 2.6.1/FCP 5.1.2/OS X 10.4.8

[Peter Barrett]

Ah! Motion filtering! It’s been set to “Normal”, “Best” is no better, but “Fastest (linear)” fixed the problem, presumably at the cost of some theoretical but invisible accuracy. I can live with that!

Thanks Mattdawgpro for the heads-up on that – sometimes the solutions for things are utterly counterintuitive.

Quad G5/NVidia Quadro/Kona LHe/Infortrend RAID/Final Touch HD 2.6.1/FCP 5.1.2/OS X 10.4.8

[Peter Barrett]

Hi Graeme, congrats on everything you’ve been up to lately. Yes, I think it’s ok in both a native HDV and AIC timeline, and transcoded to Uncompressed 10-bit HD (although that introduces its own fine mosaic). The material is native in the timeline, ingested via XDCAM Transfer. The primary delivery format for this is SD on Digibeta, so it’s a 10-bit Uncompressed SD sequence I’m using.

At first I blamed the fact that the offline editor had inadvertently set the Video Processing to render only 10-bit at floating point, ignoring HDV’s 8-bit – I selected the “Render all…” option and the problem disappeared – til I rendered.

I think it’s an FCP scaling issue – we’ve found that hardware downconverts from Uncompressed 1080i to PAL tend to be better than either FCP’s time;line renders (which go a bit soft) and Compressor (which often introduces moir

[Peter Barrett]

Sure, what I struggle with is that the banding is absent UNTIL the render takes place in the timeline. It suggests that it’s something FCP is doing during the process – formerly distinct, bright clouds vanish behind venetian blinds…

Quad G5/NVidia Quadro/Kona LHe/Infortrend RAID/Final Touch HD 2.6.1/FCP 5.1.2/OS X 10.4.8

[Peter Barrett]

Alternate frames or alternate fields? DV 4:2:0 skips a line between samples – which is why I’ve heard the argument that ingesting 4:2:0 DV at 4:2:2 Uncompressed actually results in a LOSS of chroma information – the lines with chroma are half-sampled, from those without it’s totally absent… not sure if I buy it but it’s an interesting paradox…

Quad G5/NVidia Quadro/Kona LHe/Infortrend RAID/Final Touch HD 2.6.1/FCP 5.1.2/OS X 10.4.8

[Peter Barrett]

Thanks, I agree HDV is rubbish. We need both SD and HD outputs, which is why I’ve avoided ingesting as SD. The workflow requires direct ingest, which means it all arrives in glorious HDV, as Sony intended…

I’ve worked with HDV a fair bit, either directly or using AIC. Now I know AIC has its detractors, but I’m not a big fan of DVCPRO HD transcoding either – 4:2:2 colourspace perhaps, but the material suffers. It’s HDV native or uncompressed for me. I’ve successfully got HDV in and out before and this is a new issue as far as I can tell – that I think originates in the camera – there’s evidence of it there, though it’s not that pronounced…

Quad G5/NVidia Quadro/Kona LHe/Infortrend RAID/Final Touch HD 2.6.1/FCP 5.1.2/OS X 10.4.8