[Sean Oneil]

Teranex.

[Sean Oneil]

[pvideoman] “However, when I researched further online, I saw several instances of people saying that it is risky to capture DV at 23.98”

Applying Advanced Pulldown Removal after the fact can be dangerous. Perhaps that’s what you read about. Doing it during capture should be fine, although perhaps there are issues w/ certain cameras. Just try it out and you’ll know right away if there’s a problem.

Shooting 24p and editing 60i is not a good idea. It will destroy the pulldown cadence which will cause the final output to have motion artifacts on computer monitors and progressive-scan consumer televisions. Edit 23.98 if you can.

Sean

[Sean Oneil]

The buzzing is caused by VHF over-the-air signals. So like everyone else says, no.

Sean

[Sean Oneil]

[Chuck Spaulding] “DVCProHD is 100Mb, Sony SR is 140Mb”

Don’t just look at bitrates.

DVCProHD downrezzes to 1080i and 720p to 1280×1080, and 970×720, respectively. This allows it to “cheat” and achieve less compression per pixel. Even then it doesn’t hold up multiple gens.

SR uses a MPEG-4 compression which which is inter-frame. Thus it is a lot more efficient than ProRes and other NLE-friendly intra-frame codecs.

[Sean Oneil]

[FooKai] “Going from 29.97 to 24 we will loose 5 minutes from the show”

That’s not how it works. The running time will not change. It will just drop 6 frames per second, and display the remaining 24 frames at a slower rate.

What version of FCP are you running? Does it have audio?

If it has audio, you want to convert it to 23.98 first, and then use Cinema Tools to conform it to 24 (which slows down picture and audio by half a percent or whatever it is).

I haven’t tried converting 30fps source footage to 24 yet in FCP6. FCP5 doesn’t do a very good job. FCP6 might though.

There are filters and plugins available that specialize in this. Gramme Natress’s does this I believe.

[Sean Oneil]

[Tim Wilson] “The other megaBIT numbers I cited were for:
HDCAM = 140 megaBITS
DVCPRO HD = 100 megaBITS

My point there is that calling ProRes 145 “lightweight” ONLY makes sense in comparison to 1:1 HD. It’s heavier than HDCAM and DVCPRO HD, much MUCH heavier than HDV.”

It is assumed you are comparing it to 1:1 HD. Comparing ProRes to those other codecs you listed is like comparing apples to oranges. They are very lossy camera codecs and they can’t withstand multiple generations of re-compression. The compression is meant to take place one time only – within the camera itself. This why mastering to regular HDCam or DVCProHD is vastly inferior to making masters with D5 or HDCamSR. People shouldn’t render to those formats, and they should never be used as an intermediate codec (like when sending Quicktime files to a graphic artist). With lossy camera codecs, you are supposed to capture and edit them natively (i.e. over firewire), or you capture, edit, and render to a codec which falls into a completely different category.

That category is a lossless or near-lossless codecs. Uncompressed, ProRes, Sheer, DNxHD, Cineform, JPEG2000, Animation, M-JPEG, P-JPEG, etc. These formats should not be compared to DVCProHD, HDV, and HDcam. Apples and oranges.

So with that in mind, comparing apples to apples, ProRes is indeed a lightweight codec. Especially when you conder the fact that prior to ProRes, the only lossless/near-lossless option in Final Cut sanctioned by Apple was Uncompressed. Which of course is many times larger.

[Sean Oneil]

[walter biscardi] “I meant of the three that I tested.”

Ahhh, I see.

Sean

[Sean Oneil]

[walter biscardi] “Dulce is the only system that has a working RAID alarm system. So if a drive fails, an audible alarm sounds warning you that there is a problem.”

That’s not true. Highpoint RocketRAID (the first SATA card for the Mac) has an alarm that goes off it a drive fails or is disconnected.

Sean

[Sean Oneil]

I’m sure you’re right for his case. But I have four 1-gig modules of properly placed Crucial RAM and I’m having performance issues.

I occasionally get dropped frames when using ETT with ProRes. And render times are only modestly faster than my dual 2.5ghz G5.

This is from barefeats.com:

TIGER IS “CHASING ITS TAIL”
“Yes, the memory bus is weak, but the biggest problem is that OS 10.4 (Tiger) does not know how to deal with so many cores. Perhaps 10.5 (Leopard) will. the problem is that the OS does not know that it should keep a thread on the SAME core instead of swapping it around to any one of the 8-cores. When a thread moves to a different core-group, the cache has to be reloaded on the new core. Since Intel quad-cores are two Core 2 Duos “duct-taped” together, the problem is worse than it would otherwise have been. When this thread/core shift happens repeatedly, it makes the cache ineffective and floods the memory bus with activity.” (Though put forth by an anonymous BF reader, this analysis has been confirmed by Lloyd Chambers where he discussed “core swapping” on his latest blog entries regarding the 8-core Mac Pro.)

[Sean Oneil]

[JackNastowski] “Hello,

I’m a final cut edito and I’m thinking of upgrading to a MacPro Quad Core or Dual Core. I’ve worked on a Quad Core and I haven’t noticed any significant difference in render speeds compared to my MacG5.

I use the iStat widget and i can see that the MacPro is never using all the cores. I have 9 gigs of memory and I can see that 6 gigs of it are inactive.

Are the 8 cores only useful for QMaster?

Is anybody experiencing performance increases that justify the upgrade?

I appreciate any information or direction on where I can go to get a clear answer.”

I’m glad someone spoke up about this. I just got a quad Mac Pro. Huge disappointment.

Its bad enough that I worry something is wrong with it. But what can I do? If I take it to the genius cafe, what the hell do I tell them? It’s too slow?

I think Leopard will really make the thing shine, but until then it’s really sad. A dual G5 seems almost as fast.

Sean