[Tim Kolb]

Most people I know who use it are on Macs (I’m on Windows myself, but I’m a Sony/SxS guy for the most part).

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

FW= FireWire

I think that device has a FireWire port as well…I’m curious whether that might be a bit faster.

I know that several colleagues of mine have used the Duel Systems Express 34 to PCMCIA adapter (I’m sure there must be others available as well) with P2 cards pretty successfully and you’re moving data across the PCI-X bus instead of USB…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

So you have the “save media cache files next to the originals when possible” checkbox checked in preferences -media?

What happens if you uncheck that box and send the cache files somewhere central on your system? Let it re-process (it should be simply recreating .pek files, which would be where the waveform comes from…as far as I know it should not conform audio that’s native to the sequence settings), then close the project (after saving it under a different name of course) and see if it does the same foolishness when you reopen the project.

This has something to do with the project being unable to either “remember” that the cached files exist (access to them is restricted somehow?) or the project is unable to update the files so that it can find them (the XMP preferences).

Usually what causes something like this is someone choosing to “clean” their cache database while an external drive with media and cache files on it is disconnected, meaning that the cache database dumps the reference to the actual cached files because it doesn’t see them on the system any longer and assumes the database entries are obsolete. Then you re-attach the drive…the media isn’t in the media cache data base…and we re-index because we think it’s new.

The problem is if the media cache database is written somewhere while you were running a session as “administrator”…there are are situations where a simple user logon will not allow PPro to update the media cache database…so the footage is new every time as it never gets permanently entered into the media cache database.

Any of this make any sense at all?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Have you tried the device coupled as a FW peripheral?

…also are you exporting AVC-Intra, or DVCPHD?

Writing back to a P2 card is a great convenience, but it’s definitely easiest when the card is in a local PCMCIA slot.

I seem to think that the architecture of the cards tends to make cards of larger capacity write a bit faster…what is the capacity of the cards you’re writing to?

Exporting P2 DVCPHD should be a piece of cake…it’s VERY fast in my experience. I have less experience exporting to AVC-Intra however.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I don’t know what was meant by “turning it off”…it just doesn’t do as much conforming by design.

OK…in your preferences, in “media” do you have the two check box choices for “write XMP ID…” and “Enable Clip and XMP…Linking” checked?

It sounds as if PPro isn’t able to update the metadata for the media through the project…what are the write priviledges on the external drive? If you’re on Windows, does it come up as the same drive letter every time? Does the project know where the media is when it’s opening?

Also…in preferences–audio, what is your source channel mapping default track format set to?

…and how many audio tracks are in your P2 files?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Hmmm… First off, I’ve never been a fan of the many aftermarket or shareware codec packages like the k-lite package.

You don’t need any additional codecs to use P2 footage In PPro as it handles DVCPHD P2 footage quite easily on its own. I’d like to see what would happen if the k-lite stuff was pulled completely and CS4 was uninstalled and reinstalled cleanly…

The audio conform (probably just generating peak files…or does it actually say “conforming” on the bottom-right of the interface when you’re loading?) has a lot to do with where the scratch disks are targeted and sometimes to do with what user level was logged on when the app was installed.

I’ve seen odd cases where the application was loaded under a user account instead of the administrator and there was an issue with a project re-linking to cache files due to the app’s authority level, so it decides to make more… Eventually the media cache is huge and scrambled and the software starts to struggle.

I’d check where the cache is currently targeted and check how full that volume is…and definitely clean the cache (in the preferences).

P2 should run like butter…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Video images are relatively “elastic” but hard edged text…not so much.

You’re creating your text in a 1.2 pixel aspect…wider than square…and then you’re asking it to recreate itself in the proper aspect ratio in square pixels (1.0 PAR)…raising the horizontal resolution by 20% even though there is no resolution to source from.

The math is simply not pretty and that is where the evident scaling is coming from.

I’d recommend setting up a custom desktop sequence at the 874×480 frame size and creating the titles based on that, and maybe nest the DV sequence (the video shots) into the custom square pixel sequence.

Alternately, you could try to output to 720×480 widescreen in your H264 file, but I know that not all media players are very good at recognizing those pixel aspect flags…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I would say you may want to check where your scratch disks are set…and look at how full that volume is…

When you are exporting to DVD this way, the first thing that happens is that your material needs to be rendered to an uncompressed state in a temporary file that then feeds the compression process. If you have a long timeline, this can be a massive file…and if it’s targeted to a drive that’s short on space in the scratch drive settings, you won’t make it through the process.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

What is your edit image size…and your H264 output image size?

The image you attached to your post look like the encoded image is simply about 1/4 resolution…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[Charles McIntyre] “Did you mean gaining related to FCP’s enduring reputation?”

To some extent, FCP is surviving on that reputation, which needs to have some renewal with some refreshed capabilities.

In this thread, we have an individual who has disqualified PPro because it can’t easily parse the proprietary wrapper that FCP puts on XDcam material. FCP wins that round not because of superior capability, but because of being the only thing backwards compatible with itself.

If the user changed to PPro, they wouldn’t be duplicating media through the importer process, and the files would stay camera native for any other use through post, but that’s a significant change to make in procedures and file management if you’ve gotten accustomed to the FCP rewrapping process and you want to not drop FCP completely and switch over (which I doubt any FCP user would want to do from a common sense point of view.)

Avid survived their down years because of the same sort of thing. Once you have some market dominance and a closed system, you can lag behind for some time before you will drive users to have to make a move as their infrastructure is not that easy to change over night.

I’m quite aware of FCP’s reputation, and I wouldn’t say it’s undeserved…however I think that PPro CS5 may have some who have disqualified it from high-stakes workflow situations reconsidering whether it belongs in the group.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,