Print to tape

Hi ,

I have a question/ rant.

In the yrs i have been editing I have always found getting the project to a tape master to be the biggest pain in the butt. So I am hoping that either there is some fix or that maybe we all can get apple to fix this lame issue.

Why is it that when you print to tape that the black screen comes up with your movie in the middle and it locks you out of every other program on your system. Or if you do it the other way via playing your timeline with your deck recording your still held up and cant touch anything.

What I am hoping is that for yrs I have missed some setting that will alow me to continue my work flow. I don't know about the rest of you but those 90-120 plus minutes are times that i could be doing alot of other work and instead I get to look at a screen of crap I have already looked at for months and am very sick of.

It seems to me apple could easly fix this issue so that when you are printing to tape you can use other apps and do other work. Am i so off?

Thanks for your time

John



Cheers,

John

I can only guess that Apple thinks you might want to watch the print/edit to tape as it runs in real time anyway. Since there is really no guarantee it will all work as planned, maybe a safety check???

If it bothers you so much. why not do it at the end of the day and go watch TV?

Hi.
Printing to Tape is one of the most important things in the art of editing.
It's your WORK,where you have spend hours and hours.
A tape is subject to a lot of stress in the machine and drop-outs or drop frames may happen.
A professional editor always watch the Final Cut beeing printed on the Tape.


Rui Barros

I would but its such a bad system seems you have to watch it like a hawk. But the only thing is the only way to tell usually is to look at the tape with log and capture to see if the audio is there, or if its out of sync. Plus every time I do it and leave at the end of the day to let it run it never finishes it always cuts off.

Plus I dont work at home. We are a super busy company and its just lost time which is lost money.

John



Cheers,

John

Playback and Record (Capture) are the two times that the system has to run at full speed, in real time, with 0.00 errors.

All the rest of the time, the system can show you low rez, compressed, sampled versions of the show and nobody will care. So what if the timeline jiggles a little during cutting. You're only manipulating pointers to clips and instruction lists, not The Real Thing.

During Capture and Playback, it's The Real Thing.

This is a problem for all machines that run a verion on UNIX. You can't lock out other processes, you can ony give your process a high priority. That means if you decide to play On Line War Games at the same time the system is trying to play Martha Stewart out to a tape machine, you lose on Sports Call.

The only way to increase success is to lock out *control* to the other processes during capture and play.

Even better is for the operator to close everything before trying either of those processes.

Do a forum search for "stuttering frames on playback" and "dropped frames during capture." Then stand back. You will get thousands of hits. It's a major problem *even when you're doing everything right.*

There was one guy about two years ago that claimed he could do multiple jobs on his machine at all times, but there was only one and I don't know anyone that necessarily believed him.

Koz

On a whim, I asked the Infero/Flame Systems Operator about that and he gave me a list of processes that you couldn't share with checking email. And these are the refrigerator-size, SGI HiDef Realtime Machines.

That's why you have that iBook by your elbow while you're rendering. All the operators have at least one iBook on VPN during an edit session.

One oddball has a Dell, but we make allowances. This is California.

Koz

I see the point that it is the final process and that apps need full capacity of the system. I think for alot of us that work in the dvd world only thing that a tape is for is to have a backup master to the DVD that is what your really worried about.

We sent them out for foreign deals also so that they can do there thing its simpler then a DVD for them. But even so its still a killer of over 3 hours probably of my time.

Once the tape is done I check it for audio problems using log and capture but thats about it.

I work in adult so I'm not nearly as concerned about it as most of you are. To me its time its not uncommon for me to be working on 4-8 projects at a time. So 2-3 hours is alot of time for me. Especially when I'm probably printing to tape 2-3 times a week.

What is a concern to me is the DVD quality and the VTS folder. Reality for us is most of the tapes we send out are recut anyways for there market place.

I just dont see why apple cant make it a preset so that you can choose to have it lock you out of work on other apps. My ultimate goal and love would be to be able to work on other FCP projects while it printed to tape and while it logged and captured.

I do understand what your saying about the underlying unix systems though.

Thanks John



Cheers,

John

> There was one guy about two years ago that claimed he could do multiple jobs
> on his machine at all times, but there was only one and I don't know anyone
> that necessarily believed him.

There's always one black sheep...kind of like the "do we daisy-chain decks with drives" debate. I think my conclusion is that if a method doesn't work at least 90 per cent of the time, it's not a good method. As a rule, "no internet and no other applications while capturing/outputting" is desireable. I don't think anybody will say "do it and die", but I'd probably say "it's your funeral". That's why I have a guitar next to my station. Most editors and sound guys have some kind of entertainment in the suite for renders, captures, outputs, DVD burns etc.

I see what your all saying I just dont get it. Maybe its that as much as I learned at film school and with in working in the profession for many yrs. I just dont get the madness. I cant seem to understand why a great program like FCP cant seem to upgrade and fix the two area that waste the most time and are the most critical in logging and capturing and print to tape. It seems to me that we as a group could get so much more done.

It kills my boss to see myself and the other editor sitting doing nothing while printing to tape or logging and capturing. Plus as I move to owning my own company I see all the areas where i could save money or utilize that time. each week we probably spend 4-8 hours just printing to tape and probably 10-20 logging and capturing tape . That is alot of time really wasted in a sense where some one could be doing alot of work.

I understand that there are times when you need to watch everyframe of a movie print to tape. Plus then go and check that tape again so that its not messed up. I have to do this with probably 20% of the movies we put out.



Cheers,

John

Until videography goes to hard disk recording, there will be interminal waits for a tape to rewind and play at 1x during capture.

Why do you have to print the final project back to tape, anyhow?
Archival? Write it to a removable hard drive and it will happen much quicker and keeping the project and render files along with the trimmed media (as with the Media Manager). You then have almost instant access to a project if it needs to be re-edited.

John, now you see why many places hire ASSISTANT editors for less money than Editors. The assistants do all the logging and capturing and sometimes monitor the outputs. But really, the editor should monitor the final output and this should in NOW WAY be considered a waste of time. What if you were able to check e-mail or work in After Effects while the output was happening, and a title didn't look right, or something was offline or not rendered properly? Then the client gets the tape, sees this, and kicks it back. Then you have to do it all over again, and now you have mud on your face for delivering a tape with a mistake on it. Your reputation takes a hit...and reputation is everything in business.

And logging and capturing and organizing your media is also not a waste of time. A properly organized show saves the editor tons of time when looking for footage. I have worked on a highly organized show and a poorly organized show and let me tell you, the work goes much quicker and easier when things are laid out right.

I served as an assistant editor for 3 years, so I might be a little biased. Logging and capturing and monitoring your output are a VITAL part of the editing process, and in NO WAY are considered a waste of time. As someone suggested, that is why it is advisable to have another computer system in the bay for all the other stuff you need to get done...

John,

The reason we dont archive on hardrive is we have 100 plus titles currently in the library and another probably 30-50 either in editing or authoring or at a replicators for a sept to basically june release any given week we might release 3-6 titles. I just cleaned one project off a drive and it was close to 400 gigs alone. typically I dont work on any project with less then probably 100-200 gigs of logged and captured media. If you include all the after effects files , moion, and shake as I learn more about it that is another probably 30 gigs. Then there is the dvd project side also that tends to be close to 8 gigs if its just the assets but if i have other media that can spur up to. So for us to keep its all digitally archived is really impossible on cost issues alone.

John



Cheers,

John

If Shane has a bias, it's a good one to have. I always advocate: Spend lots of time and effort in the beginning stages to set up the project right. It saves you hours, sometimes days, of troubleshooting down the road. Things tend to go wrong when you're in a crunch, so when you're not in a crunch, do things thoroughly.

> It kills my boss to see myself and the other editor sitting doing nothing while
> printing to tape or logging and capturing.

Your boss needs to grow up. There is not a single editor who can make output and capture go faster than they already do. If your boss has a problem with it, just tell him to get someone who *can* output to tape faster than real time. He'll never find one.

> So for us to keep its all digitally archived is really impossible on cost issues
> alone.

I also disagree with John there -- I also keep tape copies of everything I do. Can't tell you how many times I've been able to 'wow' a producer by telling him/her I actually have a copy of the show I did for them. Files are more unstable and easier to lose. I still believe in tape copies.

<<<I just dont get it.>>>

Actually, they did. That's the black screen you get when you play to tape.

A little UNIX here is valuable.

There is no such thing as a valueless process. All processes running have value and it is necessary to service each processes at least once in a while. There is an enormous pile of processes running you don't even know about.

Open a terminal window and type:

top

...and press enter. That's an abbreviated list of the things running on your machine. Screen handlers, keyboard managers, mouse interpreters etc. etc. etc. And that's the short list.


There is no such thing as a hard drive.

UNIX (OSX) has no idea what a hard drive is. That's why the real name of your system drive is /Volumes/Delores (for example) instead of c:\ like it is on PCs. Everything is a Mounted Filesystem (to quote UNIX-ese). This can lead to real damage if one of your drives goes south. Or worse yet, one of your FireWire drives skips a frame. This can lead to damaged preference files, and scrambled permissions and other instability.

This also is why a hard drive in trouble can give you the error "Out Of Memory." The system can't tell. It's all one big pile of storage.

Everybody thinks of these things as Personal Computers, but UNIX is much more powerful than that. On a fully network compliant UNIX/OSX machine, you can be logged into and using the FireWire drives two time zones away.

Two popular Terminal commands are "hostname" and "whoami". Who does the system think I am and where am I? It doesn't have to be you and it doesn't have to be the machine you're sitting in front of.

Go get an iBook like everybody else.

Koz

There are a number of people who have machines that do burning and tape operations and nothing else. The machines don't have to be particularly powerful, they just need the connections, the drive space, and the network to get the results to the machine where it's needed.

At least one operator burns on a PC while he's cutting the next show.

Koz

Just if those blasted Sony dvcam tapes wheren't so damm expensive. 28-38 dollars apeice is crazy, especially when your buying them 20 at a time. Plus stores really dont give a decent break on them in bulk either.

if i could I would store everything digitally and on a tape. I cant tell you how often we have to reload something to be cut a different way or make a softcore version, pull trailers for some weird project. or like last week just throw a PSD on this dvd so that it would have screener copy printed on it. If we did all the verations it would be insane all the tapes and drives it would take.

John



Cheers,

John

We used to have a G4 that was used for all the ggrunt work so to speak then we hired another editor and he uses that one now. So its back to everything being done on one machine.



Cheers,

John

Where do you buy tapes?

You can get tapes of various durations ranging from 12 min to 184 minutes. Edgewise Media in Hollywood on Highland (near Santa Monica) has great prices.

And the cost of the tape is nothing compared to having to recapture everything from source tapes or store it on hard drives.

I actually am not sure where we buy the tapes from. I think my boss looks online and finds the best price and goes with it.

Some projects we might over 2 yrs make 12-20 different versions per a clients request. Sadly there is no telling what that request will be. I export and make dvd's with like 6-12 different versions typically depending on what the movie is of. DVD's are much cheaper.



Cheers,

John

> My ultimate goal and love would be to be able to work on other FCP projects
>while it printed to tape and while it logged and captured.

I use other programs all the time when capturing. It might be stupid but it FCP doesn't stop you from doing it.


>And the cost of the tape is nothing compared to having to recapture >everything from source tapes or store it on hard drives.

Bare hard drives are almost as cheap as using tape now. maybe cheaper.