Robert Gilman
Forum Replies Created
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Thanks for your replies. I’m on a 2008 Mac Pro upgraded with dual 5770 GPUs and 16 GB of RAM. I don’t have the option at this time to switch to a faster machine. I have previously lowered the track size from the default 32 pixels to 20 and that did seem to help.
The biggest help so far has been to use “Reduce keyframes …” on the partial track whenever the tracking fails and needs manual attention — but that’s more manual fiddling. One big bonus of doing “Reduce keyframes …” is a major improvement in UI responsiveness.
I’ve tried using Coremelt’s Lock & Load as an alternative but I wasn’t able to get it to do the kind of point-tracking stabilization that is built in to Motion. Any other plugin alternatives out there?
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I upgraded my MacPro 2008 with a SSD and a second 5770 GPU and it has given the old machine new life for FCPX. You might find this thread (https://www.fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/18806-dual-gpus-in-old-classic-mac-pros) interesting if you want to upgrade your MacPro.
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I’m finding iDraw to be a great alternative to Illustrator. Opens .ai files and saves vector PDFs and SVG.
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When I do an event with external audio recorders I find that the clock rates in the camera and the audio recorder aren’t exactly the same so even if the reported “duration” says it’s the same the waveforms don’t match. There may well be a better way but I just sync the audio at the start and then go to the end, turn on retiming and drag the retiming handle until the I have waveform sync at the end.
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How about the C100 with the Atomos Ninja so that you can get 4:2:2 output for a lot less than the C300?
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You might get more value out of a second 5870 card. Take a look at https://www.fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/18806-dual-gpus-in-old-classic-mac-pros . I have a 2008 Mac Pro which had a single 5770 card. I recently updated it so that it now has two 5770 cards, 16GB RAM and a 250 GB SSD boot drive. It is like a new machine and quite smooth with FCPX 10.1.1
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Thanks for responding. The two cams were not as consistent as that. The event was streamed and the director sometimes took a wide view from each cam — and sometimes did MS and audience shots. The cams were on tripods but the movement isn’t always smooth so I need some stabilization as well as reframing. Even the wide shots usually have material of the presenter that is usable for my purposes with some reframing, cropping and zooming. During the slide portion of the presentation I never use the full wide shot but always use the slide image with the presenter in the portrait frame.
The event was shot in 1080i and is an hour 35 minutes long. So far I’ve been doing the reframing manually, and the results aren’t that bad, but I’d like to know if there is a better workflow. I could go through the whole thing with a manual pass and then take the difficult sections into Motion for a Track Region stabilization. Is there a better automated way to do this upfront? Should I be looking at other tools (Lock & Load?, AE?)?
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+1 for iDraw on the Mac. While they don’t official claim to open .ai files, I find it can open most of what I’ve tried.
I have also found Acorn to be a good alternative to Pixelmator. I have both and find I gravitate to Acorn.
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I don’t know if this was John’s issue, but I recently found that once I had placed cross dissolves and let them render through background rendering, I couldn’t modify their length or position without getting “ghosts” from the previous renders. Doing File>Delete Project Render Files and then re-rendering solved the problem.