Sean Oneil
Forum Replies Created
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I’m not a fan of the company either, but this is actually a very interesting product. It provides two very useful things. For one, you can monitor and output HD from a Powerbook/MacBook/iMac/MacMini. That wasn’t possible before. And the other thing is that you can get a true HDTV video output over DVI, allowing you to use an LCD monitor as a true broadcast monitor with proper colors (albeit you should always use CRTs for this). Before, this was only possible buying either the Blackmagic MultiBridge Extreme ($3k), or a Decklink/Kona HD card plus an HD-SDI to DVI converter (>$2k).
So they definately tapped into unsanwered needs.
Sean
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[Graeme Nattress] “incorrectly refer to YCbCr video as YUV. It’s not YUV, never will be YUV.”
Heh, terminology is whatever we as a people make it. While the true meaning of YUV is not YCbCr, YUV is a commonly used and typically accepted term to describe YCbCr. Probably because it’s easier to say and easier to type.
Sean
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You’re looking at the footage after capture, correct? FW capture stutters and looks strange during the actual capturing process. Pay no heed to that.
Make sure FCP is set to abort on dropped frames during capture and ETT.
Sean
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I mentioned this alreay in another thread. Rumor has it (that’s RUMOR, meaning it could be comlete BS) that along with Final Cut 6, they will release a “Super Final Cut” which will do 4k w/ RT and will cost $10k or more.
As for the normal FCP 6, one can only speculate. RT Effects for all QT codecs would be great. I’d also love more seamless way to mix formats (i.e. HD footage in an SD timeline). It’d be nice if “Motion” was axed and instead existed in the “Motion” tab of FCP. Other than that, I honestly can’t think of any features I’m dying to have.
Bug fixes and an improvement in performence should be expected. I understand that they’ll rewrite the code using Cocoa. Whatever that means. Actually, I do know a tiny bit what it means. It’s how Compressor and DVD Studio Pro were written (notice how those programs have a unique look to them compared to FCP) and that FCP suffers in performence because it written with an older programming library or something. So when it’s re-written with Cocoa, it will be more powerful because it can take more advantage of 64-bit processors, GPU rendering, and will probably support Qmaster distributed rendering. GPU rendering is especially a big deal with PCI-e graphics cards. With PCI-e and the latest ATI/Nvidia cards, we can get a performance boost by 10 fold over the current AGP Powermacs if Final Cut is re-written to take advantage of it. Think of the RT performence you get now with DV editing. Now imagine that same performence with Uncompressed HD or 2k. That kind of thing.
Sean
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I use a littly software utility so that I can map Apple + and Apple – to the mouse wheel.
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[Peter Wiggins] “Bare in mind that there are already 2K easy setups in FCP, what about the hardware?”
Who knows. It’s an internet rumor. I would imagine that at a $10k price, it would fully support RT effects for uncompressed 4k. Maybe it includes extra hardware.
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Make sure your Autosave Vault is on a different drive than your project. That way if one dies, you can always acess the other.
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I think the latest version will still work with Final Cut 4.
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[Erik Lindahl] “No-one know if FCP6 is just around the corner
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[walter biscardi] “That’s actually incorrect regarding the Kona series. It does natively capture DVCPro HD via SDI and in fact, according to AJA the image is a little better using that method. I’m not sure how other capture cards handle this process, but it is a lossless transfer using this method.”
Walter, I’m sorry you feel that way but you are completely misinformed and/or confused about this. Any video engineer can tell you this. HD-SDI transmits uncompressed video. It cannot transmit compressed formats natively any more than you can connect to the internet using mic cable. It just doesn’t work that way. While there does exist a protocol called SDTI which can transmit these types of streams over SDI chips – Kona cards do not support this (nor does Blackmagic or any other FCP card). Nor do they really need to because the same thing can be accomplished on a Macintosh using Firewire.
If you don’t believe me, look at a scope as it’s coming in. Or just look at your capture settings for Kona DVCPro. Why is coming in at 1280×720, but being stored as 970×720? Please, feel free to explain this.
If you think giving it a second round of compression looks just as good or even looks better, you’re certainly entitled to that opinion (even though the concept is incredibly ridiculous). Come to think of it, the very notion that it can “look better” in and of itself proves that it is not native capture. If it were native capture it would look identical because it would BE identical. Thus, it couldn not look better.
I’m not going to argue over whether or not the loss is significant enough to deter someone from using this workflow. To each his own. But don’t fool yourself into thinking this is a lossless workflow because I promise you it is not lossless.
Furthermore, even if it were native capture and layback (which it isn’t), a native workflow is only lossless for cuts only video. Any effects, transitions, color correction, or anything that needs to be rendered (key word: rendered) goes through yet another dose of recompression. This is why batch re-capturing at uncompressed is the only way to ensure that the video is identical in quality as it was on the original tape.
Sean