[Tom Matthies]

Just regular clips in standard SD. Things are working pretty much as normal here. No new problems to prompt this thread. It just seems that if a machine can render a 30 minute show in eight minutes then the computer should have the horsepower to play the sequence back in real time. If it can render 90 frames each second to disk, you’d think that it would be able to playback 30 frames a second out of the I/O!?

I can’t really complain though. Eight minutes to render a simple 30 minute show isn’t too bad. I just always wondered about this point. We’re all getting spoiled as the Macs get faster and faster.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Yea, I have both an AJA Kona3 and an AJA IO on the system. U usually use the IO for SD but I suppose I could use the Kona3 and make use of the downstream feature. Good Idea.
Actually the render times aren’t bad. It’s just a rhetorical question I’ve always wondered about.

Alan, you DOG! So how’s life treating you down in the land where people taawlk funy? Email me a phone number sometime and we can get caught up on things!
Tom

PS: Yea, I’m just sitting around with nothing to do, like usual.
I wish.. 🙂

[Tom Matthies]

For the Power Point program, I usually open it in Apple’s Keynote application. Keynote give you the ability to export the show as a Quicktime movie and then bring that into FCP. There are controls for timing the show as well. It usually works well but some playback features depend on the version of Power Point used for the original show.
I’ve done this several times with good results.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

And if you are running FCP & Studio installed on your machine you already have the camera sound effect. Just do a Finder search under “camera” and you will have them as .aiff files.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

The last time I made it on the air was when a mamber of the Denver Nuggeta and a member of the Utah Jazz piled into me at full speed. I was the poor schmuck running the live camera while sitting on the hardwood under the basket. The three of us all went into a row of folding chairs. All I got out of it was a black eye and the indignation of the whole thing being replayed from four different angles…including my own on the late news that night. And I didn’t get any speaking lines…at least none that could be aired. 🙂
Ouch!
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

I disagree as well.
For SD video, I’d pick a Digibeta over an XDCam any day. Digibeta is 10 bit for one. Much depends on the front end of the camcorder as well. Most Digibetas have a pretty darn good camera section. We have evaluated the HD XDCam along side of our Digibetas. While the obvious difference is the resolution of the picture (SD vs. HD) I found that the HD XDCam is very noisy when compared to the Digibeta in SD mode. I blame this on the GOP recording process and the noise seems to be more compression noise rather than camera noise.
That said, we will probably be buying a pair of HD XDCams in the near future. We have the need for an HD acquisition for some longer format programming coming up later this year. For the most part, much of the day to day footage will still be down-converted for delivery so I’m not as concerned with the compression noise for that reason. When down-converted, the HD HDCam looks good.
Our Digibetas are still used daily and will be for some time to come.
They are built like tanks.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

I’m not all that sure that this is an FCP 6 issue only. I’m still running FCP 5.1.4 on my machine. About a month ago, I was working on a project and wanted to take it off site to continue editing on it while sitting in the airport. I copied all of my footage to a Firewire drive. I have my copy of FCP also loaded on my Macbook. (It’s OK to do that)
Anyhow, when I went to reconnect my files to the project on the Macbook, I had the same problem and posted it here some weeks ago. There were several responses of people suddenly having the same problem and never having had it before. The files fail to reconnect and instead of getting the list of files in the reconnect menu, you instead get a single “*” as the only item in the list. I was also forced to reconnect the files one at a time. I’ve never had this problem before that time. FCP usually has no problem locating and reconnecting clips until just lately. It seems to be working OK these days as well. I’m wondering if some update or something else broke the reconnect routine somehow.
Tom
FCP 5.1.4 running on a Quad g5

[Tom Matthies]

No, actually I haven’t upgraded them for a while not since installing a Kona 3 board about a year ago. I believe that I’m a Quicktime version behind as well, but I’m hesitant to upgrade for the usual reasons and I’m just finishing up a large project that I’ve been working on for almost two months now. I don’t want to mess with things until I finish this up. I’ll be doing the upgrades after. We’re also slated to put in another edit station with a new MacPro in a month or two, relegating this workstation to mainly logging & capturing, so I haven’t been too worried about upgrades lately.
It’s an intermittent problem and it seems to only be on some clips of a batch digitize…not all clips. In this case, the clips are all from a Digibeta field tape. It’s an interview. The batch is about twenty clips, all from the same tape and about 60% are fine while the rest show the audio sync issue. It seems to be a consistent three frames or so. Just enough to be noticeable to the client. It’s happened on a few projects lately.
Weird, since, as far as I know, nothing has changed on this system.
Something obviously did, however.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

FWIW
This will be a HUGE file for export. Yikes!!
tom

[Tom Matthies]

I’ve had both good and bad luck with these drives. I have a few that have been running for a number of years now with nary a hiccup out of them. On the other hand, I have three Big Disks and a collection of the smaller D2 type disks that are all flaky and unreliable. Some seem able to be “fixed” with new power supplies, some just never seem to recover. I have a pair on my home system that are about 2-1/2 years old. I run them as a striped pair. One is always reliable while the other will be sitting there, idle, and then just start clicking and making an assortment of noises. I backed all of the files off of it and onto a pair of SATA drives in an external enclosure and haven’t had a problem since. The two Lacies sit on my backup system, basically waiting to die. 🙁
I’ve noticed that these drives do run very hot within the aluminum enclosures, especially the dual drive Big Disks. There just isn’t anywhere for the heat to bleed out of the boxes. I assume that the aluminum frame acts somewhat as a heat sink, but it seems to be too little, too late. In the summer months, I had to run a small fan on the disks to keep the temperature down. When they get too hot, they tend to cause dropped frame errors within FCP. Keep ’em cool, and they are OK.
I plan on sticking to the SATA solution for my home system. I will be adding another 2 or 4 drive enclosure in the near future when I change over to a new MacPro. These have multi-speed fans within the cases to handle the buildup of heat a little better than the older variety. I’m going to try my best to stay away from Firewire drives altogether. At work, I’m running a pair of Huge 2Tb raids and a few legacy G-Raids. They’ve never given me any problems at all…knock on wood.
I’m still debating trying to rebuild the Big Disks for fear of the same problems cropping up later. I usually use only Hitachi drives in my do-it-yourself projects. They seem to be very reliable so far and have a three year warranty to boot. If I do rebuild the Lacies, that’s what I plan on using.
They (the Lacies) are a good solution to transportable drives, so I hope I can resurrect a couple and squeeze a little more life out of them. Maybe using them only occasionally will solve the problems of their self-destruction.
We’ll see…
Tom