[Tom Meegan]

I would take this question over to the Apple xSan forum here on the Cow.

The folks who know about the tricky parts of configuring a SAN for things like catastrophic power failure hang out over there.

Best,

Tom Meegan

[Tom Meegan]

I’m a freelance editor, videotape technician, and Apple certified instructor for FCP. Part of a previous job I held at a PBS station was editing to “fix” shows that had been rejected by PBS for technical reasons. I also spent years setting up random tapes that came into mobile television trucks covering sporting events. Take my thoughts with that background in mind.

On your digibeta dub, the TBC on the deck was probably not adjusted for the signal on the tape. Making these adjustments at the TBC before DV compression will preserve quality.

In order to confirm the settings of the TBC on the deck you need an external waveform monitor and vectorscope, a reference monitor, a good viewing environment, and a technician with the ability and knowledge to read those scopes, recognize problem video on a calibrated reference monitor, and know where to make TBC adjustments at the deck.

The technician should adjust the bars, and then look at the footage, first confirming that the signal falls where it should on the scopes, but also that the video looks good on the reference monitor. Further adjustments at the TBC should be made based on this viewing. Then the technician can send the tape to FCP.

Occasionally the footage will be beyond the power of the TBC to help. The TBC won’t allow you to adjust gammas and won’t allow you to adjust individual color channels. The inexpensive way to deal with these issues is to use FCP’s color correction tools. A judgement need to be made about whether this is truly needed

[Tom Meegan]

Hi Walter,

I’m glad you haven’t had any issues. If I decide to go back to that work flow for client copies in the future I will purchase the disc recorders you mention above.

We do DVD records for producers in live TV trucks because it is the only practical way to give them a DVD of the line cut as they rush to catch a flight. About 1 out of 15 times the producer has trouble with playback on at least one device.

To me this is an acceptable ratio if you are your client is local, or there is no other alternative. It is not acceptable if I am FedEx overnighting the disc and there is a deadline looming.

Just reporting my experience.

Best,

Tom Meegan
http://www.wovenpixels.com

ps Wish I had been able to catch your session at Post Production World. I hope it went well.

[Tom Meegan]

The ProRes numbers are similar to uncompressed SD. I edited uncompressed SD on two of the original G-Raid discs striped together. It was a bit dodgy when I tried to make it work with one G-Raid.

As you probably know, all of the firewire ports on you computer share the same bus. My guess is that the HD IO is going to want the Firewire bus to itself. If you decide on FW800, I recommend that you buy a firewire expansion card from Sonnet or someone similar.

A SATA RAID is probably a better idea, if you can afford it.

Here are a couple of articles that might help

[Tom Meegan]

If you play out to an external DVD recorder, be aware that the resulting disc may not play in all DVD players. I don’t recommend this option if you are sending the disc to a client, or taking the disc to show others on an unknown player.

Good luck.

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

The issue you describe sounds like the field order was reversed when you exported the movie.

Here is a general description of what fields are

[Tom Meegan]

A storage area network (SAN) solution will allow multiple users to have access to the same files concurrently. This is very expensive and requires knowledge and expertise to set up.

That being said, for shared assets like sound effects libraries, network attached storage (NAS) over ethernet can be a practical solution. Just be careful about media management. I suggest dragging the files you need onto your local drive before importing them into FCP.

Be aware that you will need two distinct FCP licenses for this to work. FCP will not open if the computer is on a network with a second computer that is running FCP with the same license.

One last thing:

Two users simultaneosly editing the same project, on the same drive are in a, “last person to save wins,” situation. If you need to do work on the same project on the same day, duplicate the original project and implement a naming scheme that includes the date and editor’s identity. Increment your work by duplicating the project daily. Manually concatenate the projects when you are done.

Without knowing more about what you are editing or the scope of the project, I would recommend two identical media/asset drives, one for each user. Divide the work thoughtfully. Having two separate and identical drives has the added benefit of providing a back-up in case a drive fails. If you need to port new assets between the machines, use ethernet or sneakernet.

Good luck,

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

I would call a dub house. I’m not being facetious

[Tom Meegan]

This sounds like a field order problem that is occuring during your mpeg-2 encode.

DV (PAL or NTSC) is lower field dominant.

Here is a good article that might help…

https://dvcreators.net/why-is-motion-in-my-dvds-so-jittery-and-stroby/

Be well,

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

When I encounter this problem, I resort to capture now.

I also go

Final Cut Pro > User Preferences

General tab

and change the On Timecode Break drop down to, Warn After Capture.

If I hit a bad chunk of tape where there are hits, I capture now on either side of it.

Cue the camera to the first good frame. Freeze it.

Hit Capture Now in FCP. The window will report that it is waiting for time code.

Then hit play on your camera.

Not ideal, but should get you over the hump. Remember to return your preferences to your normals when you are done.

Best,

Tom

ps The Canon DV cameras seem to be particularly troublesome with FCP. I’m not enough of an engineer to say why, but that has been my experience.