[Steve Knattress]

I looked at one at the London broadcast show last week.

It is a very neat product, and comes with 2 hot switchable batteries, charger, disc caddy ( extras are of the order of £5 I was told.), and USB caddy to connect to computer, in a case.

Pity there isn’t SDI I/P as well as the HDMI input.
You can play your records on the touch screen but no HDMI out.
There obviously is also no way to get time code from the camera/deck into it.
No 2.5HD is provided

I had asked about using the ninja as a non-computer digitiser. (the spec for Prores capture is I believe 4 cores or a very new mac book pro at a pinch.)
I was told that the Ninja, although designed for use with cameras, should take an input from any HDMI source for recording in to ProRes.
However some devices certain DSLR cameras included) may not provide a ‘clean’ HDMI output – i.e. there may be an overlay or resolution reduction.

The Ninja won’t accept an HDMI input when HDCP is invoked by the content provider. and gets an error message to the effect that “This monitor does not support HDCP. Please remove your HDMI cable”.
Apparently the rule from the HDCP regulations is “the sending device must refuse to send content to a device that doesn’t support HDCP”. So at the start of a session, the sending device queries the receiving device to ask whether it is HDCP-compliant, and if it isn’t, then it won’t send content.

I hope this helps. Steve

[Steve Knattress]

when you insert an SxS card into the reader it opens an ama folder on the avid, which of course is only online whilst the card is present.
This ama folder can then be consolidated in its original format onto a media drive on the avid. The .new attribute is given in this process and the master clips can be linked to these new files.

I assume that if you can access this online avid media you can link to it.

I have found problems in trying to link to the SxS media directly in that each file is its own folder together with metadata etc and is in a mp4 interleaved format that avid cannot directly link to.

Has any one found a way of linking directly bak to the SxS card? ( or a disk image of it?)

I received a project from a laptop computer (MC5) with a rough cut of a sequence. I brought this onto my desktop and opened the sequence. The SxS card media was shown as offline (on the laptops C drive).
Although I mounted the original SxS card I could not get the MC4 to link to it.
In fact my consolidated master clips were made off line as the sequence still thought they were on the C drive despite still being present on my media drive and the SxS card.

Any suggestions?

[Steve Knattress]

Thanks for your reply Dave.

I can now talk to my Drobo Pro over iscsi again.
I connected my Macbook pro via FW800, then set up the manual ip address again to the Drobo.
(there is no iscsi set up via ethernet only by FW or USB)
It now taks to my Macbook pro over scsi again.
The dashboard is still on my wife’s imac.

The trouble my Drobo is in another room adjacent to the time capsule router, so it is easier to connect over the network at the moment.

I find that for backup work and the odd bit of DV editing the drobo works fine over my normal network. Although when I’m working with the drobo there is very little extra network traffic.

When I get a chance I’ll do some speed tests.

Steve

[Steve Knattress]

Hi All, I posted this in the fcp forum a couple of days ago, but feel I may get an answer from you network people here.

I have a drobo pro at home to use as general backup and somewhere to transfer hours of cycle head cam footage.
I have a fw800 g-raid2 and small sata raid 5 array for “real” editing on my macbook pro.

The drobo pro was successfully connected to my macbook pro using iscsi on my home network ( iscsi and internet via a time capsule. In a separate room),
I gave the Drobo a manual Ip address outside those allocated by the TC)
I was able to edit DV from the drobopro without any problems over my home wired network.

until.. I loaded drobo dashboard onto my wifes’s imac, to do a backup via isci
Now the drobo pro is reluctant to connect to my macbook pro. (does not connect when my wife’s mac is on. (drobo dashboard (which was given same drobo ip address as mbp, )is NOT being run on boot. more often than not will not connect when the imac is off.)
How do I select which of my computers on my network talks to the drobo pro via iscsi. (I know its not NAS and that only one computer at a time can be “connected” by iscsi

I assumed that the drobo would connect to the machine that had the drobo dashboard running ( I assume this is what loads the iscsi mac agent? …but this does not seem to be the case.)

A lot of assumptions I know. Has any one else experienced this?

