[Scott]

I assume you are capturing the video to your hard drive?

Try freeing up some space on the HD.

In order to capture and playback video from a HD in real time,
there must be plenty of free, contiguous space available on the HD. Note that its not only a matter of the amount of free space available, but how quickly the heads can write to the platter. It won’t do to have a fragmented disk where the heads have to skip around alot to read/write the data. The space available has to be physicially close, preferably on the outer portion of platter, where, as the disk spins, the speed is greater, and so more data can be written faster.

Does this help?

[Scott]

Yes, I have my scratch discs set to the Raid, Video and Audio capture, as well as to my two SCSI drives, Video and Audio.

As I indicated, they work as expected except when doing a Capture Now.

I suspect FCP, before doing a Capture Now is doing some sort of speed check to make sure the write speed is going to be fast enough to do a Capture now. In any event, its either not seeing or not liking the Fibre Channel or SCSI drives.

Only when I clear up enough space on a phsically connected HD (either my system drive, which I HATE to put video onto, or my “Projects Drive”) will it perform a Capture now, placing the footage onto one of those Drives, which I have to reconfigure as Scratch drives.

[Scott]

hey, what ever happened to the 10 sec countdown (beep and black at -2) Anyone still using Type-C out there in TV land?

Man, have I been in the biz too long or what?

[Scott]

WOW, what a great resourse. That was exactly what I needed — after playins some and tweaking some here and there, I can’t tell you how great that works. Many, many thanks. As great as AE is, it’s you guys who really make it such a useful and valuable program!

[Scott]

WOW, what a great resourse. That was exactly what I needed — after playins some and tweaking some here and there, I can’t tell you how great that works. Many, many thanks. As great as AE is, it’s you guys who really make it such a useful and valuable program!

[Scott]

The problem gang is this: I am not the only editor in this shop, and I am working with folks who do not come from a video background, but an IT one.

Jerry Hofmann, FCP Guru and Herd Leader in his FCP article in the premier issue of Creative Cow Magazine writes:
“Keep your project file on your startup disk in your User’s Documents folder….Final Cut takes care of all the sorting of different project’s media files, captured or rendered, putting them in folders that are automatically created and named the same as your project file, so why fight it?’

The reason, Jerry, is that we like to back up our projects so when the client comes back and wants to update it 10 or 15 months later, we can pull one disk and load up not only the edl, but the motion effects, AE animations, PS files, Illustrater files, scripts, VO aiffs, music bed, and all those other elements we need to recreate the project. See, it helps the workflow to have all that stuff in one place, not in eight different folders. That’s why.

I’m not expecting Apple to houseclean for me, just to make my job easier. That’s theoretically why computers exist, imho. They should serve my needs, not the otherway around. Apple usually gets that. I didn’t create the bizare file structure that FCP defaults to. The point is, this is the default. Sure I can change it. But when my colleagues who get on the system once every few months to do some little project that I’m too busy to help with, the stuff gets stored all over the place. I have seen capture folders inside capture folders within the wrong project folders, and so on, because when they open FCP, it by defalult loads the last project, and they’re off captureing footage that gets stored in the wrong places. That’s not always helpful.

All I’m asking for is wheither there is a concensus on best practices. I don’t think it’s FCP’s default arrangement.

[Scott]

I agree that it would be a great idea if the company were to invest the resources necessary to develop, impliment and support a streaming site — but I just don’t make those kind of calls. I do hope that within five or ten years the comapany may do something like this, but until then…

Still, one major issue is that many of our customers do not have high-speed connections anyway, and if they do, they are not likely to have them available on the shop floor or warehousing facitilities where the operators work. This is an industry where training on how to use expensive, dangerous and heavy material handling machinery is often viewed as a necessiary evil, best done quickly so they can put the operators to work. (Hey, You and I know this is stupid, but it still happens no matter how insame we think it is) Our customers range in size from Wal-mart to mom-n-pop shops, all over the world.

Now, with the current state of the internet, streaming a variety of 15-50 minute videos to who knows how many different asynchronous simultanious end-users without any glicthes or hiccups in that hour is simply an unrealistic expectation. Heck, you’re doing good to get a solid 20 minutes, and that’s from sites like MSNBC which is an internet company. Ours is not, nor, as I have been told many times, does it wish to be.

Thus you see where we are: we want to provide our customers with a digital file they can use however they can, but we don’t want to get into the business of being a media conversion company. Dontcha wish you had my job?

[Scott]

For some reason, the sequence audio settings were set to dual mono instead of stereo, hence pan was disabled. To check this, right click the sequence in the brower window (yes, of course I use a two button mouse, what do you think) and click on settings in the contexual pop-up menu, then in the dialog box, click on the audio settings tab.

[Scott]

Try https://www.mca-i.org/members/forms.shtml The Media Communicatins Association-International has on their website a plethora of forms, templates, legal releases, contracts, copyright information, etc. They are all in MS Word format (.doc) so you can edit or customize them.

Note that you may have to be a member first to access some of these forms, but considering all you get, insurance, networking, etc, it’s cheap at twice at the dues.

[Scott]

Thanks, Todd.

I did finally discover another way, and yah, it’s kinda wierd, but here’s how:

1) Adjust the audio level, pan, etc. on just one clip segment in the timeline.

2) Highlight that audio clip by selecting it in the timeline.

3) Copy that highlighted clip (command-C)

4) With the mouse, highlight all the clip segments in the timeline that you want to adjust to the same parameters.

5) Now, in the top menu bar, go to >Edit, >Paste Attributes.

6) A Dialoge box opens, check the appropriate boxes of the attributes (such as audio levels) you wish to copy onto the highlighted selection of clips in the timeline.

7) Click OK (or Apply, or Done, or whatever the button is labeled)

Perhaps there is a better way, but if so, I certainly can’t seem to find it.

Now, to me, this seven-step process is appaulingly more complicated than Avid’s more intuitive approach where you FIRST higlight or indicate the selection or track you wish to affect and then adjust the levels, etc.

While, overall, I like FCP better than Avid Express 4.6 running on Classic OS 9, it’s issues like this that continue to disappoint and reveal software development choices that were made by computer programmers rather than editors.