Sean Oneil
Forum Replies Created
-
I think I’m the only person who actually likes Media Manager.
Sean
-
Use Option 1. It’s a no-brainer.
FYI, Teranex will actually improve the quality of the DV footage.
Sean
-
“Digital Cinema Desktop – RAW” outputs the video without scaling or deinterlacing. That’s nice and all, but the color is still wrong. It outputs the wrong colorspace and gamma levels because it is outputting a computer desktop signal, not a video signal..
A broadcast signal over DVI is YCrCb with a color range of 16-235. A computer monitor signal (like what you are using) is RGB with a color range of 0-255. Furthermore, the Quicktime engine changes the gamma level for playing back video on a computer monitor. Even with Digital Cinema Desktop, I’m pretty sure it still does this.
Your current “DVI output” is actually using the analog pins. So it’s really an analog RGBHV VGA output. The Extron box you are using doesn’t do anything to the color. It just takes the horizontal and vertical sync signals and adds them to the green signal to give you an RGsB which some broadcast monitors will support (like your JVC appearantly does).
This isn’t really my field of expertise, but I’m pretty sure that neither your current setup, nor your proposed future setup is suitable for color grading. I would recomend you check out the Matrox MXO and use that with the Dell monitor.
-
I think its good for people to complain. The more people who do, the one’s who benefit will be us.
It’s funny. If you think about it FCP itself really hasn’t been updated at all. ProRes is a Quicktime codec, so isn’t that a Quicktime update? I’ve used ProRes in FCP 5. It works. No RT Effects but it works. FCP 6 just added it to the list of RT codecs.
I’ve been telling everyone the mixed format thing worked EXACTLY the same as in v5. The only difference is you get a green render bar instead of an orange one. That’s it. And it’s still shoddy. It doesn’t scale properly between 480 and 486. And it doesn’t add 3:2 pulldown when using 24p in a 60i sequence.
So pretty much all they did was two little software tweaks (1. Allow ProRes to use RTExtreme, 2. Allow mixed formats to use RTExtreme).
I guess they added the menu item “Export to Color”. And you can now export XML v4.0.
New FXplugs. But aren’t those technically Motion effects?
Is there anything else? Kinnda sad. But at least the whole FCS2 suite is still worth the price by all means.
Sean
-
Well for end to end DVCProHD, all I/O should be firewire. No question about it. But you’ll still want SDI for monitoring and for when you rent an HDCam deck.
The Kona 3 may be overkill, unless you plan on upconverting a lot of SD stuff, or if you want 4:4:4 HDCam SR capability. If neither of those are the case, I would get the LHE or a Blackmagic card and save a lot.
As far as drives. There are a lot of options out there. FC is a ton of money. SANs are great for certain types of projects with lots of editors. Good chance you won’t need it. SATA is faster and a lot cheaper.
There’s a bunch of vendors who sell external SATA solutions. Firmtek, Sonnet, Calldigit, Highpoint, 3ware. Some have RAID 5 (wikipedia if you don’t know what it is) which is great. Some are quieter than others. Some cost a ridicluous amount more than others. But they all essentially do the same thing.
I myself just bought four 400GB drives for $95 each, and put them inside our new Mac Pro. The Mac Pro only has slots for 3 additional drives, but there are extra SATA conenctors on the motherboard. So I put the 4th drive in the optical bay using a bracket kit.
-
What tape format are you shooting on and delivering on?
Sean
-
In the meantime you can try watching it in Quicktime player, full size.
Sean
-
Dan, you gotta understand one thing. If you capture over Firewire, that is EXACTLY what is being recorded to tape. With Varicam, FCP allows you to remove duplicate frames (turning 60 to 24) which is 100% a lossless process.
There is no re-compression taking place. With firewire it is a perfect digital 1:1 copy. Think of when you copy a computer file from a firewire drive to your internal. It’s essentially the same thing.
Capturing over SDI to any format will actually decrease the quality, not increase it.
Sean
-
Bob, thanks. Yes I have done all that and I still had the green line.
The problem’s been solved and it was the stupidest, simplest thing ever. Trashing the Final Cut preferences did the trick. What’s sucks is that I trashed them earlier per instructions from AJA’s tech support, but restored them with FCP Rescue. So it didn’t fix anything the first time.
I don’t know what was going on, but it smelled like the “green slug” problem people have had (myself included). It’s as if “blank video”, which is supposed to be black, was instead green. I may have not mentioned this, but the problem occurred only when using ETT, and the green line was only present during black parts of the sequence, as well as when using ETT’s Black and Code feature.
Seems there’s something wrong with my digibeta that went unnoticed till now. It has not been recording or playing back the bottom line of video. It substitutes the bottom line with “blank video” (not to get too technical here). However, in this case, it was recording green. Trashing the preferences fixed it and it is now black again.
Anyway, that’s the problem with troubleshooting when you get a new system. You suspect the wrong thing and overlook more obvious things (like trashing prefs).
Thanks everyone for the help.
Sean
-
[gary adcock] “What is the deck set to receive as a source for Sync?.
Looping out thru the G/Y on the component out or from the REF out should suffice.”It’s normally set to recieve sync from the input video. But I’ve tried reference as well.
Like I mentioned to Jeremy, it syncs but I get that green line.