T. Payton
Forum Replies Created
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Thanks for the reply guys. Well noted.
Oh yeah, I have a slightly faster machine now. 😉 In fact as they were just gathering dust in a back room 3 years or so ago we had to PAY someone to come take away the G3’s. They were trusty little workhorses even thought they would crash (hard crash) daily.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
I distinctly remember cutting a spot for an Alice Cooper concert right after Bush got elected and I was moving the files from my speedy PowerMac G4 400 to my PowerMac G3 266 via my FireWire 60 GB drive, and I didn’t have to render.
I would remember because it took about 30 minutes to render that 30 second spot, and if I had to re-render I wouldn’t have had enough time to get a Beta SP dub down to the TV station.
Are you sure you can’t reconnect render files?
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
Just a quick report. I shot an hour long interview yesterday and NO temp warning. Darn!
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
I think it is a combination of the sensor and the card. Once I had left the 7D and LCD on during a setup, about 30 minutes, and the overheating began within about 30 minutes of shooting. The shoot yesterday was a good 90 minutes before the overheating started.
I’ll be shooting another interview on Tuesday and I’m sure I’ll get overheated again. I’ll do the card swap again and report back.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
Okay, I’ll throw Adobe under the bus….
As I was writing my post a few minutes ago the infomous “Adobe Updater” popped up and wanted to update Acrobat Pro. In the middle of that it got “stuck” and left a dialog box on my screen that was unresponsive. The only way to remove it was to restart my Mac Pro.
Hopefully CS5 will be better.
Oh before I go I should point out that the only software that I would call bullet proof is Avid/DigiDesign ProTools. Never ever had a crash or a problem in 10 years. And they are slow on the upgrade, typically taking 6 months after a OS is released to certify it on a system, and when they certify it, it really works.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
I think utilizing the GPU for video editing will be revolutionary for our industry. However, Adobe didn’t invent this stuff, they are just the first with a shipping product.
Apple created and is pushing the standard of Open CL which is a hardware independent version of Nvidia CUDA ( what the Mercery Playback engine is programmed in). Apple knows the future is in the stuff, I would just be patient while Apple creates a shipping product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL
Snow Leapord was the first OS to ship with Open CL last August, we are still just waiting for the development to catch up. Search on YouTube for some Open CL demos and you’ll see some of the potential.
As a fellow who does about half print work and half video, After Effects CS4 on the Mac is stellar, but not without a few hickups. The rest of the creative suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Media Converter), is getting to be a bloated mess over the years. I can’t even quit any of the apps anymore without those apps crashing (apparently a widespread problem.)
I’m not trying to throw Adobe under the bus, but I just think that any software is not without its problems.
If you are a FCP user and attracted by the great promise of the PPCS5, I would just give Apple a few months and see what they will offer.
My 2 cents.
– T.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
About the lighting… I just got a 7D last week and it is fantastic in varying lighting conditions. Just pop it in manual photo mode, take some meter readings, take some still shots you are happy with, flip it to video and you are good to go. I don’t feel the 12 minute recording time is that much of a problem. Starting and stopping to create a new take can be done in about 1 second.
Audio… ouch. Feeding audio to your 7D proves disastrous with the AGC (automatic gain control) in the current firmware. Impossible to get anything without hiss. Magic Lantern is hopefully going to come with some new firmware to disable it, but I wouldn’t count on it. BeachTek DXA-5D sorta fixes it but not really.
Therefore you would really need double system sound, which is dooable, but adds a level of complexity that you might not want. You’d defiantly want to use PluralEyes to sync, https://www.singularsoftware.com/autosync/.
So about this Tapeless Workflow for 3 years…. are you prepared for that?
I think you could make it work, but I believe there are better solutions out there. The 7Ds are just not made for shooting long runs of video day in and day out. They are just a few months old!
BTW, To give yourself some more ammo with the client I would head over to Jem Schofields’ video blog of using DSLRs, and pretty much watch everything. https://www.thec47.com
Best to you my friend.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
Yes it does take a while, but I believe that is because it is working in the background.
One thing to note is at the “Share” window you can setup your job and then click “Send to Compressor”, then customize the settings all you like. Then when you submit, you can continue to use FCP.
Also, you can access any Compressor Setting, Including Custom ones in the little share interface.
I believe the Share DVD, and BlueRay workflow is really for meant for a dalies or proof workflow. Hence the utilitarian look. However, with my testing everything works great (well except making a SD disk from a HD workflow, it looks horrible), even the h264 DVD format.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
If you install Qmaster on that machine it will have ProRes 4444 codec installed on it (I confirmed this), but I don’t know if will actually export.
Give it a try. BTW, Qmaster Install is in the Extras folder on your FCP install DVD.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
One thing to remember is not to go back to DV after compositing your shots. Especially when you blur the chroma in Keylight (which is slow but fantastic) or other keyer. A straight transcoding to ProRez will not improve your shots going into the key but it will improve things on the way out.
– T.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque