Zak Mussig
Forum Replies Created
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Between FCP and Motion you’re better off in Motion. It has better tools for making garbage mattes, or any other masks of mattes you might end up using. I’m by no means an expert keyer, but the one thing I can tell you is not try to make 1 filter do it all. You’re better off combining several iterations of a filter affecting different parts of the image than trying to stretch 1 copy to cover everything.
Zak
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You have to have FCP 5.1 or later to run on an Intel architecture. On the bright side, with FCP 4 you weren’t eligible for the crossgrade, so you didn’t really miss it. You need to buy an upgrade to FCS, which if you can wait a month or so for, I would. If you need it yesterday then obviously don’t wait for software that may come out at some point between now and June.
Zak
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X, option-A, ‘nuf said
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I’m with the previous folks… it’s fun to speculate. It’s not like I’m going to switch to Avid if Apple doesn’t meet, or exceed, my wildest expectations this go-’round.
1) New interface – the entire interface will fall into step with the rest of the suite (along the lines of the HDV L&C window). The interface will also be resolution independent ala Leopard. Aesthetic change really, but how we interact with FCP is why most of us choose it over a competitor… that deserves attention.
2) Media Manager will be updated, but mostly under the hood. It will offer to collect media for any Motion or Soundtrack projects in your timeline.
3) Color correction will work better, but function exactly the same. They may add some crazy core animation effect to draw attention to the fact that it’s new.
3) Lots of hardware accelerated real-time stuff… FXPlug in a big way.
4) Motion will inherit a nice feature from Shake, 3D compositing. Motion 3D… too good to pass up. It will still refuse to stop playback somewhere between 5-10% of the time, but Steve knows you really wanted to see it again. It’s a feature.
5) DVDSP will do Blu-ray, ‘nuf said.
6) Soundtrack Pro will have some crazy visual way to assign channels for 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound.
7) Bruce will look like he belongs in OS X and will be more animated. It was their test to see how practical animation would be. (Probably not so much)
See? Fun.
Zak
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The short answer is that you don’t.
A. It’s a Mac – not saying that it’s impossible to exploit the platform, but the bottom line is that it hasn’t happened and there’s no reason to think it will soon. The worst they could do is pass something along to one of the PCs, which are presumably protected.
B. These are workstations. They need to use their full power to edit, not scan for trojans.
Let them tweak the firewall settings however they like and then tell them to leave you alone.
At my last job we had a Video Toaster (VT4) for live switching. We never really pushed what it could do (beyond constantly hoping it didn’t crash – it could do that like gangbusters) because we couldn’t get media onto it without huge headaches. It ran on Xp or Win2000 (can’t remember), but we couldn’t put anti-virus software on it. Unlike the rest of the room (macs) we just couldn’t put it on the network without that protection. Your FCS stations are Macs… they are big kids and they’ll be fine on their own out there in this big scary world. Now convincing Win IT folks of that may or may not be impossible.
Sorry of for the long post… I’ve had bad experiences with IT people controlling Macs.
Zak
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USe FCP instead of Quicktime. Just make an SD sequence with whatever settings you like, but make sure the anamorphic box is unchecked in the sequence settings. Drop your DVCProHD sequence and it will be letterboxed.
Zak
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Our Mac Pro is still running 5.1.2 on OS 10.4.8. FCP 5.1.2 was a great update and I doubt I’ll update either FCP or the OS until we give this thing a Leopard-FCP 6 double ninja kick to the face… I don’t know.
Thanks for the heads up about any potential performance loss.
Zak
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Ming,
Editing HDV natively isn’t so bad if you have a fast mac and a DeckLink or Kona card that can let you watch what you’re doing on a monitor. When you’re done, you downconvert for delivery, but you can also quickly make yourself an HD master (not trying to pick the HDV is /isn’t really HD fight). This should let you avoid going back to original footage just to get an HD copy. Recapturing footage is where I’ve had a LOT of my problems with HDV, so I’d suggest avoiding it if you can.
A lot of the COW folks capture HDV as DVCPro HD to avoid a lot of the long GOP pitfalls of the HDV format. I can’t remember off hand if the deck you mentioned has HD-SDI out, or if that’s the next deck up, but that may be a deal-breaker. Maybe someone wiser could speak to the virtues (or lack thereof) of using that workflow capturing over component inputs rather than SDI.Zak
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Shane’s technique definitely works, but I prefer to do this without opening anything in the viewer. Turn keyframes on in the timeline and just work your way through dragging each of them to the far side of the dissolves. If you animate without transitions and then add them, the ending and beginning keyframes for two adjoining clips will be on the same frame in the middle of the transition. I believe dragging the upper part will affect the keyframe for the first clip, and the bottom part the second clip (or vice versa – it’s been a while).
If you’ve already animated everything, and this process is tedium rather than tweaking, then I think you’ll find this way a bit faster as you don’t have to open each clip in the viewer individually.
Zak
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I’m with you… FCS doesn’t have to be blazing fast, but it would be nice if it would run on the low end of the line. If FCP 2/3/4 hadn’t run on m iBook in college I might not be an editor today. Having that with me all the time was huge.
From Apple’s FCS tech specs page – “Graphics: AGP Quartz Extreme or PCI Express graphics card (Final Cut Studio is not supported on systems using the Intel Extreme Graphics 950 GMA)” The Intel 950 chipset includes the macbook and the mini.
Tell your friend to get a macbook pro or, since you said cost was a big issue, maybe an iMac would do. Some or all of that line has firewire 800 now, so that’s a plus.
Zak