Sean Oneil
Forum Replies Created
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[slabrot] “The set is filming 29.97 DF all around. That was our first guess, but doesn’t appear to be the problem. The timeline is also DF. The HD tapes are being captured from a Sony HDW-F500 deck downconverted.”
I think that’s your problem. You need to use NDF timecode for it to match up.
Sean
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[Vladislav] “My concern is scaling, how accurate will compressor convert from 1280 by 1080 to 720 486.
Any other issues I should be aware of?”The scaling works great as long as you export directly from Final Cut Pro.
Sean
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First off, I’d read this article by Gramme Nattress:
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/beyond_dv_nattress.htmlBasically, capturing Varicam using your Kona is not native capture. You can only capture native DVCProHD into Final Cut by using Firewire and a Panasonic AJ-1200. The reason is because SDI only transmits uncompressed video. That is why it’s saying 1280×720 in your capture settings. Your VTR is taking the native format on the tape and converting it to uncompressed so that it can output over SDI. Then the Kona is capturing SDI uncompressed and converting it back to DVCPro on the fly (hence the converting back to 970×720). When it converts “back” to DVCPro, it is not the same DVCPro that originally existed on the tape. It is a lossy recompression process. You lose a generation. It doesn’t “remember” what it used to be (if that makes any sense).
A lot of people find this confusing. Part of the reason is because you CAN capture natively over SDI on an Avid using a Panasonic AJ-1700. The reason is because it’s not really SDI. It’s called SDTI which is actually more like Firewire than it is SDI. But neither the Kona nor any other Final Cut product can capture SDTI.
You can still use the Kona SDI->DVCProHD workflow for offline editing. But for the finishing you’ll definately want to batch re-capture your final edits as uncompressed. In fact, I’d recommend doing this especially since you’re mixing in HDV footage. Don’t capture the HDV natively. It’s just headaches and will not playback well on a DVCPro sequence.
So capture both formats as the same thing for the offline (doesn’t matter what it is since it’s offline editing). Then when you master, batch re-capture both of them as Uncompressed 720p if your final delivery needs to be 720p. Or if you’re delivering 1080i, batch re-capture both of them as Uncompressed 1080i.
Sean
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Yes thanks. I got worried because we mailed in all our discs for the exchange 2 days ago.
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[jason levy] “Hi Kristian,
Will we require these drivers to run Decklink with the Intel Macs only or will Power PC mac’s running the universal binary versions of fcp also require new drivers?”
Kristian, can you please respond to this? Are you saying that the UB version running on a Power PC Mac will still require new drivers from Blackmagic?
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No, it won’t. I tried pretty hard and talked a bit with Andreas from BitJazz about it. Only QT components that Apple officially supports for RT in FCP will work.
The reason why the P-JPEG “hack” works is because P-JPEG is already supported for RT with Final Cut Pro. Remember, Offline-RT is P-JPEG @35% quality and half res. FCP is designed so that P-JPEG is a real-time codec. But they use the RT Enabler script to prevent it from working at full quality. Why they chose to do this is anyone’s guess. I have theories but I won’t get into it.
P-JPEG is the bomb. With standard-def, it takes up less disk space than DV25, and the quality is better than DV50. In fact, according to the technical tests I’ve read (onerivermedia.com), P-JPEG is virtually lossless and is pretty much equivalent to Digibeta. You can run it through many generations before any degradation, unlike DV50.
I’ve even used it for a few HD projects (EPKs that didn’t require multiple layers or many effects). I captured and mastered back to 1080Psf D5. No dropped frames. It worked great and took up less space than DVCProHD.
Another interesting thing with P-JPEG is that you can actually do full broadcast quality SD finish work on a PowerBook, a Mac Mini, or on the system disk of a PowerMac without the need for a RAID. Because the JPEG media is so small (again, smaller than DV), you don’t need a fast disk array. Obviously I wouldn’t reccomend anyone in a pro environment to rely on this, but it’s pretty darn interesting what you can get away with.
Sean
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Didn’t know people were actually using this. Glad to hear it.
Sean
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“PCI Express based” just means that the ATI graphics adapter (the thing that connects to the MacBook’s LCD screen) is hardwired to a PCI Express bus. But there are no slots for PCIe cards or anything like that. Just the ExpressCard slot.
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I can’t believe what horrific reading comprehension you guys have (except for debe). He said clearly that he knows to select the blade tool is “B”. Duh.
He wants to know the keyboard shortcut for “split clip” as it’s called in Media 100. The idea is to razor the selected clip where the playhead is located. And unfortunately this command doesn’t exist in Final Cut Pro.
Ctrl-V (add edit) is the closest thing to it. However, this will razor all of the clips in every video and audio track.
In order to do a split clip, I use a 3rd party tool that can perform keyboard macros. So when I press the key, it does: “B, left mouse click, A” all at once. It only works right when snapping is turned on.
This may seem over the top to some, but many of us come from other NLEs. Having to use three keystrokes instead of one for a commonly used task is very, very annoying.
Sean
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Make sure you set a “mark out” point in the ETT window as well as in the sequence.
Sean