[T. J. shank]

I hear a lot of discussion about how ‘awkward’ the Color interface is.

I suppose that, compared to FCP or Motion, it is different – but having spent a little time in a CC suite I don’t find it badly designed at all.

Most professional correction systems have similar interface approaches. The design challenge is to make the work easier, not necessarily to set something up that looks like it only has three buttons. You need a lot of control and a number of ways to approach a problem to get good results from any color correction software.

I haven’t tried some of the other CC plugs out there to compare them with Color, but I have Color Finesse on my home system and find that it, too, is ‘awkward’ compared to FCP’s own CC plugs. But CF does more and that makes it worth the ‘non-Apple’ design for me.

The worst part is trying to do color work with a mouse – I’d love an inexpensive control surface (in the $500 – $700 range?) to make the work faster. Other than some import/export problems that I understand happens primarily with DVCPro material, I’m happy with Color. It just takes a little getting used to.

My 1/50th of a dollar.

tjs

[T. J. shank]

The green slug comes from corruption in your preferences, and they need to be discarded. They are in Users/”your name”/Library/Preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data. In my experience “green slug disease” happens regardless of what other cards/hardware you have installed. If you haven’t backed up your preferences, you will need to reset them after discarding and restarting FCP. For future preference resets, try FCP Rescue.

tjs

[T. J. shank]

Capture and edit will be quicker, but when the project is done you still have to archive all that footage somewhere. The most cost effective archive medium…video tape. Should be great for some applications, though.

tjs

[T. J. shank]

Hi David,

I have the smaller S2S and get 4-5 streams of DVCPro HD. According to the literature, the larger array runs at just about the same speed as the smaller one. For what it’s worth, 2 small S2S raided together clock in excess of 400 mB/sec.

tjs

[T. J. shank]

Of course, the OTHER way to fix this is to make sure that the reference input to FCP is the same as your deck. We find that occasionally the ‘Ref In’ selector on our Kona 2s will mysteriously change to something other than ‘Ref In’. Putting the setting back where it belongs solves the problem.

tjs

[T. J. shank]

We’re using Kona 2 cards – 8 channels embedded in the SDI stream. Getting four to and from the digiBeta is an Easy Setup away.

tjs

[T. J. shank]

Here’s a vote for SATA solutions, at least one that’s new enough not to be mentioned yet in this discussion…

I’ve been using a LaCIe S2S for a couple of weeks now. It’s 5 discs in an enclosure that has activity lights on the front, and comes with a four channel PCI-X adaptor, with the controller in the bottom of the array taking one so you can add three more arrays for more space/speed without adding a card. It is a SATA 2 device, and the throughput is fast enough for a stream of 10 bit HD uncompressed.

tjs

[T. J. shank]

Actually, LaCie is offering the “Biggest S2S” array in 1.25 Tb and 2.5 Tb sizes with a SATA II card. So far, I have had only good experiences with the smaller one and FCP, and the price is very reasonable. Read times are in the 180 – 200 Mb/sec. range.

tjs

[T. J. shank]

I can’t help but notice that you said you installed the latest Decklink drivers, but you have a Kona 2. Typo? or???

tjs

[T. J. shank]

I have had a different experience from Graeme with monitoring. I use an old Sony firewire to composite adapter (a DMC-DA1 or something like that – it’s not in front of me right now).

I have been able to monitor on a standard NTSC monitor (the image comes in letterboxed) right from FCP. I haven’t tried using the camera as an adapter, but it seems reasonable that if the DA1 works, a camera should.

tjs