[Todd Wiseman]

Excellent point. Thank you. I’m hoping CS6 will chomp through those MOVs a little better, especially if I grab a more ram. A little worried that Apple won’t be updating the towers. Are most Premiere users on PCs you think?

[Todd Wiseman]

Believe me, it saddens me to leave the Final Cut Pro camp. I was a certified trainer for a couple of years and love that program to death. I am much more comfortable with it and am not yet convinced Premiere is an improvement. I really just feel that moving forward, FCPX is not going to work for our needs. It may get better and I may return to it later but Premiere is looking better and better with every version and I have a lot of confidence in Adobe and its commitment to professionals. Apple, I believe, is headed in other directions. Thank you for your input.

[Todd Wiseman]

I think this is pretty much the answer. Thanks for your input. I do hope that CS6 will have better support for the FCP-optimized XDCam MOV’s, because I really do have a lot of them and will definitely need to use them on a daily basis for years to come. If not, I’ll look into the decoding option you mentioned. I’ve read good things about it.

[Todd Wiseman]

Thanks for your help.

[Todd Wiseman]

Thank you to all of you for the prompt response. I’m getting in touch with their tech person any day now so it’s good to know what my options are ahead of time. Hopefully they can take 480p ProRes.

[Todd Wiseman]

Thank you everyone. I’m getting in touch with their tech people soon, but now I’m armed with some potential solutions. I appreciate everyone taking the time to respond. This forum is second to none.

[Todd Wiseman]

I wouldn’t suggest using h.264 if you intend to edit in FCP. If you plan to snap a video and upload it straight away to youtube than h.264 might be suitable, but it’s a delivery codec, and Final Cut does not enjoy its taste.

I’d try to match what your timeline says (Sequence settings). If I’m working with XDCam footage, than I’ll save out my Snpaz to XDCam (then conform the framerate with CinemaTools, as was mentioned–which is very quick and a great solution). If I’m editing ProRes I export to ProRes, etc. Framerate is not hugely important (30 fps vs 29.97–I stick with 30 and can still play my imported Snapz clips fine after conforming with Cinema Tools without render)

One last thing I like to do that might help others, is restrict my SnapzPro recording size to a specific Aspect Ratio (4:3 or 16:9 depending). It tends to match the video I’m working with better that way.

Thanks to the others who have written this helped me and I hope others find what they were looking for.

[Todd Wiseman]

I had a similar problem recently and want to share my experience in case it helps anyone. I shot a two-camera, 40 minute interview on identical Sony Ex-1s. They only differed by the type of memory used. One had two “official” Sony SxS 8 gig cards and the other had a single Hoodman adapter with an SD 16gig from Sandisk. Guess which one went wrong…

I ingested the footage via Log and Transfer in Final Cut Pro 7 with the Ex-1 plug-in. The SxS card was of course fine. However, I found that only the first 30 seconds of the 40 minute take were capturing on the SD card. After about 30 sec in, it would eject the drive and quit transferring. I tried it a few times. No luck. I started to sweat.

I put the card back in the camera with no apparent problems. In the media browser I saw the 40 minute clip and its duration was accurate. Then I played it in the camera. At 30 seconds or so, it froze up and gave the dreaded “Media needs to be restored.” Of course, it provided no option to restore. I started freaking out.

I attempted all kinds of things, but nothing was doing. I started to get it when I tried to copy the clips directly out of the card’s BPAV folder. The 40 minute clip was broken into 3 folders and the 2nd and 3rd copied fine, but the 1st would crash and eject the drive every time. Hmm…

Back in the camera I found that as long as I didn’t let it hit that 30 second “death spot” the footage was fine. So 29 seconds up and Maybe 40 after (to be safe) the footage played as expected.

Back to log and transfer. I found the same thing. I could play up to 25 seconds or so and also anywhere after that, but not at the dreaqded death spot. That would freeze and crash FCP and one time I had to completely restart the machine.

So after at least an hour of gut gnawing anxiety I set ins and outs in the log and transfer on both sides of the death spot and got all but a small portion of the footage back. I was amazed it worked.

So, no great loss in the end (we were on 2 cameras after all), but I was sufficiently freaked to put in the request for more SxS cards. Too bad they’re monstrously over-priced.

Anyway, sorry this is long. I hope it helps someone though. Seems like there can be corrupt frames with the SD adapters that will cause mayhem, somehow. Let me know if you have any questions. Good luck.

[Todd Wiseman]

Thanks, you inadvertently answered my question–almost.

I noticed that when manipulating the anchor point in the canvas via pushing the center of a wireframe with the distort tool, the image “moved” around the frame–sometimes. This is not ideal. When I shift the anchor point I’d prefer for the image or clip to “stay put,” so I can more accurately place the new anchor point without disturbing the clip’s center value (position). What was more vexing is that some clips would behave this way. That is, on certain clips (in my case actual video clips–as opposed to stills) when I pushed the anchor point around with the distort tool the clip’s center value did not change. That is what I would like to happen, but it just wouldn’t always do so.

You had the answer here, I believe. If the clip or image whose anchor point you are adjusting is the same size as the frame of your sequence, the anchor point will move while the image “stays put.”

If, say, you are adjusting the anchor point of some imported stills that have been scaled down, this wonky and unhelpful “slip sliding” of the center value occurs. Lame.

Furthermore this is just counter-intuitive. In After Effects, for example it seems like the opposite is true. If you adjust anchor point the position remains the same but relatively the clip “moves” around the composition. That makes sense to me. As does using the pan behind tool to adjust the anchor point and position value simultaneously so as to effectively shift the anchor point of a layer while preserving its relative position in the comp.

What’s going on with FCP and why does this happen? Also, how can I get around it. Any ideas?

Thanks.