[Tom Brooks]

It’s funny. Most everything looks better when you’re standing in Kalamazoo, too.
-Tom

[Tom Brooks]

David,
This is an excellent question. Maybe we can get something started. First off, I’m assuming your DV50 is anamorphic 16:9 – am I right? Answer to question 1 is that you can’t transcode on the fly during capture over FireWire. The only way to do that is through a capture device such as a Kona or Blackmagic.

Your goal here should be to get to one format AND that format should be an optimal one for multiclip editing in FCP. DV50 would be good for that, but you’d be taking everything down to SD resolution. HDV is probably not the best choice. So what you need is to get both sources to uncompressed, ProRes, or DVCProHD. I don’t have a capture card that can upconvert, so I defer at this point to those who do. Anybody?
-Tom

Final Cut Studio 2, FCP 6.0.2, Mac OS-X 10.4.11, Quicktime 7.4, After Effects 6.5 Pro, G5 Quad 2.5, Kona-LHe V5.1, 4.5GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7800-GT 256MB, G-RAID 2x1TB FW800, 6TB RAID-5 (Enhance E8-ML, Highpoint 2322), Panasonic HVX-200P P2.

[Tom Brooks]

You should search for an Apple document or a tutorial for all the answers on this. As an example:

https://images.apple.com/pro/pdf/L317074A_FCP_Wkflw.pdf

Shane has good ones on this site, too.
If you have only the MXF files for some of your media, search for tutorial on how to recreate the P2 file folder structure. Or look to Raylight for help.

Final Cut Studio 2, FCP 6.0.2, Mac OS-X 10.4.11, Quicktime 7.3.1, After Effects 6.5 Pro, G5 Quad 2.5, Kona-LHe V5.1, 4.5GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7800-GT 256MB, G-RAID 2x1TB FW800, 6TB RAID-5 (Enhance E8-ML, Highpoint 2322), Panasonic HVX-200P P2.

[Tom Brooks]

Max,
Thanks for explaining that network drive thing. Can the reference movie be made into a single self-contained movie by opening it in Quicktime Pro and doing a “Save-As” self contained? I’m not sure if this would solve Neil’s issue. The other thing to try is to simply limit the length of movies to stay under the 2GB limit–a very severe limitation to be sure.
-Tom

[Tom Brooks]

What’s the format of your scratch disk? Media drives must be formatted Mac OS Extended.

[Tom Brooks]

Mike,
I’m into a big edit with a ton of various and sundry stills of every type and am having similar troubles. I’m trying to discover what it is about certain stills that causes the problem. I’m also seeing some extreme jaggy edges that won’t go away. It’s not always related to very large sizes. I’m scaling everyting down to “reasonable” sizes in Photoshop before bringing in. One of the flickery shots was only 456 x 768 or thereabouts.

I’ve found a couple things that help. Long story short – flattening and blur. One trick is to use a little blur – say .2 or .3 of Gaussian blur (maybe more on a really large still). The other has to do with edges and alpha channels. I seem to get the best quality still with an alpha by making it a PSD file, saving the transparent part as a selection (alpha), using a black background layer and then flattening the file. This gives a flattened PSD with alpha channel. Some of the files I’m getting have a Path that outlines the object. The Path can be made into a selection, which can be used to drop out the background. Sometimes this results in a very hard edge that causes shimmery edge effects on moves. The best remedy for that is to feather that selection by 1 pixel and sometimes to contract it by a pixel.

I’m in the thick of this, so I’m still figuring it out. I’m interested in anything you discover.

Final Cut Studio 2, FCP 6.0.2, Mac OS-X 10.4.11, Quicktime 7.3.1, After Effects 6.5 Pro, G5 Quad 2.5, Kona-LHe V5.1, 4.5GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7800-GT 256MB, G-RAID 2x1TB FW800, 6TB RAID-5 (Enhance E8-ML, Highpoint 2322), Panasonic HVX-200P P2.

[Tom Brooks]

The other advantage of the codec is that it’s cross-platform and comes standard with Quicktime, so it’s a decent choice when you are passing files from one system to another and you don’t want to deal with supplying the codec on the other end.

[Tom Brooks]

I’ve had a couple media files do that as well. I’ll check the setting Gary mentions, but it does not seem to be size related in my case. Only a couple of files have had the problem — one from MPEG Streamclip and one from DV tape. They played at the time they were captured, but went offline after restart–suggesting the existence of referenced media that is no longer available after the restart. I’ve had to recapture to fix. Using logged time code was OK in my case.

Final Cut Studio 2, FCP 6.0.2, Mac OS-X 10.4.11, Quicktime 7.3.1, After Effects 6.5 Pro, G5 Quad 2.5, Kona-LHe V5.1, 4.5GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7800-GT 256MB, G-RAID 2x1TB FW800, 6TB RAID-5 (Enhance E8-ML, Highpoint 2322), Panasonic HVX-200P P2.

[Tom Brooks]

I recently built an 8-drive RAID myself. There is a lot to learn and there are many pitfalls you can run into. You need to get enough drives to populate the case and a spare or two — all of the same model and firmware. You need assurance that the case, the drives and the controller card are all compatible with each other and with your software. This info is probably available on the various websites. But it’s hard to pull all of the information together from different manufacturers and suppliers. I would recommend the cases from Enhance Technology. I chose a Highpoint 2322 controller because it saved me a few hundred bucks. I now wish I had gone with either the Areca, the Atto or the CalDigit. The Highpoint was recommended for the box, but it doesn’t handle all of the I/O with it’s own hardware–it relies on the Mac cpu for part of it. The CalDigit looks really good on paper and there is the possibility that you could get some advice and support on how to use it and integrate it with the other components. It has four internal and 8 external ports.

All in all, it’s a good experience to build yourself—in some ways. You can save a grand or two for an 8-drive box. But, I’d do the math a little differently now, putting more value on the expertise you can draw from a manufacturer that already has the experience of making systems that are proven to work together. Above all, I’d look for that–experience with systems that are proven to work.

[Tom Brooks]

Sure. Just look in the PDF manual on your system or on the AJA site. The details are all there. Basically set your analog output to downcovert to 525i29.97 and in the Codec tab, set the pulldown pattern to 2:3:2:3.