Zak Mussig
Forum Replies Created
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Walter,
I haven’t had this exact issue, but I’ve had a lot of crashes while trying to render anything in the timeline that isn’t just video (namely Motion projects*). As a workaround for now, maybe you could build your lower 3rds in Motion and export as Animation. It adds a step along with double-rendering the same graphic, but it works whereas the “right way” doesn’t at the moment.
* – O.T. Is anyone else’s machine incapable of rendering / exporting Motion projects which include text in anything other than Motion? FCP and Compressor both hang and eventually crash on my machine. I’ve submitted a bug report ( I submit lots of Motion bug reports), but you never know if they’re going to do anything about it until an update comes out.
Zak
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There’s an assumption there that all of his clients are using Macs. There’s also an assumption that his clients’ computers can play back DVCProHD video.
Your best bet is to compress to MPEG4 or h.264 like Aaron suggested. Even then, take into account that it takes a fairly new and beefy computer to play h.264 files in HD. A standard office PC may not have the horsepower. You just need to ask your clients what they have to work with and compress accordingly.
Zak
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No problem… just boot from that drive and clone it to your internal boot drive. If you can spare the external, just set it aside as your backup drive, ready to boot in a moment’s notice.
Zak
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I love this thread… we do it every couple weeks and I just can’t get enough. Blu-Ray is so sexy, but I would be surprised if we see BD Studio Pro this year. If it exists, it will be THE product that brings real BD authoring to those of us outside of huge studios, and I feel like it would be big enough to Apple to stick with NAB for 1 more year.
I know the Encore / Toast Blu-Ray workflow has gained some traction, and right now it’s what there is, but it doesn’t get you a replicated, first-class, BD title.
There’s a lot that has to go into making software which allows a non-programmer end user to author a true BD title (as opposed to a DVD with HD assets on a high capacity disc). To make it flexible enough that we can make what we want instead of using cookie cutter templates must take triple or quadruple the work.
I’d love to see it happen, but I’m convinced it’s crazy hard after reading the BD white paper and watching some of Sun’s materials about Java for Blu-Ray. As long as Apple can sell machines and avoid the extra cost while selling boatloads of iTunes downloads then the incentive may never really be there until a competitor shows up with a sub-$5000 app.
My 2 cents,
Zak -
Only thing that’s going to fix that is good old-fashioned B-roll.
Zak
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That would technically work, but would be tedious if you’re dealing with multiple clips.
The real method is to check the box that says “Send only referenced media” in the dialog box that pops up when you select the “send to soundtrack audio file project” command. You can even set the duration of your handles, but I always keep the default 10 sec on either side. These are helpful when you’re going to Soundtrack to remove background noise as something on either side of your clip is more likely to contain a few clean seconds of background noise.
Zak
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Dale,
I honestly haven’t dealt with any clips getting spanned across two SxS cards (I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about so please correct me if you meant something else). I would like to do some testing with this and how it affects the process of dumping cards off to disk.
As far as FCP freezes go… are you launching the transfer software via FCP? (File > Import > Sony XDCAM) I would imagine this would help out with the stability of FCP in the background, but there is a bug with the part of the software that adds the clips to your FCP bin which will add duplicate files. Importing with the regular FCP command after the transfer avoids this issue. Those are definitely bad things that are happening to you, but I would just suggest quitting FCP before you use the transfer software, although I have to say I haven’t had any issues with this. I’m not transferring to a RAID though, just a lowly firewire drive.
Not a lot of great information there, but maybe that will help move things forward a bit.
Zak
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Not sure if this will apply to the images you’re working with, but I have to do this pretty often with images of objects on white backgrounds. I always just use photoshop to knock out the background and take the object into FCP with an alpha channel. This is the only reliable way I’ve found to get rid of the outline.
Zak
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Dale,
I think your issue may be that you don’t have the right piece of helper software installed, but this could also be a simple miscommunication. The EX1 comes with a piece of software called clip browser or some such thing… is this what you say works with your clips? I don’t have this installed on my machine. The only Sony app I have is called XDCAM transfer (available here). This is the app that will open and play the clips, but also export them as FCP compatible .mov files. This is the unwrapping / rewrapping process I mentioned earlier. You can use the transfer software with SxS cards or add a folder which you’ve copied from a card to the source list.
I’ve only done a brief test with dumping the cards to hard drive, but my method was to copy the entire contents of the card to a folder. My file structure was SxS Card Dumps > Project Name > Card 1 >… Then your clips are organized by project and recording iteration of a card. You would add the Card 1, Card 2, Card 3, Card x, etc. folders as sources in the transfer software and everything from them on just works.
Hope that helps… let us know if you’re still having trouble.
Zak -
Craig’s procedure is the correct one. Copy the contents of the card into a folder, and use the name of that folder to organize the clips rather than renaming the BPAV folder.
FCp won’t accept the footage because the EX footage is in a .mp4 file container. The transfer software unwraps this file and rewraps it in a standard QT .mov file container which FCP then imports. The codec is the same, but FCP only supports EX footage in the QT format.
Zak