Steve Oakley
Forum Replies Created
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well before you go sending any tapes off, you need to know what your final deliverables will be.if you don’t know that, you could well be creating the wrong output.
you could certainly plug a MXO2 into your laptop, send this out to SD tape, then recapture it back in letting the hardware scale it to 720 or 1080. Dvcam would not be my first choice, but digibeta would be. shouldn’t cost more then a few hundred to rent one for a day. either way, your 3:2 PD cadence should be the same with the hardware adding it on output, so removing it on input isn’t hard if you have the REAL need to deliver a 24p HD master. if you don’t , don’t worry about it. – see you need to know what you need to deliver.
I’d also have any graphics turned on during the layoff. doing a graphics clean pass is pretty much standard procedure anyways for doing international versions. you can then redo the graphics in 720 or 1080 as appropriate.
finally you can rent a HDcam VTR for a day and use the MXO2 SDI to send it out to a couple of tapes if thats your final output.
of course none of this considers the various audio mixes you’ll need to also create from full stereo, mix minus, and possible 5.1 you could need to create several tapes since HDcam only has 8 tracks. will you also need to deliver any SD versions ? SD isn’t dead yet 🙁
Steve Oakley
DP • Editor • VFX Artist
http://www.practicali.com -
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pretty sure its possible on the 900 to shoot at 30.000 instead of 29.97. it certainly has settings for 23.976 and 24.000. I do dearly hope they didn’t actually shoot at 30.000
what card are you using to capture with ? of its running out of sync by 2X sounds like your card is set to 59.94 / 60.00… which would also mean 720 most likely and down converting the 1080 to 720… or something wierd along those lines
Steve Oakley
DP • Editor • VFX Artist
http://www.practicali.com -
actually I’d view it as a benefit – you don’t have to worry about some goofy system sound trashing a tape being recorded.
most apps support the MXO2 audio outs, otherwise by selecting in hardware prefs
Steve Oakley
DP • Editor • VFX Artist
http://www.practicali.com -
you know you could of paid for a compressHD card in the first couple of shows. just export QT from FCP using the Matrox H.264 and directly export the files… done. hours and hours saved.
Steve Oakley
DP • Editor • VFX Artist
http://www.practicali.com -
sorry guys but I’ve found that the MXO2 is more reliable, and certainly way more flexible then the AJA stuff. its got more audio ins and outs, and its just plain newer hardware. the drivers are also rock solid, and they have been updating them pretty constantly the last few months adding new features along the way…. like snow leopard support a few days ago.
Steve Oakley
DP • Editor • VFX Artist
http://www.practicali.com -
FWIW, I too have been using a Matrox MXO2 Rack + MAX for H.264 encodes. the time savings alone is worth it…. fixing the gamma shifting is bonus. QT is riddled with gamma shift problems with other codecs too. some times software developers can write workarounds along the lines of “If QT 7.2 Then use fix1 else if QT 7.3 then use fix2” ect… but that obviously gets messy, and developers should not have to be working around apple’s QT problems. its even worse because apple fixes and breaks these consistently and you never know what you’re going to get between QT versions.
I do dearly painfully wish / need / want apple to get their act together and fix ALL QT gamma problems once and for all.
Steve Oakley
DP • Editor • VFX Artist
http://www.practicali.com -
its pure rubbish that you can not mix frame rates in FCP. I do it everyday and I don’t have problems. you simply have to do it the _right_ way. honestly I’m venting but it gets really tiring to see misinformation constantly repeated. its this simple
create a new TL with a 29.97fps frame rate in whatever 1080/720/480 size you need.
go to your original TL, select all, copy
paste into the new TL. DONE….
ok you might need to do a conform to sequence on clips that are scaled wrong – 1080 clips in a 720 TL, or vice versa, but not a big deal since you can group select clips.
FCP will add 3:2 on the fly to the 24P material. its once you start trying to out smart FCP’s automatic handling that things most often go wrong. yes once in a while FCP will do the wrong thing, but more often then not it gets it right. at worst you sometimes need to either fudge clip interpretation, or use the deinterlace filter to fix what’s wrong.
the look of 3:2 PD is what it is. its probably more visually jarring to mix the two frame rates like this then anything else, but you don’t have much choice.
Steve Oakley
DP • Editor • VFX Artist
http://www.practicali.com -
when FCP is sitting idle, it should be using almost NO resources. when playing, seeing less CPU usage is good because that means less chance of dropped frames. when getting into TL sections where the RT effects are CPu rendered, you will indeed see FCP use the processor cores as needed. during rendering, I can very much assure you that FCP will use all your cores, typically at about 80% load across all of them provided that there isn’t an I/O problem – your drives are too slow. I could only see this as a problem if you are working uncompressed HD with many layers at once, otherwise any compressed format should not be a problem, nor SD uncompressed with most storage in use. in case any one does not believe FCP is multi CPU core aware, and uses them, I can send you screen shots showing FCP at 600-700% usage on a 8 core machine – max would be 800%. nothing to complain about !
FCP will use about 2.5G of ram actually, and may use a bit more for storing still images. its not really the end of the world for MOST users in MOST situations… unless you are working at greater then HD resolutions, greater then HD sources, and deep color, which means 99% of most folks won’t see FCP’s out of memory errors like I do…. because I do do these things.
Steve Oakley
DP • Editor • VFX Artist
http://www.practicali.com -
Hi Shannon
all MXO products support 24P and adding 3:2 pulldown on output to get to 29.97/59.94 as appropriate for the format.
you have to flip the switch on the JVC deck from DV to HDV in order to get HDV back to the deck. 99% chance that the problem. if not ( its in the right position ) then trash fcp prefs and try again. it does work. the JVC deck will only take HD as a FW HDV signal. it will however accecpt SD as Y/C ( ideally ) or composite from any MXO. you can use the DV or RS422 for VTR control when outputting. another option for quick DVD’s is to feed the MXO output to a DVD recorder..
ideally what you would want to do is feed the camera directly into the MXO2 ( or mini ) to capture to prores straight to HD. that will make for much better / easier keys then HDV… not that HDV is terrible.
you can mix and match HDV and DVCpro footage on the same TL without a problem. the MXO series products will down / cross convert to whatever you have them set to output. they just work in that respect. if you haven’t bought anything yet, a MXO mini might fit your budget if its tight as you can input and output with it, including feeding your camera into it for chromakey captures.
Steve Oakley
DP • Editor • VFX Artist
http://www.practicali.com