real time effects question.... what am I missing?

Running FCP Studio 2, 6.0, OS X 10.4.10 on a mac pro tower with 4 gig of RAM.

I'm doing a job where I've been getting new footage from my assistants on a daily basis. The first three days of getting footage come in just fine. If I need to put a basic motion effect on the footage, it goes in without a problem.

Day four, I get a clip with the visible timecode strip on the top of the frame. I use the basic motion effect to scale it up to 107, and it appears in my timeline with the orange-perhaps needs a render bar.

Footage from days 1-3 can do all kinds of crazy moves and basic motion effects without breaking a sweat. The day four footage needs rendering and stalls out all the time.

When I look in the bin, all my footage has the Photo-JPEG compressor.

Now this may or may not be related, but the only thing that might have changed in the system is the digitize settings. The first 3 days of footage were digitized at a low resolution (something like 15% on the compression settings). After day 3, I told the assistant that drive space wasn't a problem, and they didn't need to overcompress the footage, and they might have brought the compression quality up to 50%.

The weird part is that stuff digitized on days 4 and 5 don't have that orange-bar problem at all. So the problem seems to be localized to this one tape.

If the digitize or compression settings are different, and causing this render problem, where else do I look to see how it's set?

Or if it's not the compression settings, what else could it be? This is idiot troubleshooting, but I still have problems managing my timeline and bin settings... I'm an old school AVID user and still tend to get lost when I get under the hood of FCP, so to speak.

Thanks-

Jeff

So if you add some more footage now from the earlier tapes and scale it up, does it need rendering? I'm thinking you've just reached the edge of what your computer can handle in real time on one timeline, but I could be wrong, so this test should confirm.

is it that anything from here onwards needs rendering, or just that one tape?

Also, what are your sequence settings?

If I scale up footage from earlier or later tapes, I don't have a problem at all. I have one sequence with a bunch of dissolves and quicktimes with alpha channels layered up three or four deep on top of scaling the footage and I'm getting real time playback without a hitch.

In the same sequence, when I have to use footage from this "day 3" tape, I get the orange bar as soon as I scale it to any degree. The orange bar occurs and I can't get real time playback of even a dissolve out of the footage.

When I work with the footage digitized on days four and five, it also works without a problem. So the problem seems to be localized on this "day 3" tape from what I can tell.

That's peculiar to me, because I do have 4 gig of RAM, and have done some heavy online quality HD work with lots of real time playback without a problem. If this dual-core mac pro can't handle slightly varying resolutions of low-resolution footage (if that's the case) that's only 320x240, that would be a bit surprising to me.

Sequence settings are set to the same as the source footage of the first two days of digitizing. Multimedia large 4:3, 320x240, Photo-JPEG 35% quality.

Other than the bin column that lists the "compressor", is there another place to see if there's a compression setting mismatch?

Where else can I get the specs on a piece of footage? Or what can be done to bring this 'day 3' footage into the fold, so to speak.

I think I'm on to something with this. The tape that's causing me rendering issues was captured with 16-bit integer audio, and everything else in the project is at 24-bit integer.

I'm going to use media manager to re-compress this to 24-bit integer audio and see what happens, but could this be the source of the troubles?

If it is, are there better solutions?

"Where else can I get the specs on a piece of footage?"

right click clip in timeline/browser, item properties?

www.markdavid.tv

....aaaaand using media manager to re-compress this trouble clip to a 24-bit integer did nothing. still getting the orange bar of doom, even with the re-compressed footage.

That right click menu item is helpful, I've been overlooking that.

But still no dice. Thoughts, anyone?

So, I'm a bit lost. Can you tell us

1. The sequence settings
2. All the info you have on the 'good' tapes - shoot format, capture format, size, audio info, etc
and
3. All the info you have on the 'bad' tape - as above

And out of interest, why are you working at such low quality? How much storage do you have?

Why are you using Photo-JPEG for *anything*?? That was useful for running on an iBook-- at 35% Utterly useless for anything else and drive savings for equivalent quality to DV -- just not worthwhile.

- Loren
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Jude - thanks for trying to help me figure this out. Running through all the settings is a pretty good troubleshooting exercise, and here's what I've got.

The sequence settings are:

frame size: 320x240 multimedia large 4:3
pixel aspect: none
anamorphic box unchecked
field dominance: none
editing time base 29.97

quicktime video settings: photo-JPEG
quality: 35%

audio: 48K
depth 24-bit
config: channel grouped



The footage settings are as follows:

pixel aspect: square
vid rate: 29.97
frame size 320x240
aud rate: 48.0K
aud format 24-bit integer -- except for the trouble tape, which is listed at 16-bit integer
compressor: Photo-JPEG
data rate: hovers around 435K/sec +/- 5K -- except the trouble tape with is 468.6K/sec
master clip: check
capture: ok

The rest of the columns are reel number, timecode, or blank.

The only variations from the "bad" tape with the rest of my footage is the audio format and the date rate. I can rule out the audio format as being the source of the troubles, because I did a media manage on the "bad" tape, and recompressed it to a matching 24-bit audio depth to no avail. What's interesting, now that I look at it, is that the recompressed footage has a data rate of 570K/second. But I have a hard time seeing that 200K/second is causing the trouble.

Last week, I was working on a film trailer in full-rez HD - with footage that has a data rate of 3.2 meg/second, and my system hummed along as happy as could be. This week, a bottom of the barrel low res file is demanding renders on almost every dissolve, and I've no clue why.

This is where FCP throws me. I'm an old school AVID guy, used to having about 5 compression settings and for most of my career, I just needed two - a low res, and full res. I'm an even older school video guy, who got started in my career by solving problems with cable adapters and other pieces of hardware. To me, FCP offers a baffling amount of compression options and video settings, and it's frustratingly easy to mismatch a couple of obscure settings and wind up constantly rendering things... or such has been some of my experience. So this is the steep part of the learning curve for me.

Any new thoughts on what am I overlooking? Or what else can I do to track down this problem?


**

As for "why using Photo-JPEG" for anything, there's a number of good reasons. The biggest being that my client is doing my digitizing for me, and that's their offline preset. This project has over 80 tapes of broll to wade through, so there are space concerns as well.

I don't know where the "utterly useless" judgement comes from but it's perfectly adequate for what I'm doing now. Plus, I know at least one huge production company (whose head honcho of post production meanders through these boards as well... hi Mark!) that uses photo-JPEG at 320x240 for all their off-lining with fabulous results. This has the peril of becoming a separate thread, but Loren, what would you recommend for a quick and easy low-res compression setting to handle a massive amount of digibeta footage?

OK. I'm a bit out of depth because I've never cut with PJPEG, but what happens if you get the bad tape and recapture a section of it - just a minute or so.

Does the new capture solve the problem, or is the problem related to the tape itself? If the capture is a problem, what happens if you capture a small part of one of the previous 'good' tapes? Could it be a hiccup in the recent capture settings?

I agree you shouldn't be needing to render.

>>a baffling amount of compression options and video settings,<<
Yeah - and it's getting worse everywhere, not just in FCP.

i was thinking the same thing, a recapture of the bad tape.

is this something format conversion can solve using compressor?

are all the codecs a result of panasonic and sony fighting? OT i know but really man, enough already, how bout an industry standard.

let's get back to editing.

sample rate these.

www.markdavid.tv

well, Photo JPEG isn't useless, but in this situation, where you only have 80 tapes (that really isn't that much...I capture onver 120 dvcpro he tapes for my shows, full RES) doing the offline/online thing does make much sense to some of us. In Mark's case, there are five series with multiple episodes, each with more than 80 tapes and dozens of editors that need to access the footage...in that case, offline rt makes perfect sense. In your case, all of this footage would fit on a couple 750GB drives (1.1TB of ftg).

That's all we are saying. If you can avoid the offline process, avoid it.


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Re-digitizing the funky tape would be a good experiment, but today's my last day on the this project so it's not likely to happen. For now it's going to remain shrouded in mystery, until my next job with this company in January. Thanks for the brainstorming thoughts, all...

To Jude/Mark: Three cheers for industry standard codecs!


To Shane: Avoid the offline process? What are you? The wave of the future? Ha ha ha.


Edit - No, seriously about that 'wave of the future' joke (and this is again OT) but the collapsing of off-line and on-line editing into one step, one machine, one operator has some serious ramifications for the role of the editor.

Admittedly, I got my first big career break because I could off-line and on-line, but most of my career has seen more and more duties collapsing into the editor's chair - off-line, online, graphics, design, sound design, sound mixing, etc. The whole concept of doing an "off-line edit" has pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur, and that's disheartening. The off-line edit is the refuge of the art of editing - making the decisions that communicate your message as clearly and powerfully as possible - and it's the part of the process that I most enjoy.

The work that I did for said large production company was some of the most editorially fulfilling work I've done in years because all I had to focus on was telling the story. All the technology that allows editors, producers, and clients to rush past that offline stage might make things faster but not necessarily better... and when it's formally dead and gone, I will dearly miss off-line editing.

Mmm I dunno - I don't really see the advantage of working at an offline resolution if you don't have to. The offline edit itself will never dissapear though. There will always be the point in the process where you need to focus on story, then another stage where you clean up the technicals and add the pretty bits. All we have done in recent years is remove the steps where you laboriously recapture the whole thing all over again.

I work at online resolution unless the job has come from film. I also do the offline and online myself, but I still spend the majority of time in the offline phase. That's where the story lives.