Walter Biscardi
Forum Replies Created
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Sorry I was out all day yesterday Otis, but I see Gary and the others here have you on the right track. As you’ve found out, the 1200A is menu intensive and it can take a while to figure out exactly how to set up the deck for your needs.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.comNow in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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If you’re earning enough money on the system and you really want to take advantage of Motion, then yes, upgrade. If you just want to use Motion from time to time, the G4 should be fine.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.comNow in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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If you look at a thread down below, Zax has already posted some queries about 3D and a potential plug-in. It will be awesome if he can integrate this feature in Motion 2.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.comNow in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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[Nik Manning] “Yes we would be very interested as long as it doesn’t cost more than the program. $299 for a plugin for a $300 program just doesn’t seem right.”
That all depends on the plug-in. Motion is $299 because it’s an Apple software that requires Apple hardware to run. Ultimately Apple is a hardware company and will sell the software cheaply to sell the hardware.
Boris Continuum complete is $700 – $800 which is a fanstastic set of plug-ins that add a lot of new features and effects to Motion. It’s a lot more than the original program, but then Motion would not be at that price if it was released by someone other than Apple.
So how much is the plug-in worth to you? The cost of the original application software is irrelevant.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.comNow in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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[BabaG] “fcp seems to want my render and media files on the same drive or
partition. is this something i can redefine? or must they always
reside together?”For the most speed and performance, you’re better off keeping all the media together. The more your media is spread out, the more likely you are to experience dropped frames. I simply assign one drive or array for all my media, including render files.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.comNow in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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[Michael Belanger] “I just upgraded my second system to fcp 5.02 and found that when I import a psd file , snag a layer from it and then place it on another sequence THAT sequence gets renamed to the name of the psd file. This is truly a new one on me. Any thoughts?”
I’ve seen this happen to nested sequences but not to a primary sequence.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.comNow in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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[frankpledge] “that coupled with really reliable layoffs. a complaint i’ve heard across the board as well (and experienced) is the uncertainty of layoffs (drop frames, skips and jumps WITHOUT error report). this btw – occurs with regular old DV FCP self contained movies on roomy drives.”
Dropped frames is a symptom of drive issues not getting the media throughput to FCP. I’ve never seen a report of dropped or skipped frames that didn’t come back to the drives and / or controller card. Having plenty of room on a drive doesn’t mean the performance will be there. Fragmentation and the speed of the drive itself will give you more or less performance. Too many folks take the “speed test” of a drive to be absolute law of performance and that’s simply not the case in real world editing. You don’t know how much performance a drive is really going to give you until you start pushing it. I run 8bit and 10bit SD and HD using a combination of FW800 and Fibre Channel arrays to ensure plenty of overhead in speed.
I’ve also never experienced a layoff that didn’t give me a warning if it dropped frames so that’s a new one on me.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.comNow in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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[Dean Sensui] “But with my 2-drive RAID 90 percent full I got a test reading of a bit more than 90 MB/sec which is supposed to be able to provide about 72 frames/second with 10-bit 4:4:4 NTSC video.”
Keep in mind that testing is just a “best case scenario” when it comes to drive speed. You need to actually run Final Cut Pro with the footage you want to edit with to find out whether or not the drives can actually handle the 4:4:4 footage.
When doing reviews for the Cow I will run speed tests that show enough speed to run 8bit or 10bit uncompressed footage, but then when I actually try to edit, I get dropped frames. So a speed test is a good reference, but that does not automatically guarantee that the drives can actually run any particular footage with Final Cut Pro.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.comNow in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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Definitely a head scratcher there. I’ll keep an eye out and see if it pops up here, but so far we’ve batch captured 7 episodes and some other projects with everything good. Even after using the ESC key on occassion to fix things.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.comNow in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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[michael vance] “The media was captured on one of two WideSCSI SEAGATE drives. The drives interface to the computer via an ATTO ExpressPCI UL4D. Theses drives are in theory fast enough to do nearly do realtime uncompressed NTSC 10bit without even being striped. Apparently the drives aren’t having any problem playing the media back in Quicktime, so I don’t know why they would in FCP.”
I’m not familiar with those drives, but I did have a LOT of issues with the UL4D card when I was still running SCSI drives. My drives simply would not mount correctly and when they did work, they would suddenly stop working for no apparent reason. I went back to my older UL3D and all the problems went away for the drives.
Do you have any Firewire drives available? If so, try capturing to the DV codec to those just to see if you can capture / playback fine.
If not, set your Mac HD as the Scratch Disk and capture one clip in the DV codec to see if that will capture / playback fine.
If either of these tests work, then your issues lies in the SCSI Card / SCSI Drives. The fact that they won’t stripe together is a real red-flag on the setup. Could still be a bad drive in there or something wrong with one of the arrays.
I only ran Medea SCSI arrays and never had a lick of trouble with them until I put in the UL4D. I’m betting once you get your harddrive situation cleared up, everything else will smooth out.
For 8bit Uncompressed, you can easily run a G-RAID FW800 or LaCie Big Disk Extreme FW800 unit.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.comNow in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters