[Todd Gillespie]

You can get this to work. I setup multiple exports all the time so I can have compressor render while I’m away.

The ‘trick (or thing to pay attention too)’ is when you’re in Compressor-it highlights the jobs and targets in blue. When Compressor is doing this, it needs control of FCP to Preview, estimate, etc. the file that you’re processing. So make sure that Compressor is NOT highlighting ANY file, and you will find you can bounce right back to FCP with no problem. Make sense?

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Naiche is on the right track. You’re having FCP and your Mac spend a lot of time compressing video and resolutions that doesn’t matter to your final product. You’re compressing below SD, so you can start shooting in SD rather than HD-since you can’t tell the difference with your final output. Also, I’m not sure what format the JVC transfers in as? But you might want to try use ProRes or AIC for the codec for your sequence and that should help spend up the renders.
I’ve found that FCP usually takes a long time to compress from an HD format down to a small streaming/downloading file. There’s a lot of compression that the computer is doing.

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Hi Darren,

I missed the ‘proxy’ in your previous post, which lead to my confusion.
Yes, that’s the best workflow for your situation. Full ProRes is around 21MBytes per stream with audio, so multiple by 8 and your at 160MBytes per second of video. eSata is suppose to run a lot higher than that, but as is often the case, real world is different than the technical specs.

With as much footage as you need to wade through, it would be a good idea to run a test with your footage before you commit to the workflow. You may find you don’t need to run with proxy.

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Hi Darren,

I’m a little confused on what you’re accomplishing by [Darren Peister] “When finished, media manage the material to my RAID but recompress the footage as new ProRez Proxy resolution.”

You’re correct that trying to do a HD 8 angle multi-cam edit will take a HUGE amount of bandwidth. I’m not sure, but doubt even eSata can do this. My system choked when trying to use an internal raid, with 4 720p HD streams.
You’re best to either cut in SD then uprez or a proxy edit. But I don’t see the benefit to re-compressing?

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Glad you were able to figure it out.

One of the best things you can learn is how to troubleshoot a problem and how to isolate different functions so you can eliminate what’s working and what’s not. While it may have taken way longer than you wanted, you were able to figure it out, so kudos to you.

Cheers,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Wow. It does sound awful. Welcome to the world of post-production! If it was easy, we’d train monkeys to do it.
It’s not making sense that FCP won’t show you the file, but it’s trying to locate it?

you’ve covered most of the usually suspects by deleting pref and restarting.

If it was me, the next thing I’d try would be to create a new project, then ‘copy all’ from the sequence and paste into the ‘new sequence & new project’. Close your existing project and see if it still errors on you. You might want to add in a restart just to make sure.

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

You’re on the right track.
When you open up the project, FCP tries to reconnect all of the files. Make sure during that process that you select that temp render file and click ‘skip file’. Then it shouldn’t bother you any more.

good luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Hi Graeme,

The files will have a .mov extension, they will be rendered with the ProRes codec so you’ll need to download the decoder to view them on a Windows machine.

https://support.apple.com/downloads/Apple_ProRes_QuickTime_Decoder_1_0_for_Windows

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Hi Paul,

The “Capture Now” function just digitize the tape as it’s playing until you hit escape.
If you want to capture ‘clips’ you would need to use the batch capture function.

The audio sample rate is due to the tape being record at a lower rate than 48khz. Once you’ve capture it, you can render the audio rate up to 48khz.

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Hi Lauren,

Best quality 90 minute usually should default to the ‘best’ settings for the DVD encoding. You can manually go through the settings to check, Two pass VBR Best, you can bump your Average Bit Rate up to 6.7Mbps, Max Bit rate can’t be higher than 7.9Mbps and Best Motion Estimation.

That’s about all the control you need to make a good looking DVD. (aside from listening to David’s suggestions about exporting).

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production