Phillip Todd
Forum Replies Created
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I did something similar recently (09 MBP to 08 MP) and the details are here: https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/1160258
I did everything Grant said except to zero the boot drive. I just erased it a few times with Disk Utility while testing the whole system with tech tool. I am also planning to do a dual boot system, when I get that far and I am making the mistake of using the FCP boot drive to surf the internet. I have noticed in 4 weeks that the booting time is getting slightly longer than when the drive was really clean with fresh installs, but I do feel the set-up is snappier than my MBP was and infinitely quieter to work on, the internal drives are fast and quiet, I ma very happy. I also use Activity monitor on all my computers to “see” what’s going on if it slows down. Very handy tips Grant, thanks.
Phillip Todd
Cinematographer
Philadelphia – NYC – Zurich -
I was working only on a laptop the last 10 years. It was fine in SD.
I can’t really recommend it in HD, but, I am a DP, editing personal projects and my reel, not making a living as an editor, so maybe I am missing something. I just think the laptop as your sole edit platform has hidden costs and is a compromise, for the sake of portability.I always keep my media files on an external FW800 drive (Lacie rugged drives) and in my office have an external FW800 RAID 0 with 7200 RPM drives for a fast scratch disk, then a bunch of 2 TB drives for real storage and backs up of that real storage to take off premisis. I defrag my boot drive once a year too. It’s my primary computer, so there is a lot on it including a bootcamp partition. I always try to keep the last 100 GBs free (it a 500 GB drive).
My current mid 2009 2.8 Ghz intel Core 2 Duo MBP 17″ (matte screen), Ram max’ed at 8GB, running OS 10.6 & FCP 7.0.3 can edit my 1080 Prores footage fine. Even multicam edit 3 streams off a FW800 drive. For ergonomics I use a device that raises the MBP ca. 8″ up and use and external keyboard and mouse. I recently bought a Dell U2410 for good color and to stop having to strain my eyes to see what I was doing and use the laptop as a 2nd screen (Digital Cinema Preview screen or project/finder window). Like this I was able to get by for awhile. I just always felt the MBP 17″ 1080×1920 screen was too far away (it’s keyboard is too much in the way, even on the riser) compared to the 24″ 1080×1920 screen. I also really do not like how the non native resolutions look on screen (nothing is crisp, so up-rezing the screen is out for me).
The onboard graphics card had a hard time keeping up displaying HD video, I discovered the MBP has a 2nd “high performance” graphics card, so I switched to it, only to have the fans turning on more than before (noise pollution).It is just actually finishing a project on the MBP where it can get laborious. Color correction, I can get by with, but if I need to do any masking, or shading (vignette effect) it takes a long time to render, with the fans on at full speed (that can’t be good for the laptop longterm -maybe Shane can chime in here)
Then the export and compression into different formats for “client” delivery and web delivery, take a long time using FCP 7 Quicktime conversion. I recently used compressor and was happy to see it was ca. twice as fast.
Each time I am stuck waiting on the MBP to render something, I ask myself, what can I do to speed this up?
-Upgrade to FCPX (64-bit app) that could use the Nvidia GPU acceleration my MBP can offer.
-SSD Boot drive (yet, I read they aren’t always reliable? Experiences?), replace the optical drive with a 7200 RPM laptop drive for storage.
-Upgrade to an eSata Raid with an eSata expresscard (this MBP has expresscard)
Investing hundreds of dollars into a machine that is basically I feel has a screen that makes it hard on my 40 yr old eyes.So, I bit the bullet and invested over $1000 into a used 2008 MacPro 3,1, 2.8 Ghz 8-core, put in 2x2TB 7200 rpm drives, beefed up the RAM to 10 GB (not ideal, but, it’s what I could afford at this time). I am still looking for a graphics card that will tick all the boxes: Cuda, OpenCL, Open GL which means basically a GTX 285, 470 or 570 from MacVidCards on ebay (David Pirinelli on these forums). It’ll cost me almost $2000 by the time I am done, so maybe it’s not a deal since the machine is 4 years old, but, so far just with the stock video card FCP 7 is a joy to use, renders are still a bit slow (not a 64 bit app) but everything works well, I can make some upgrades, the internal drives are super fast (ca. 150 MB/sec), and a dual monitor set up with 2 Dell U2410s (used, off ebay) are really nice to look at after years of eye strain working on a laptop, feeling that the job is going to melt it. The biggest bonus is the MacPro frees up the MBP 17 for everything else.
Phillip Todd
Cinematographer
Philadelphia – NYC – Zurich -
I had this once with a card that was corrupted. Had to rewrap the files using ClipWrap (v2.4.6 I think) into ProRes, then import into FCP 7.0.3
Phillip Todd
Cinematographer
Philadelphia – NYC – Zurich -
Yo David!
Like you I was running 10.5.8 and FCP 7.0.3 for a long time on my 2009 MBP 17″. No issues and I was happy.
Then I did 2 jobs with my GH1+GH2 and later 2x GH2 cameras using the AVCHD codec and did the post myself. Both jobs had a lot of static shots with people talking in a relatively controlled indoor environment. Both jobs were transcoded using L&T to ProResLT upon ingest.
On the first job only when I got to the color correction did I notice some ugly graininess in the dark greys. I thought I was pushing the codec too far. On the 2nd job I noticed some ugly graininess and strange macro-blocking in the dark blues after ingest! After a lot of experimentation it turned out that QT 7 was the culprit and was creating the macro-blocking. Upgrading to 10.6.8 and continuing with FCP 7.0.3 was fine and the footage looked beautiful, like it had played out of the camera directly on my Dell Supersharp via HDMI in. I didn’t even have to reencode. It was as if there was something in the AVCHD codec that QT 7 could not “compute” and display properly.
It was early in the project and I was under a time deadline, I did a SuperDuper dupe for insurance and installed 10.6.8 on top of my 10.5.8 install on the MBP HD. It ran well but towards the end of the project during CC FCP would crash ca. once a day. At that point my laptop was just overwhelmed with the effects, so I can’t say if it was due to the OS or not. I have recently started to think I should back-up, wipe the drive clean and do a clean install of everything, especially if I want to go to FCPX.
In the end I realized, with new cameras coming out every 5 seconds and new codecs almost as fast I couldn’t expect QT 7 (unsupported) to keep up with a camera newer than the last QT 7 update. That is why you should upgrade as soon as you can. That was 3 months ago for me and I am starting to think to upgrade to Lion already.
Hope it helps.
Phillip Todd
Cinematographer
Philadelphia – NYC – Zurich -
I had this once happen to me with a rental 501 or 503 (not sure anymore) using Manfrotto bowl legs (75mm or 100mm, can’t remember).
If you have a 2nd pair of legs, mount the head and repeat the test. If it’s different, check the legs, where the leg meets the bowl (or nut mounting plate in this case).
Often the retaining nuts on the legs can work their way loose and the spring back effect is due to too much pan drag and loose leg nuts. The leg nuts should be loose enough to allow the legs to move without much resistance, but, be tight enough to hold the head and the camera firmly, regardless of your panning and tilting.
I own an even older Manfrotto head which was an expensive compromise back when I was a student. I never trusted their new and improved stuff was that much better. I got lucky and found a used Sachtler at a good price on bblist.co.uk and have never looked back.
Hope this helps,
Phillip Todd
Cinematographer
Philadelphia – NYC – Zurich -
Follow-Up:
When I started that projects I was on FCP 7 on 10.5 Leopard.
After transcoding my AVCHD files to QT ProRes I noticed that QT7 was showing massive macrblocking in my images. QTX in 10.6 on another system did not have this macroblocking so I upgraded mid project to 10.6. I had no choice.
I finished the edit and delivered without a problem until…
While archiving the project I got some error messages and had to “reconnect media” for some of my Zoom H4n files and then got a lot of FCP error messages about sequences & in and out points that would be affected. I went into those sequences and saw that everying was out of sync by a small amount. I removed my audio clip speed change of 100.9% (workaround for this problem described above) and the clips played in sync again.After reading the very good article below, I now think my sync issues were related to QT7 not being able to read the flags in the Zoom H4n files, but, QT X can! I am looking forward to NOT have this problem on my next project.
This was one case where it did pay to upgrade the OS of a working system, both in image quality and sync sound. In retrospect I shouldn’t have expected my new devices to work with older software.
Phillip Todd
Cinematographer
Philadelphia – NYC – Zurich -
I have the exact same problem with my GH1 24P (hacked) or GH2 24P (un-hacked and hacked) footage and my ZoomH4n (48KHz/16). In FCP 7.0.3 on OS10.5 and OS 10.6 (QTX) all footage transcoded to ProRes LT, audio always 48KHz/16 in a ProResLT FCP sequence.
My workaround after lots of frustration was to set my audio clip speed to 100.09%. That has solved the problem every time for me.
I will check out the tutorial mentioned below (THANKS!) about time stamping. I had previously thought it had to do with the fact that true 24P actually runs at 23.976 FPS, but QT reports it as 23.98 FPS. So an audio speed increase ca. .04% was necessary… and .09% actually worked. Recently I noticed in VLC 2.0 the fps reported as 23.976xxxxxx. The x’s were not zeros to my surprise. Lots of new issues with these inexpensive devices rushed to market, I guess.
Phillip Todd
Cinematographer
Philadelphia – NYC – Zurich -
Hi
I have been thinking also of buying an iMac for FCP in the last days.
Yesterday I found one used at a decent price on ebay and thought about taking the plunge until I saw this:
https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#iMacThe iMac is overdue for an update.
Personally, I am looking for one that can have the OWC esata upgrade done
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/turnkey/iMacis compatible with Resolve for future color correction
and has as much VRAM, display real estate and processing power as I can afford.Let us know what you end up doing.
Thanks,
Phillip Todd
Cinematographer
Philadelphia – NYC – Zurich -
In Final Cut Studio 2 and 3 (In SoundtrackPro 2 and 3) there is the ability to set a noise sample of the sound you’d like to remove (filter). There are parameters to expand on the sample you give it as well. It could work, but might affect the fidelity of the speaker.
Good to know those Azden products are not the bargain they appear to be.
Good luck!
Phillip Todd
Cinematographer
Philadelphia – NYC – Zurich -
Worth trying might be the app Treasured 2.6 from https://aeroquartet.com/movierepair/repair or maybe they can recover audio files. A human emailed me back. I think they are in Germany.
Maybe Zoom has such a recovery program, or another audio manufacteurer for .wav files. There must be tons of programs out there as .wav files are so common in the PC world. I am sure you are not alone in having had this happen to you.
Next time, do you need to bring an APS power supply? This really is the bleeding edge of technology. Thanks also for sharing.
-Phillip
Phillip Todd
Cinematographer
Philadelphia – NYC – Zurich