Steve Covello
Forum Replies Created
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Yes. Though not literally at the same, AFIK. Be sure to set your Control Panel settings before you startup FCP for either device.
steve covello
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>>AVID is NOT turnkey – I am the turnkey – I build the AVID systems from a bunch of parts
I am speaking from the users perspective. Once I had my Meridien installed, I NEVER had to touch it. My editors don’t need to mount or setup drives, no going through 5 menus to setup input/output medium, resolution selection, target drives, backup drive, capture track selection, deck control, etc. etc.
>>I am the one that suffers.
And for good reason, too: so my editors don’t have to!! This is my point — that engineering and setup should be done once, and that’s IT. The user should be able to be dumb enough to open one window, chose from a few simple buttons or menus, and go. Avid projects carry with them all resolution, fps setup, and so on no matter who used the machine before you. If there was ONE THING I wouldchange first in FCP it would be to simplify user/project setup. I stand by my opinion.
>>You can find an AJA dealer that can deliver you a turnkey, but if you get a bag of parts for AVID Xpress Pro
If you ONLY use the AJA IO on your FCP editing system, and you ONLY use the SAME disk drives every time, then the system can stay relatively simple. But that’s not how our system is used. Some producers/editors don’t want to use the IO and would rather just jack in the FW drives and use FCP strictly as a DV system [don’t ask me why]. There are various connectivity issues when using several FW 400 and/or FW 800 drives in series, which, to you and me, might be simple, but not for the average knucklehead director. You would be amazed at how many ways there are to setup an FCP system wrong!
And then there was the producer who thought that if you setup FCP to work in FW DV, then all you had to do was run another FW cable from the other FW port on the G5 to an ADC-100 and patch the CV to the monitor to see NTSC, except that it didn’t work because the signal flow was wrong. The ADC-100 has to be in series with the media drive.
My point is, Bob, that an Avid system REQUIRES inflexibility [read: turnkey] in order for it to be easy to use, though there is a price to pay in installation and various proprietary components. This is fine for those who seek it, which is why Avid’s stock has inexplicably risen from the lowly $8 when I owned it in 1997 [and sold at $12] to where it is now around $50!!! Go figure.
But since I have a choice in the matter, and the know-how to manage it, I will sacrifice simplicity for the convenience of price and flexibility. I felt this poster should know this.
steve covello
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You might want to use Tiger Cache Cleaner [tcc] on versiontracker. If you have output problems, you are likely to be successful after purging the temporary files stored in various User and System caches if the FCP Rescue 5 trick doesn’t do it. TCC is a deeper level of ‘cleaning’ which I don’t fully understand more than that the system and applications create temporary files as part of the automatic Virtual Memory that OSX requires.
If you go into Utilities/Activity Monitor, you can see how many mb are used as virtual memory for each application or task that you have open [select All Activities]. FYI, virtual memory is data that the OS writes to a temporary file on your disk to serve as the equivalent of regular RAM. It is supposed to be deleted or replaced as new data gets created. In the old OS9, you could manually turn VM on/off and set the size limit, however OSX has taken that option away and does it dynamically — thus dynamic RAM — which causes us to have the necessity to purge various caches now and then.
I am making the leap here that VM and cache-purging troubleshooting activities are somewhow connected, though I am not an engineer. nonetheless, anytime I have an input/output problem on FCP, using TCC on Medium Cleaning on all levels does the trick.
steve covello
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Some things I like about Avid better than FCP 4.5/AJA IO:
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Even with repeaters – which are readily available – I would not extend a FW signal that far. Extend the tie lines instead [AES, SDI, CV, RS-422, Componenet Video, etc.]
steve covello
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If you create a new D-1 720 x 486 timeline and then copy/paste your DV contents from the DV timeline into it, FCP will autmatically make the scan line adjustment and ‘canvas’ the DV image onto 720 x 486. However, it seems to make a slight downscale adjustment too [?] which is a pain to take out in every shot.
As mentioned before, if you re-cap UC 10-bit from DVCam deck via SDI, your frame size should be 720 x 486. I don’t know definitively how the scan line issue reconciles — whether the DV output is ‘canvased’ onto a D-1 frame size inside the DVCam deck prior to SDI output, or whether it is scaled vetically. I have not seen scan line artifacts as a result of having captured DVCam/SDI, so I am venturing to say it is the latter.
steve covello
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Had the same problem. Moved the dead clips to another track. Problem occurred only on export QT’s and AIFF’s for a while too but not on timeline playback.
steve covello
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I doubt that this setup will work. It might work for short clips on a drive that is nearly empty, but you will get dropped frames and many other performance problems later on. One solution is if you have two G-Raids and stripe them together, then get a FW800 PCI card [Lacie has one]. run one fw800 connection to drive A, another between drive A and Drive B, then another one from drive B to the PCI FW800 card. This will give pretty good performance. Test the throughput on it and I will bet that it should do the job.
One note, though: I know that with Lacie FW800 drives, they get slower as they get more full, and I will assume most internal IDE RAID FW drives will do the same. BTW, those big-ass FW800 drives are actually a couple IDE drives striped together inside the chassis. It’s not like they are significantly different in technology than a regular internal drive, just ‘juiced up’.
Here is a link to barefeats:
https://www.barefeats.com/fire46.html
Here’s a good picture of the guts of a Lacie Big Disk:
https://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery-lacie-big-external-disk.htm
steve covello
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As you probably already know, FW lengths beyond 12′ require a repeater. In your case, I would extend everything else and NOT the FW cable. Strangely, you can actually buy 50′ length FW cables, though I can’t say what use they would be.
In other words, setup the IO next to your Mac with a 3-6 foot FW cable, then run the CV, YUV, SDI, AES, Ref, RS-422 and whatever else cables to your machine room. You can run long lengths of video and audio cables with much more confidence than FW and USB. Be sure to use digital cable for AES, not analog, and use SDI specific coax, not regular CV coax [sorry if you knew that already].
steve covello
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I made some dumm mistakes setting up my RGB monitors about 35 feet away from the CPU in the machine room and encountered a variety of problems including, I think, what you are describing. Here are the solutions as I have resolved them, though I’m sure there are a few other ways too. Some of this might not apply to your situation, but maybe someone else will need it: