Sean Oneil
Forum Replies Created
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Forgive me if I sound rude, but you’ve wasted a lot of time and money. Capture the DV over Firewire straight from the camera. Then convert it to Uncompressed or whatever helps you out with your keying. There is absolutely not one single non-artistic reason to convert the signal to analog. And you’re doing this for technical reasons, not artistic.
That Miranda converter, well, I don’t know the price of that thing, but I’m sure it’s a lot. I know their “DVI Ramp” was $10,000 US a year ago (totally outrageous). Anyway, you don’t even need it. It’s totally useless for what you’re trying to accomplish. You don’t need a converter, a card, or any hardware whatsoever. If what you need is to DV footage to some 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 codec (even though you never gain anything back), you can download many free programs for Windows that will do that very same thing, or buy Quicktime Pro for $30 if you use a Mac. You accomplish the same exact thing. The “side-effects” to this are that you don’t massively degrade the quality by converting to analog and back to digital, and you save a bundle.
If this extra step of converting it with software presents a major workflow problem (and based on your QC methods, I’m sure your not in an environment where it would), you want a DV to SDI converter. For professional work, DV and S-Video don’t belong together in the same workflow, or even in the same sentence.
Again, sorry for sounding rude, but your fundemental understanding is rather weak- which is totally fine. We can’t all be nerds. But I do get a bit annoyed when people just blow money on things that they don’t need whatsoever- especially when it’s something that hurts their work, not something that improves it.
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[Sean ONeil] “Another feature. When logging and then capturing (not capture now), you should be able to stop it shorter than you originally intended without it throwing away the media. It should be able to create a clip which ends when you stopped it. A button for “Stop” and a different button for “Abort” would be the way to go.”
Whoops, Peter beat me to this one. Sorry Pete!
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A really big one I missed:
When capturing from tape, there’s no running TC counter. I always thought this made FCP look unprofessional. Aside from their image, it’s a pain for me. I have to go into the machine room and look at the deck’s counter to know how much time is left.
Another feature. When logging and then capturing (not capture now), you should be able to stop it shorter than you originally intended without it throwing away the media. It should be able to create a clip which ends when you stopped it. A button for “Stop” and a different button for “Abort” would be the way to go.
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[mishka] “Only the editor stops playback – timeline or viewer should keep playing when I switch windows, perform edits, whatever until I hit Stop or Pause.”
Wow, that’s right. Good call. I completely forgot about that one. A lot of times I’ll want to watch something I’ll be working on in it’s entirety. I’d love to be able to do multitasking on the Mac while it’s playing (watching a movie while surfing the web- what a tough job).
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Hey, it’s possible. I’m not sure the typical environment that would have a house-sync would be using a standard-def Decklink. Who knows? We use the genlock just because we happen to have a blackburst and my HD Plus won’t work without it- so the digibeta needs to be in external reference mode.
I totally believe you and I know for a fact this didn’t happen to me prior to 4.8. Matt says they screwed around with it so it surely doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put the pieces together.
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I don’t understand the problem. Most places rent by the day or week- not by the hour. Even still, onlining it in chunks shouldn’t be much more time consuming. Re-capture the first 30 minutes as Uncompressed, edit to tape, throw away the media, and repeat for the second and third 30 minute chunks. It would only take several minutes longer than re-capturing 90 minutes all at once and then mastering 90 minutes all at once. Unless you applied effects to the whole thing and needed to render the entire piece overnight or something, it really wouldn’t add that much time.
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Yes, you don’t really need it unless you’re in an environment with lots of equipment working together. The Decklink will spit out a reference signal that the deck can lock onto.
When you say 1080i, you mean 1080pSF, right? 1080i is 29.97.
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Some of these are already rumored to be in v.5 but I’ll say them anyway
– Ability to digitize more than 2 audio channels at a time.
– Ability to mix and match different video codecs (and maybe even HD and SD) in the same timeline without anything needing to be rendered.
– Ability to render effects to a codec different than the codec specified for that sequence. Example: You have a DV/DVCpro sequence with DV footage. You want to leave all the cuts-only footage as DV, but you want to render only footage with effects applied to it as Uncompressed. That way you don’t lose any quality due to recompression.
– A window that displays detailed timecode info, just like every single other pro NLE has. Media 100 has the best one. It has a list that can show source TC for specific tracks as well as the duration from in point to out point for specific tracks. Also, Premiere’s TC info windows shows the timecode of the cursor’s position, which is nice. FCP’s can only do source TC and it has to be on the overlay, which is kind of lame.
– Support editing and RT Extreme for HDV, Standard-def MPEG2, and some sort of lossless codec like Shear Video. Ideally, Final Cut could edit any codec that Quicktime understands. But if that’s asking too much, the three I mentioned are the most important.
– 3D hardware based RT Effects – like what Motion does.
– A render farm solution – like what Shake has.
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I’m not sure most Decklink Extreme users even use the reference input. So that would explain why only some users are reporting it.
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I can confirm this. I thought I wasn’t doing something right, but I guess this really is a problem.
It’s really problematic since “output black video for sync” doesn’t work on the HD Plus (at least not for NTSC). We have two systems, one with an HD Plus and the other with an Extreme. Needless to say, it’s ridiculous that one method works on one but not the other, and vice-versa. The two of us have to go into the digibeta menu and switch between reference and video sync each time we need the deck.