[Tim Kolb]

XDcamEX has been my staple format since the later stages of CS3. It runs quite easily on even lighter configured systems.

If you have the actual camera footage, I would ask the videographer how the material was transferred. It really should be transferred with Shot Put or the Sony EX utility.

The BPAV folder should be the overall directory and inside that, you should have folders named “TAKR” and “CLPR” and two XML files named “MEDIAPRO” and “CUEUP”. If the data isn’t arranged like that, the total file structure is not intact.

If the media is solid, then I’d try a reinstall of PPro and make sure you get all the updates.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

PPro imports the audio it sees in the file. Since the Hyperdeck came out after the latest version of PPro, it is possible that there is some misinterpretation of the file.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[Tim Parsons] “Look at the specs. It’s a beast. But for some odd reason, we are having problems”

Well…I’d be curious to know what the filesize is as even a PNG QT clip can be quite large and a non-RAID harddrive system will have all it can do to play it out.

Also, keep in mind that you have a single processor that was introduced in early 2009. It may be a very solid 4 core/8 thread proc, but it’s not invincible in terms of HD formats in QT…

I suspect that the MJPEG material is somewhat smaller and it’s a codec that Windows has in its system, whereas PNG QT files are a codec unique to QT…hence no playback in WMP.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

If you are importing the ProRes into PPro, make sure in your sequence settings that you have “Max Bit depth” checked as ProRes is 10 bit.

If you are bringing in the AVCHD material itself, and that looks bad…I’d be curious to see what the ProRes footage looks like if you bring that in to PPro for comparison. If ProRes looks better, then there may be some H264 decode issue on the machine…

Keep in mind that the QuadroFX 1800 card is a pretty dainty CUDA component…it’s about as small as you can get and still see some benefit (I believe it has enough RAM to run GPU accelerated…but it’s right on the edge) H264 material including AVCHD and DSLR is a load for even a large machine without a CUDA card(I have a dual hex core here with 24 GB of RAM that chokes on one stream of 5D footage with a three way color corrector on it…)

To see the material pixel-for pixel on one monitor, you can send a full screen video to an interface monitor in the playback settings…just designate the monitor you want. OR, you could just un-nest the program panel and drag it onto that monitor, scale it up to fill the monitor, and save the workspace. If the monitor is not large enough to show the entire frame pixel-for-pixel, 100% size designated in the bottom of the panel will cause the image to be larger than the panel, but for periodic checks of focus or that sort of thing, you can bounce back and forth between 50 and 100% and slide the image around if necessary.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Mac or Windows?

Have you tried any other file type?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

With a somewhat limited (16 GB of RAM is a good call) hardware config and no CUDA card, you won’t be very flexible with RED 4K footage.

There is a tremendous amount of scaling involved with decoding, de-bayering, and then displaying RED R3D footage and with a single proc working alone, you’ll be pretty limited on how fluid your playback can be at higher fractional resolutions.

(…not to mention that if your footage isn’t on a fast Thunderbolt connected drive at the very least, you could start to see drive readback limitations.)

RED footage is a load for a workstation-class machines…an iMac (even one with 16 GB of RAM) is going to be challenged to do that sort of heavy lifting.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[Travis Brown] “is there something special that I need to do to enable the audio to be “panned center” and would that enable the main dialogue (that is recorded in stereo) to play correctly on mono devices as well as stereo devices?”

Well…if the main dialogue isn’t coming through on systems that are playing left-only mono, you’re not recording it in stereo…your recording it on channel 2-right.

You would need to bring in the stereo audio as dual mono (set it in your preferences) and then you pan mono channels in a sequence that is master-stereo.

These are the realities of having such a wide variety of target devices for video playback. Commercial recordings have to cater to this same landscape.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

You could keep your narration and other critical sound panned center instead of letting it exist only in left or right channel…this is what most recorded music is structured for…vocals center vs having them pushed left or right.

There really isn’t a magical way to maintain really obvious stereo imaging (separation) while also maintaining a proper sound mix on a device that plays mono by picking one stereo channel (instead of combining them).

I think you would find that most of us in the industry usually output different files for cel phone/mobile use and general internet computer playback. There are too many variables to optimize for both, so if the file has to be used on a wide variety of devices, you need to optimize for the lowest common denominator.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Do you have a 4K monitor?

I think many people seem to be concerned about this, yet for the most part users are viewing on a 2K at the very best, or more often an HD display.

What is your computer’s configuration?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

There isn’t any way to create custom fractional resolution values…

However, keep in mind that scaling and decode math is all about how easy the calculations are to make.

Most frame sizes are even numbers so 1/2 and 1/4 resolution decodes are easily calculated. If you start making fractional scales that make sub-pixel calculations necessary, you’ll create scaling workload that won’t be proportional to the size reduction (1/3 resolution could very well create a more processing-intensive operation that 1/2 resolution).

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor