Sebastian Alvarez
Forum Replies Created
-
Excellent, thanks!
-
[Howard Duy Vu] “Not sure if you have a good understanding of the color wheel and how it relates to hue. To accomplish what you want, you would just keyframe from 360 degrees to 40. That’s the exact same thing as going from 0 to -320.”
It’s not, but you have a good point in starting at 360. Keyframing 360 down to 320 works just as I would do 0 to -320 in Adobe software. Thanks for the tip.
-
DaVinci may be great for color grading, but it’s a pain to edit in. Besides, I’m not talking about any fancy color grading here, I’m talking about a very simple hue keyframing that’s very easy to do in any other NLE. Using DaVinci for this would be like calling a lawyer because I have a mild argument with my brother.
-
[Walter Soyka] “[Bill Davis] “I don’t know the specific answers Sebastian, but whenever it comes to codecs, you are in IP land. Apple, right or wrong, seems to feel that they want to keep their software as free from relaying on “not in house” codecs to the extent possible. Obviously they are a part of the MPEG and h-264 style consortiums – therefor are IP clear for all that stuff.”
In fairness, Sebastian is not talking about some esoteric codec; he’s talking about MPEG-2 in an industry-standard MPEG container format.”
That, and the complete lack of coherence in how Mac OS X and FCPX handles them. The OS and NLE come from the same company. Quicktime player can happily play .mpg files. FCPX cannot unless you change the extension to .mod, an obscure extension that a Google search tells me was used by some JVC Everio camcorders. However, after you changed the extension from .mpg to .mod, FCPX will ingest it (after playing beach ball for a long while), but QT player won’t open the file.
.m2ts, a very common extension that every other NLE takes without a hitch, for FCPX is a day at the beach and be prepared to move the import window aside to work on something else (BTW, what happened to Steve Jobs mandate from about 10 years ago that no window or dialog in OS X was supposed to be modal? Yosemite is full of them, including all help). However, after some internal deliberation, it takes m2ts file. QT player? Error.
What about Compressor? It behaves like QT player despite being part of the FCPX suite, or at least much more closer to FCPX than to QT player. It imports .mpg, doesn’t import .m2ts. I haven’t tried much else though.
I find this all very strange since all of this software comes from the same company.
-
[Bill Davis] “ctually, that’s likely the lovely world of autocorrect in play.
Try just switching the extension to .mov
Which both QuickTime and AVFoundation can read.”You make a good point (after all we’re all victims to autocorrect these days) but I think he actually meant .mod and .tod as strange as it sounds. I tried changing the extension to .mov and FCPX didn’t want anything to do with it, and QT player wouldn’t open them. FCPX is still fine with .mod, though, even if it chokes in the import window for a while.
Apple really needs to work on these format issues if they want to be any kind of competition to Adobe Premiere, which especially with the latest release is going to get more users than even before. I mean, if I can throw anything at Premiere and it plays without issue, while FCPX is picky about formats, many editors won’t have the time or patience to deal with that.
-
[Andrew Kimery] “Out of curiosity how long were the clips you were using the Warp Stabilizer on? Last year I did a project where I used WS a lot and never ran into the problems you described, but I only used it on clips that were around 3-6 seconds long.”
In this case it wasn’t a professional job, just a video of a wedding shot with a camcorder. There was a take that was 12 minutes long that he asked me to stabilize. The light was great, it was 1080i-29.97fps, so it wasn’t a big challenge, besides, the part of that take that he wanted stabilized was shot handheld but it was mostly static, at most panning every now and then.
Mercalli in Edius took it like a champ. About 6 minutes later it had finished and I was able to playback the footage in real time, no dropped frames. Saving the project took less than a second. We’re talking about a 32 bit program with obviously a 32 bit plugin.
Same take into Premiere CC 2014 (I’ve had this video since 2010 but I tested it in all versions of Premiere since CS6), same in and out points. Analyzing took hours. Solving took less time but still long enough to go do something else. What I was left with wasn’t bad as far as stabilizing quality goes, however, playback would stall (even though it was being played out of an SSD and WP is CUDA accelerated, and in my case I have two GTX770 cards with 4 GB each). When hitting CTRL+S, it took about an hour to save that project, which was a test project so it only had this take with a sequence that matched the format of the footage.
A little while later, even after rebooting the computer, I tried to open the project and it stalled. I kept waiting minutes, then hours, then I went to bed and the next morning it was still there, stalled. I killed Premiere, rebooted the computer, tried to open the project again and I left to do some other things. Hours later, still stalled.
My Windows PC, by the way, has an i7 3930k (6 cores at 3.2Ghz, 3.8 Ghz turbo), 32 GB of RAM, fast hard drives and an SSD (back then, now I took out the SSD to put it in a USB 3 enclosure and use it with my MBP), added to the two graphics cards I mentioned, so it’s no slouch. I assembled this machine with all the components tested for compatibility and it’s faster and more stable than any brand PC you can come across, as is usually the case with computers assembled by users when they make sure all the components match in the HCL.
