Deleted

I posted about an issue I have now solved, but I don't know how to delete my posting - only how to edit it.

Sorry to waste your time

Don't delete posts you've solved - it can be useful to others with the same problem.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

I apologize.

I was having a bunch of problems with HDV in FCP 6.0.6. The problems happened after I reformatted drives and reinstalled everything because I bought new internal drives.

It was a 2 week nightmare.

Then I installed FCP 7.0 which I owned but had never installed and the crashing problems went away.

So I felt that I had not really solved the problem, but sidestepped it.

Maybe the issue will return ... ?

My reason for removing the post was that I didn't want all the enormously helpful people on this board, such as yourself, to be racking their brains about a problem which ( it seems ) is no longer relevant. However, I understand the reason for your post. I probably should have posted how I had "solved" the problem - I stand corrected.

With apologies,

Best wishes,

Harry.

HDV isn't recommended for native editing in FCP. Ideally you should transcode it to ProRes but if that is not possible, at the very least set your sequence codec to ProRes.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

But, John, if I set my Sequence Setting to ProRes I have to endure the rendering time of ProRes - right?

The reason I work a lot in HDV is that I transcode to it and then use it for cutting copies of all my work - simply because HDV renders faster ... 5 times faster than ProRes on my setup. Faster than ProRes Lite. Then I match it back to a more respectable format for the final output.

It's weird, but it works for me.

Two friends on this board have recommended that I submit to enduring a trial of the new shiny improved Premiere. Apparently rendering time is minimal and you can map your keyboard to make it behave like FCP. I love that. They say it's come a long way. I'm going to give it a shot.

Best wishes,

Harry.

HDV should take longer than ProRes to render because it is not an I-frame codec and when you export your timeline it will need to conform the GOP boundaries. The only reason ProRes would be slower on your system that I can think of would be because you have slow disks.

Premiere is great. It's not quite FCP 8 but it's close. I'm finding myself naturally gravitating towards it because it gives me full control over the organization of my media, unlike Avid and FCPX. Also, the interactions I've had with Adobe employees have indicated that they really are listening.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

Good to hear this information about Premiere.

However, your comment about HDV rendering mystifies me. I did some tests a
while ago and found that, on my system, HDV renders about 5 times faster than
Standard ProRes. Same file. Same plugin.

I timed it very carefully.

My disks are 7200rpm and bought about a year ago.

Best

Harry.

Do you mean transcoding HDV to ProRes? That will take longer. But rendering a ProRes sequence containing ProRes media should be faster, and you shouldn't need to do it as often with ProRes as with HDV because it's less processor intensive.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

Jon, you are just the chap to ask this question about my crashing in HDV situation:

I am running FCP 7.0.3 and OS 10.6.8. on a Mac 8 Core.

Quicktime 7.6.6.

I have been using your Crash Analyser which tells me:

Incompatible Codec

This crash appears to have been caused by a third-party codec.
Suggested Actions

Update all codecs.
Use System Toolkit to disable or remove unnecessary third-party codecs.
Relevant Line

9 com.apple.AppleHDVCodec 0x200ebdfe MPEG2CompressorComponentDispatch + 343102
Report generated by Crash Analyzer in Pro Maintenance Tools

I have gone into your System Toolkit and turned various Codecs on and off in a scattershot attempt to find which Codec is causing the problem.

At the moment, the Codecs which seem relevant in name and which are installed (amongst others) are:

Apple HDV Codec 2.0.1
Apple MPEG2 Codec. 1.0.2
Quicktime components 7.6.6
except for Quicktime MPEG2.Component which is 7.6.

I am concerned about the line generated by your software whichr reads (as above):

Relevant Line

9 com.apple.AppleHDVCodec 0x200ebdfe MPEG2CompressorComponentDispatch + 343102
Report generated by Crash Analyzer in Pro Maintenance Tools.

I don't understand what this means or what it is telling me to do.

I remember you helping many people out when Apple sent out an update which broke HDV in November 2011 and I have kept your posts and emails. The answer that time was to replace whatever was in the ProKit folder with 5.1., so I did that this time, however, it made no difference at all.

