Steve Oakley
Forum Replies Created
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blacks below zero just can’t happen in digital. in analog they can, and really shouldn’t be.
in NTSC, with 7.5 IRE for black, 0 IRE super black worked for keys because the gear would pass it thru provided no where in the chain was something set to force setup on ( like some DV decks and cameras ! ).
in pure digital (HD) land, there are no sub zero blacks. the codecs don’t have negative numbers !.
in 8 bit, if you could go negative, that would mean all values over 127 would be negative, starting at -1. that wouldn’t work. so the codec’s are doing anything wrong, niether is the hardware, but the bars generator you got the signal from is fouled up and should not be putting out negative black levels. the only way that could happen is in analog component, anything digital would clip it up to 0 as it should.
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select the offending clips and either
1. select them and do a scale to sequence or conform to sequence
2. do a command 9 on one of the bad clips and see what its PAR is, and change it to the right one
3. failing all that, bring an offending clip into the source window, motion tab, reset its distort settings. it should now be ok, if not, try repeating #1 again.
some times FCP mangles a clips PAR…. and a prores TL won’t need a render
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you could use something like the MXO2 to scale the incoming HD to SD (pjpeg, prores, DV25) , edit, then recapture in HD after locking the cut. however, I’d only consider this if you know you have clean continuous TC on all tapes, even if it means restriping the TC on the tapes to be sure.
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well I think if you are getting ready to upgrade your hardware, you should take a look at the MXO2 series product. it can down scale on output, but it can also upres on capture which works really well for getting a few stray SD shots into a HD project. the upscale is something the kona cards can’t do.
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where is the media being stored ? and have you trashed FCP prefs as a first step ? so you have dynamic RT on ? are any clips not gray / green in the TL meaning they need to render ?
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take a look at the MXO2 series for video I/O. nice metal boxes instead of pigtail breakout cables, h264 accelerator….. and the Rack version has 8 real XLR analog outs + digital outs. stable drivers that have been adding a couple of new features in each release.
as for FCP, it only uses 2.5G of ram, so going to 16G for now would be fine. it’ll be cheaper to add more a year from now anyhow **if** FCP does grow up to be a 64bit app and can actually use it for something.
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don’t get the ram from Apple, get it from a 3rd party for a lot less
why are you getting the raid card ? you can stripe a raid with the internal drives & OS X. raid card only makes sense to connect to external storage
and that kona card probably won’t work because unless your G5 was the last generation, they have PCI-X slots, not PCIe. in that case, the kona card is a boat anchor.
in which case you need to look at some sort of video I/O, and I think the better choice is the matrox hardware once you look at price / performance / options in product line including the h264 encode acceleration.
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well I do progressive NTSC all the time. just let the video card interlace on the way out… that said
in FCP, select the clip, hit command 9 for clip info. there is a field you can right click to change how FCP is dealing with the clip – upper, lower or progressive.
I’d also check your TL settings. sometimes FCP autmagically gets mixed formats right, other times not. in this case you may need to change the clip interpetation so FCP does the right thing.
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for legal CC, an MXO2 can capture and playback CC data correctly – to / from Line 21, or which ever line you spec. it gets saved as an _audio_ track in FCP which means you can edit the picture if you need to and then send it back. its a nice legal proper video signal
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you have it right. the CPU’s will still be mostly available for other things, and its still faster then CPU encoding. if you turn out a lot of H.264, it pays for itself pretty quickly, especially if you like to go home at a decent hour. I”ve got one and I’m quite happy with it.