Sean Oneil
Forum Replies Created
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I wish I could help. The mysteries of the Varicam workflow continue to baffle me. Nothing ever works the way you think it’s supposed to. Just remember that you lose your source TC information when using the Panasonic plugin.
Sean
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[Tom Wolsky] “t can’t handle it because the application is not programmed to handle multiformat streams, video or audio. Handling multiformat video streams is a big deal and should be implemented. If this is only done for MP3 that would be bullshit. It’s so simple to convert, just friggin do it.”
Are you still using FCP 4? I’m talking about Final Cut version 5 and higher which touts “Edit Anything”. For codecs which differ from the sequence settings, you still get an orange RTExtreme bar so that Final Cut will attempt to play it back the best that it can. This was not possible with version 4. Try it out if you don’t believe me. Throw some DV25 footage in an Uncompressed timeline. You’ll get an orange bar, but it will playback just fine in full quality on a dual G5. But throw a DVCProHD clip in a DV25 timeline. In this case you won’t get good results. But it will definately try to play it back at whatever playback quality settings you choose.
Point is, FCP tries to play it back the best it can. So a hypothetical 6Ghz PowerMac would have no trouble with it at full quality. How well RTExtreme works with mixing codecs depends on the complexity. Decoding MP3 audio is not complex. Not at all. 90’s technology. My cell phone and my car stereo can do it.
RTExtreme for MP3s could be easily done in FCP. But for political (not technical) reasons it isn’t. While there’s one other expection, MP3’s are the ONLY Quicktime supported audio or video codec in which Apple put this limitation on (that I’ve discovered). The only other exception to this is high-quality Photo-JPEG, which was also “blocked” from RTExtreme. Not sure why but likely political reasons as well. My guess is that they didn’t want to ruffle the feathers of Pinnacle, since this would make Cinewave obsolete. Just a theory though. Anyway the P-JPEG limitation can be fixed by editing the RT Enabler script (which I posted a while back). Unfortunately there is not workaround for MP3s.
Regardless of not having RTExtreme, there is NO explaination as to why there are pops and cracks AFTER you RENDER it. There is no reason for this whatsoever. None. Zip. Nada. It is completely beyond stupid that this doesn’t work right. Final Cut IS DESIGNED to do this. If you throw down codec that is not the same as the sequence’s codec, the “proper” solution is to render it, which of course converts the media into the sequence’s codec settings. And this works fine for everything. Everything except MP3s. Whether you convert it using Quicktime Pro, Compressor, or you render it in FCP – it’s all supposed to essentially be the same thing. Converting one format to another. Yet for some “strange reason” MP3’s cannot be converted in a FCP timeline the way everything else can.
Again, this was clearly a political decision, not a technical one. Probably some lawyer or some other executive decided that FCP cannot be allowed to be used as an MP3 editor. Maybe they were worried that FCP would become too popular with consumers. That’s a somewhat understandble concern for 3 years ago. But at this point in time there’s just no reason for it.
Sean
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[reel2reel] “I don’t care what anyone says, I trust my own ears, and my own ears tell me MP3 sucks, plain and simple. If anything, use Apple’s AAC. It sounds better.”
No offense, but that is just a silly blanket statement. Audio codecs can be encoded using a very wide range of bitrates. I promise you an MP3 encoded at 192kbps sounds a LOT better than an AAC encoded at 128kbps.
Yes, MPEG-4 audio (AAC or WMA) is newer than MPEG-1 audio (MP3) so the results are generally better using the same bitrate. But it’s not that drastic. MP3 encoders are very, very mature. So that helps make up for it. Regardless, there are many people (myself included) who see a benefit to encoding to a universal standard that any hardware or software music device can understand. So I’d rather encode everything at a higher bitrate and keep it MP3 for universal compatibility.
One example. The stock stereo in my car plays MP3s (burnt to a CD). Its actually very easy for me to review music while driving to or from work. Amazing concept isn’t it? But I couldn’t easily do that if our music was AAC.
I’m not saying people should or shouldn’t do anything a certain way. I’m just saying one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. People should think a little more outside the box before making unarticulated blanket statements whilst proclaiming it to be the law of the land. Too many editors are stuck in the 90’s it seems.
Anyways, of all this talk I have yet to see one good REASON why FCP cannot handle MP3 files (or AAC for that matter). I’ve seen excuses, tangents, attacks on other people’s idea of a good workflow, incorrect proclamations about Apple’s ability to pull it off technically, and dare I say near-fanaticism. Yet I have not seen anything that amounts to a good reason.
Forgive me for being blunt. It is just annoying to know that Apple has no reason to change anything if most of their users buy into these ridiculous ideas as to why MP3s should not work in FCP.
Sean
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[Jerry Hofmann] “It doesn’t support it because it would be MPEG files trying to be mixed with aiffs, and all I frame video so figure it would take way too much computer overhead to mix the two in the same sequence.”
Not really. It can handle that with video (mix HDV with Uncompressed), so it COULD easily do it with audio.
But the reason it doesn’t is political and also quality control. They saving us from ourselves, making sure we don’t create multiple lossy generations of audio. That’s their explaination at least. I just find it funny that they don’t apply the same standard to video, allowing all kinds of lossy workflows in that department.
MP3 is also a dirty word for a company that pulled off a miracle getting permision from record companies to sell music online. Believe me, to some degree this definately has something to do with it.
I have a huge MP3 collection from CDs that were ripped. I would need an Xserve to hold it all if they were ripped as AIFF. I would absolutely love to just throw these MP3 files onto a timeline to see what it looks like quickly as I’m trying to find a piece of music I might want to license. I’d like to do some rough edits to see how I can make the swells and hits time out to the picture. I don’t care about the quality at that point. That’s why they call it offline editing. Even if I did finish with it, a 192kbps MP3 is often indistiguishable from the CD.
Now I may go through hundreds of tracks during this process which is an extrodanary pain in the ass if I have to guess which ones I might use and then convert them using iTunes. Even a droplet to do them all at once is still time-consuming and creates a bunch of files you’ll need to janitor. So my braind has to leave “creative mode” and enter “data management mode” which sucks, especially when I shouldn’t have to.
Anyone can’t see the benefit to MP3 editing just arrogant and/or ignorant IMHO. Personally, it would save me countless hours over the long run if I was ALLLOWED to do this.
Sean
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[bogiesan] “However… Do those rat bastards at M100 still make a free decompressor? You should have it on your FCP system. Make disk images of your M100 media drives and use the decompressor to bring them into FCP. (Sorry, I realy miss my olde M100 but I don’t even remember if the decompressor works liek this.)”
Yes, they’ve had one for at least 2 years now. It’s available for download from their website. James can just export self-contained Quicktime files from his Media100, import them into Final Cut.
Sean
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SATA all the way. Nothing else even comes close to making as much sense at this point in time.
Sean
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I’ve never done any offline editing in Uncompressed HD. I really couldn’t give an honest comparison.
BTW, despite it’s shortcomings, DVCProHD does have one major advantage. If you actually shoot footage in that format (Varicam or HDX200) then you can capture and edit DVCProHD natively. It is very useful to be able to do that.
Sean
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I wouldn’t by a Powermac right now. Very bad timing. If you want one, wait for when the Intel-based ones come out which will probably happen this summer (northern summer that is).
I use FCP on a Powermac Dual 2.5ghz. RT performance for DVCProHD seemed pretty decent 1 1/2 years ago. Now I’m just fed up with it. We use 8-disk SATA arrays, and can easily get 8 streams of DVCProHD at once using Multicam. But any type of effects is kind of a joke. Especially if you use stills like PNG files. Dynamic RT just doesn’t seem to work well either. And it looks so bad that it kind of defeats the whole point of doing offline editing in HD (something I’ve given up on doing).
The codec’s quality looks really good for one generation. After that it degrades much faster than other types of codecs like JPEG. Also, it chops off some of the horizontal resolution. So 1280×720 actually gets scaled to 970×720. 1920×1080 becomes 1280×1080. That’s a pretty large amount of spatial quality lost right there. Even if you can’t really notice it at first, doing this over multiple generations will take a major toll.
When the Intel Powermacs come out, it’s speculated rumor that a new version of FCP will also come out. This new version could use GPU rendering which has the potential of improving RT effects performence by 10-fold. So I’d definately wait.
All that said, why not just get a large, fast disk array for you PC? External SATA solutions are cheap, and software RAID will get the job done nowadays. Its a lot cheaper than buying a Powermac.
Sean
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Very strange. Haven’t seen this or heard about it yet. Sorry you had problems.
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I don’t think SDI standard includes 720p24 because it is not an official broadcast standard. So even if BMD could somehow make it work, there wouldn’t be any VTRs or any other SDI devices that could communicate with it.
Sean