(By the way, in response to the question in your previous post about HVD vs ProRes ... no I don't mean transcoding HDV to ProRes. It seems counter intuitive that HDV should render faster than ProRes, but that is the case on my machine. But perhaps all this troubkle I am dexperiencing - above - is related to that?)

Many thanks for your help and for your software which is invaluable.

I hope you can help me with this wretched problems.

Harry.

Strange... it should have flagged it up as being HDV. I'll look into that.

But the advice it would have given is the same as I gave earlier.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

I Imagine you are referring to the advice never to edit in HDV? That's advice I would happily take were it not for the fact that I have been using HDV to edit for ages and, aside from last November's widespread drama which you most generously helped to solve for me and a lot of others, I have had flawless performance from HDV.

So it can be done.

In any event perhaps, when you have a moment, you could suggest a course of action to medn this wretched HDV situation I am in.

Many thanks for ther response,

Harry.

It can be done but it shouldn't. You will experience better stability by transcoding to ProRes, but if that is not an option you should set your sequence codec to ProRes and edit the HDV in that sequence.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

OK.John. I will do that. ProRes 422 Sequence it will be - and ProRes rendering in the Sequence settings I imagine.

Many thanks for your time and expertise.

Any further thoughts welcome, but I will follow your advice. I've had enough of this nonsense.

Harry

>It seems counter intuitive that HDV should render faster than ProRes

Like Jon said, we suspect the problem lies in the drives being slow. HDV is 25Mb/s, ProRes 1080p30 is about 5-6 times that at about 145Mb/s. But HDV like XDCAM EX, which are mpeg2 based, is more processor intensive and problematic in FCP7.

>My disks are 7200rpm and bought about a year ago.

You're probably editing off a single drive, maybe USB or FW400, or plugged in straight to your Mac Pro? That doesn't give you great drive speed, I'm guessing the throughput to be about 50MB/s when directly inserted into your Mac, and probably about 30MB/s when working off USB2. The latter means your rendering speed can never be faster than 2X, as the drive throughput is your bottleneck.

You can try Jon's workaround of editing in a ProRes timeline. It seemed to help for some. However, I came across a project last year, where everything was edited in XDCAM EX. It was very very crashy, and we tried different machines, all Mac Pros, some from different batches/eras. And they all had the same problem. In the end, it turned out that the i7 MBPs were a lot less crashy with XDCAM Ex. I mean, this project was seriously crashy. We could probably only get 20 mins of decent editing at most before it crashed. And yea, we tried everything including setting the timeline to ProRes, and it was still a massive crash fest.

So I was discussing this problem with Andy Mees, and we suspected this could be chip related as most of the folks who are ranting about XDCAM EX native editing are all on MacPros.



www.strypesinpost.com

>Two friends on this board have recommended that I submit to enduring a trial
>of the new shiny improved Premiere. Apparently rendering time is minimal and
>you can map your keyboard to make it behave like FCP.

Yes. If you are not working on multicam and it's a cuts and dissolve sequence with no text, just download the trial and export an XML to PPro and give it a shot.

I won't compare Premiere Pro to FCP, because they are different softwares. In some areas, many areas, better than FCP7, some areas different, some areas worse. But overall, most former FCP7 users who are now on PPro CS6 seem to like it.



www.strypesinpost.com

Thank so much for the advice, Strypes.

Your comment about possible slow drives is strange to me in that my drives are all 7200rpm and bought about a year ago.

Anyway, I am still struggling here but plodding on.

Best

Harry.

It's 7200 RPM, but that's not drive speed. Drive speed basically means how fast the data can be written or read from the drive. 7200RPM is the speed of which the drive is able to spin, eg. 7200 revolutions a minute. This data is next to useless for determining whether the drive is fast enough for video purposes.

But anyway, here are 2 points to note. 1) RAID arrays are generally faster than single drives. 2) There could be a bottleneck in the connection, especially if you are using USB or Firewire.

You can test the data transfer rate of your drive with the free AJA System test. In graphical view, it also shows dips in the drive performance.

[www.aja.com]



www.strypesinpost.com

Hail John and Strypes + any others who have followed this ghastly thread.

Here is report from the battlefront:

By some quirk of circumstance - and certainly not because of any deep technical knowledge on my part - FCP 7.0.3 and HDV are now behaving perfectly. I am even getting RT Extreme playback from Lock&Load X.

Of course I have made copious notes and saved my Prefs - and saved anything else that is lying around.

Now I'm going to do a Time Machine backup of this System Drive in the hope that the Evil-FCP-Witch does not come in the night and destroy these settings.

I cannot pretend to understand how this was achieved. I was intent on changing over to ProRes but, half way through the process, I mistakenly fired up my HDV settings. And - voila. My life was made whole.

Perhaps I should make a sacrifice to the FCP Gods. It's a mystery.

But, for now, I am back on track.

I think maybe my computer heard that you guys were involved and that gave it a scare.

Best wishes,

and totally mystified,

Harry.

I used to get a lot of FCP crashes until I realized that FCP is very stable as long as it can keep up with what you're doing. This is why high-complexity codecs are not recommended. But if it's working now that's great to hear.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

It's a minor miracle. I am still holding my breath.

Many thanks for your advice and help,

Harry.

Usually it works. I've used HDV and XDCam EX mainly for the not so long form stuff and didnt have that much issues, except for that 1 bad case. But yea, FCP is pretty alright, except that it breaks down and cry when you give it too much to do. Treat it like a pampered child and you'll be fine.

Glad it worked out on your end.



www.strypesinpost.com

Yup. Thanks very much for your help and advice.

Keep fingers crossed. It seems ok today.

Best

Harry.

i am working on my second HDV feature documentary.
the first one, i was brought into quite late, and they were working in HDV timelines, rendering as HDV.
guess what? no problems at all.

no "conforming" on output either.

so i decided to work that way again.

the one i am working on right now is not quite so trouble free,
but i know it is because it is much more of a mess than the previous one,
with MUCH more media. (way to much to transcode.)

i think if i had started this one, and kept things in order it would behave a lot better.

i have 5 main edit projects (my initiative, it used to be a horrible gargantuan single project, that just got worse and worse to deal with)
and i mainly have problems when i have three or more or them open.

still, rendering is fast, and exports ok if i don't tax the system with too many open projects or open timelines.

i DID get the "Conforming" warning once, when i tried a "Render All" command,
but i just ticked ALL types of render in "Render Selected", and now use that.


nick

When you're exporting a QT, it'll do the conforming thing, because it has to make sure all the GOPs are in order. When you render selected, it doesn't care about GOP order. Overall, I find long GOP to be a bit of a pain in the butt. The speed of renders have improved over the years, but exporting a QT for offline still takes longer. Much longer than exporting a ref QT from a rendered sequence.



www.strypesinpost.com

I saw a horribly crashy project on XDCAM EX once. That made me swear off long GOP formats for good especially for long form. I may do it in PPro, as that's 64 bit and less crashy with proc intensive formats, but not FCP7.



www.strypesinpost.com

i'm not getting a Conform process on export, either, unless it is going on in the background.

i suspect it may be happening in the background, as i had a fail during a recent export, with a "Codec Error" warning.

after i closed projects and sequences it exported ok, so i suspect something was chewing up the RAM during the export.

still, it is not the experience i read about way back, where conforming would take hours.
these exports are always less than real time.


nick

The machines today are faster. But exporting a QT movie I still much slower than exporting a ref QT from a rendered ProRes sequence for encoding to mp4. It takes me usually less than 10 minutes to get my h.264 offlines out for a half hour show.



www.strypesinpost.com

Harry, you have a knack for starting great thread "accidentally." I still remember your "." thread from a few years ago.

HDV editing gets worse if you pile up tracks, which become multistreams. That can be pretty horrendous, and rather than temp the fates I transcode upon ingest, something Mac Pro's can do realtime. I calculate 5X more storage required-- and you know what? I like giving it 5X more to avoid 5X the headaches.

And I store on a simple 2-bay RAID 0 in the MacPro to carry 1080i.

Single-- maybe double stream, shortform, or pieces? Probably safe. Anything else, I'd want every frame to be real.

- Loren

Today's FCP 7 keytip:
Advance to next/previous keyframes in a clip with Shift/Option-K !

Your Final Cut Studio KeyGuide™ Power Pack
with FCP7 KeyGuide --
now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com