Thanks Steve

[Steve Knattress]

Hi All,

I have a drobo pro at home to use as general backup and somewhere to transfer hours of cycle head cam footage.
I have a fw800 g-raid2 and small sata raid 5 array for “real” editing on my macbook pro.

The drobo pro was successfully connected to my macbook pro using iscsi on my home network ( iscsi and internet via a time capsule. In a separate room),
I gave the Drobo a manual Ip address outside those allocated by the TC)
I was able to edit DV from the drobopro without any problems over my home wired network.

until.. I loaded drobo dashboard onto my wifes’s imac, to do a backup via isci
Now the drobo pro is reluctant to connect to my macbook pro. (does not connect when my wife’s mac is on. (drobo dashboard (which was given same drobo ip address as mbp, )is NOT being run on boot. more often than not will not connect when the imac is off.)
How do I select which of my computers on my network talks to the drobo pro via iscsi. (I know its not NAS and that only one computer at a time can be “connected” by iscsi

I assumed that the drobo would connect to the machine that had the drobo dashboard running ( I assume this is what loads the iscsi mac agent? …but this does not seem to be the case.

A lot of assumptions I know. Has any one else experienced this?

Thanks Steve

[Steve Knattress]

Yes I realise that Mpeg4 is not an editable codec that is why I am dropping it into a prores timeline and trying to render it to an editable one.

My idea was to compile the clips I should need in mpeg4 then only convert/render those.

I just do not understand why QT can convert the file to DV.mov without any problem, but FCP cannot do the same when rendering part of the file from the timeline.

I really do have tens of hours of footage of which I only need a small percentage for the edit.

Steve

[Steve Knattress]

I have a similar problem with FCP7 duplicating frames on MPEG-4 imported material, but I am in PAL 25fps.

I have many hours of cycle headcam Mpeg-4 material which plays fine in QT 10 and 7 pro. (on an esata raid connected to an express34 card on my macBook Pro.)
It is reported as MPEG4 Decompressor (libavcodec), 720 x 576, Millions Microsoft ADPCM, Stereo, 16.000 kHz at 25 fps.
If I import this to FCP7 I can view it without problem in the viewer.
As expected I get an un-rendered red line when I edit sections into a 25 fps timeline. (I have tried Pal 25fps DV and prores timelines)
If I however render this I get two duplicate frames every 13-14 frames giving a definite stutter to the edited material.
If I use QT7 Pro to export the whole of one of the mpeg-4 file to a 25fps DV .mov the resultant movie runs fine and I am able to edit it into the timelines without a problem. The resultant file is also much bigger
Obviously I could convert all of my clips before import, but there are tens hours of material from which I require very few seconds.

Has any one any idea why the render stutters when all files should be 25fps?
I really would like to select my clips in mpeg-4 and then render only that material in the final timeline.

Thanks Steve

[Steve Knattress]

How big is your project?

I did some multicam work (9 xdcam dvcam) when my project size got larger ( more than 100Mb) I experienced many crashes.

Try and trim your project and see if the crashes still happen?

I found that just doing a “save-as” and deleting sequences etc. does not work.

You need to make a new project and transfer sequences etc into it.

Steve

[Steve Knattress]

Compressor 3.5 has apple device output settings for H264 for apple TV, ipod and iphone.

[Steve Knattress]

I have edited on my wife’s imac without any problem from an external pre-captured drive.

I would not recommend editing from media on the OS boot drive

The problem with the imac comes when you want to use other codecs other than dv.

There is only one FW800 bus, (shared with the FW400) so you cannot connect another device (AJA, MOTU, Matrox capture) onto a separate FW800 bus as with a mac pro or mac book pro (using the express34 slot). Any external monitor monitoring has also to be via FW through a camera etc.

I have an Esata raid5 or FW800 raid0 (depending on which drive i’m using.) connected via my macbook pro’s express34 card(s), and my motu V4HD on the internal FW bus.
This can give editing with uncompressed 10 bit SD via SDI.

I have also run 9 DVcam recordings on an OB in multi cam with the raid0 (g-raid2) setup.

Steve