Trevor Kinsey
Forum Replies Created
-
I have had some intermittent problems when using the VO tool this way. As described in an earlier post, on one machine we use the MAC’s audio in for VO, this doesn’t work on another slightly newer but similarly spec’d machine.
When using the “turn off external video” option, sometimes the external video still shows something. It might be desktop or some window from the application. If the monitor shows anything other than black, the VO tool won’t work. It sometimes takes some fiddling to get the monitor to show black rather than for example desktop. Once the monitor is black the the VO tool works for me.
Trevor Kinsey,
Technical Producer,
CVP Film and Television,
Melbourne,
Australia -
I haven’t had any problem with Soundtrack, although I would only have used it about 10 times. I only have Dual G5 2GHz (old type) machines. I wonder if it is a quad problem?
Trevor Kinsey,
Technical Producer,
CVP Film and Television,
Melbourne,
Australia -
I’ve had this problem for some time. We have two nearly identical 2GHz Dual G5 machines with Extreme cards. On one machine we can feed audio into the G5’s audio in, select that as the source for the V/O tool and record fine. On the other slightly newer (but same model) machine this does not work and the only way to record is to turn off the external monitor. This means you can’t do ADR or any other process that requires you to see the images on the external monitor. Blackmagic say they can’t reproduce the problem so it seems I am stuck with it.
Like you I can’t believe that Apple thinks that this is the way a voiceover tool should work.
Where I have had to have images on the external monitor I have used Soundtrack Pro for recording, but this is another program that we don’t really know.
Trevor Kinsey,
Technical Producer,
CVP Film and Television,
Melbourne,
Australia -
I can’t comment on the multibridge, but we use a DVD recorder a lot. The comment about 4X3 and 16X9 is important as some recorders (our Panasonic for one) can’t record 16X9 and have the output play properly on a 4X3 monitor. On a 16X9 monitor you can set the monitor to show 4X3 or 16X9, but the recorded DVD doesn’t have the appropriate flag set to force the DVD player to show the output as letterbox or centre cut. To get a suitable disk for playback on a 4X3 monitor from a 16X9 source we have to run the signal through an aspect ratio converter to produce a letterbox image.
I don’t know if you will find the 16X9 feature on a domestic level recorder. This will force you to spend a fair bit more money on a professional recorder (which will probably give you better results).
Trevor Kinsey,
Technical Producer,
CVP Film and Television,
Melbourne,
Australia -
It sounds to me like you have a faulty component (lead, adaptor or maybe as you first suggested the mixer itself). Do some A/B testing by swapping leads and mixer inputs around until you have checked each component works.
The only other thing to check I guess is that you are sending output to both channels, i.e. are there two (or more) tracks in the timeline, panned to each side, or one track panned to the middle.
Good luck
Trevor Kinsey,
Technical Producer,
CVP Film and Television,
Melbourne,
Australia -
We had a similar problem with output from a dual 2GHz G5 machine with audio one frame out most of the time. This was running FCP 4.5 but the problem went away after driver upgrades. We have since upgraded to FCP 5 and are running two similar machines with FCP 5.03 and are having no problems.
A work around for us when we were having the problem was to offset the audio by one frame during output (i.e. move the audio one frame on the timeline). Obviously this only works with some material and you can’t do it when inserting to a previously mastered tape.
I suggest that you check that you are running the latest OSX and drivers compatible with your version of FCP. You may find your problems disappear.
PS. If you think the world of sync is problematic with a Decklink card, you should try a Cinewave. We gave up on ours.
Trevor Kinsey,
Technical Producer,
CVP Film and Television,
Melbourne,
Australia -
I have no experience with the AJA device, but we have two dual G5s running Extreme cards. We also had a Cinewave card in a dual G4 and this gave us lots of grief. The Decklink cards have worked extremely well with almost no problems and good support from the Blackmagic team (it might help that they are just down the road in Melbourne, Australia). The Extreme card does have composite I/O as well as component and SDI. Composite is done via the Y in and out leads; you reconfigure the format from the Mac system preferences.
I can thoroughly recommend the Decklink card.
Trevor Kinsey,
Technical Producer,
CVP Film and Television,
Melbourne,
Australia -
Are you sending YUV or composite to the monitor. If you send composite signal down the Y to a component monitor it has moire like pattern over the picture. Check that the Decklink card is set to output component signal, or use a composite input on the monitor.
Trevor Kinsey,
Technical Producer,
CVP Film and Television,
Melbourne,
Australia -
We have two Dual G5 systems with Decklink Extreme cards. We are very happy with the speed and stability of these cards. We moved from a Cinewave to the Decklinks because of problems with the stability of this card. The Cinewave had more on board processing power and did things like MPEG encoder much faster (when it worked), but most jobs took longer in the end because of the number of reboots required.
The Decklink Extreme does not support S-Video, but does support YUV, composite and SDI I/O. YUV and composite I/O is over shared connectors so depending on your configuration this may give you some problems. Firewire is handled through the MACs firewire ports.
Trevor Kinsey,
Technical Producer,
CVP Film and Television,
Melbourne,
Australia -
Have you changed the input to SDI in the Blackmagic section of your system settings? Open your MAC system settings and click on the Blackmagic settings icon. Change the input settings to SDI (and the output too if that is what you are using).
Trevor Kinsey,
Technical Producer,
CVP Film and Television,
Melbourne,
Australia