So forgive my candor, but Warp Stabilizer, as far as software goes, is garbage. I consider myself far less intelligent than software programmers, and yet for the life of me I can’t begin to understand why Adobe’s team would attach the analyzed and solved information to the project file, when almost everything else is handled in different files. Caches of all kinds, peak files, etc, all in separate files, so when you save a Premiere project, as long as it doesn’t have WP on any clip, it takes a second or two to save. Add WP to just one short clip, saving will be about ten to twenty seconds. Add it to a few more clips and the save time gets longer and the project file size gets gigantic.
As much as I love FCPX, the advances in Premiere make it an excellent NLE, but I don’t get why Adobe keeps bundling this junk plugin with it. They bought I don’t know how many companies, they should buy ProDAD and put Mercalli instead of WP.
-
Hi Ronny, I’m confused, you say that changing to .mod or .tod extensions lets you import the files into FCPX. I had no idea what those extensions were, but regardless I did change the extension in one of the mpg files first to .mod and then to .tod, neither of them worked. Shows grayed out in the import window and drag and drop doesn’t work either. How is it that you are able to do this but I can’t?
Edit: I found what the problem was. For some reason, the files were showing the .mpg extension. When I changed the extension to .mod in the Finder, they would still show grayed out in FCPX. But when opening the info module in the Finder for one of those files, I realized “Hide extension” was checked, and though the file was showing .mod, when I unchecked the hide extension setting, it was showing .mod.mpg. So using the info module I deleted the .mpg and that way they show in FCPX available for import. Interestingly enough, when associating the .mod extension with Quicktime Player, said player can’t open the file, even though it had no problem opening it when the extension was .mpg. Oh, the lovely world of Apple…
-
[Aindreas Gallagher] “diarrhoea”
Very original spelling of that word. Probably one of the most misspelled words in the English language, and I can’t never get it right without autocorrect. Seems to me that that word is a load of crap. One could even say that whoever invented that word was full of s**t.
-
[Tony West] “Stabilization is a nice tool, but as far as I’m concerned, you should either be on a tripod or with a Stedi-cam or Stedi knockoff in the first place. A professional shouldn’t hand you a bunch of shaky footage.
If you are doing a run and gun doc you should have a shoulder mount camera or a rig.”Tony, in an ideal world, things would always work that way. But in this world it doesn’t. And let’s not forget that FCPX is not only targeted at professionals but prosumers as well, which is evident from its $300 price tag. And regardless of whether you’re a pro or not, if you’re also a regular person who likes to go out to parks, lakes and whatnot, you won’t always take a bulky tripod to carry around while you’re walking around with your family. You might just take a small camcorder and being a professional you will shoot footage that is far less shaky than the regular Joe, but you will still watch it at home and think some takes could use some stabilization.
Unfortunately the only software as far as I know that does an outstanding job in this area is Mercalli Pro. It analyses and solves faster than real time, and wherever it saves the information it’s not in the project file, unlike Premiere. Premiere comes with Warp Stabilizer, which is an abomination that is a huge stain in an otherwise excellent NLE. It takes ages to analyze and solve, sometimes it leaves you with terrible results, and worse of all, it saves its data to the project file, so after you used it in even one small clip, it takes at least ten seconds to save the project, and if you use it in a long take, it will render your project useless, to the point where you have to go back to a previous version because it will simply not open, even if you wait all night long. And I speak from experience.
I think it’s great that FCPX comes with its own stabilizer, which is to a point better than the one in Premiere but it’s not really that great when it comes to results. Even at the maximum stabilization, footage is still shaky, even if still better than the original. For example, my GoPro Hero 4 doesn’t have any type of internal stabilization (that I know of, I just got it so feel free to correct me) so the footage is extremely shaky, even it came with a pseudo steadicam (called “Steadicam Curve”) but even when walking as smooth as humanly possible, the footage is shaky. I stabilized some of that footage in FCPX and the result wasn’t that great, even if still better than the raw.
This is why, even though my main system is a MacBook Pro now, I keep Edius 6.08 in my PC in case I need to stabilize something really fast and with good results, because Mercalli 2 came bundled with it. For now even if I have to mount the Windows share, copy the take to the PC and export the stabilized file to a large uncompressed file and finally copy to the Mac via network, it’s still a lot faster than using Warp Stabilizer in Premiere and the results are better than FCPX’s own stabilizer.
-
Hi Ronny, I’m confused, you say that changing to .mod or .tod extensions lets you import the files into FCPX. I had no idea what those extensions were, but regardless I did change the extension in one of the mpg files first to .mod and then to .tod. Neither of them worked. Shows grayed out in the import window and drag and drop doesn’t work either. How is it that you are able to do this but I can’t?