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Your basic troubleshooting forum for all things FCP Legacy (FCP 7 and below.) And general discussion on topics that do not fit in the other forums.
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Re: OT: DVFilm Releases DVFilm EPIC I For Mac - 14 years ago
What Derek said. Breaking the system to the point that existing codecs no longer function as designed is my working definition of hackery. Transcoding H.264 media to ProRes has two undeniable benefits: It always works, and it works everywhere. Once the media's been converted, it's rock-solid, because it's ProRes through-and-through. And I know the job can be moved to any Final Cut system in thby Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: OT: DVFilm Releases DVFilm EPIC I For Mac - 14 years ago
QuoteFor 7 minutes of footage it can take about 30 minutes to transcode DSLR to Pro Res. I think that's way out of line with reality. A couple weeks ago I L&T'd some 7D shots from CF card through the EOS L&T plugin, and the process was roughly realtime. And that was on an iMac, not even a "real" edit system. Taking the time up front to do things right is not bad. It's farby Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: Multi Camera Shoot - 14 years ago
Don't let this freak you out or anything, Barry, but ? all of that sounds pretty close to right to me. ProRes LT is a good choice for this material. I've used it many times with stuff that originated in a highly compressed format, and it does the job admirably. I would be uncomfortable using LT in a workflow that required a great many passes of re-encoding, but I wouldn't have any hesitationby Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: OT: DVFilm Releases DVFilm EPIC I For Mac - 14 years ago
QuoteImportant Note: Epic "overrides" the ProRes 422 decoder, so Quicktimes encoded with ProRes 422 cannot be played back with Epic installed. However ProRes 422 (HQ), ProRes 422 (LT), or ProRes 422 (Proxy) are OK. If you should happen to have a vanilla ProRes 422 Quicktime, remove Epic to play it back or transcode it to ProRes 422 (HQ), then re-install Epic. Pardon my French, but thaby Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: New camera - 14 years ago
With due respect to the others, Clay's answer is the one you should pay the most attention to. Now is a terrible time to purchase a camera. The technology is in flux, even more so than it usually is. Between the DSLRs with their incumbent ecstasies and nightmares, the last generation of HDV and XDCAM cameras, and the current-but-already-unsatisfying generation of AVCHD cameras, right now is the wby Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: Progressive or Interlaced? - 14 years ago
Since you guys are being all rational and sensible and crap, I'll be the one to jump in with a purely emotional response. Shoot 24p or 25p (depending on where you live) always, no exceptions. Okay, it's not purely emotional. There's a grain of pragmatism in it. Let's say you live in North America, and thus are a citizen of NTSCdonia. Your choices are 60i and 24p. (Please don't be fooled intby Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: XDCAM causing FCP to crash? - 14 years ago
QuoteXDCAM HD 422 being MPEG-2 compressed and yet a hefty 50 Mb/s calls for ProRes 422HQ transcode. Nah. ProRes 422 (LT) would probably be sufficient. All the varieties of ProRes 422 north of the Proxy flavor are perceptually lossless. So the virtue of the higher data rates is to preserve latitude for color correction, visual effects or other post operations. But XDCAM is crap (technically sby Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: Apple Mighty Mouse vs Magic Mouse - 14 years ago
QuoteSo I've blown through my third Mighty Mouse in three years, and of course all Apple offers is the new Magic Mouse. What? The old Mighty Mouse (renamed the Apple Mouse after what I can only assume is a trademark license expiration) is still on sale, for US$49 a pop. It's the best mouselike computer input device ever made.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: it's time for 1080p50 and 1080p60 - 14 years ago
What Shane said. And don't load the questions. Don't ask which was more "realistic," or whatever. Just ask them which they prefer. Which they like better. Because that's what matters. It's perfectly reasonable for an artist to bemoan the philistines who don't get his vision. We all do that. But sooner or later, you've gotta take the audience's desires into account. Assuming we want tby Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: it's time for 1080p50 and 1080p60 - 14 years ago
Oh, and thanks for the clarification, Vance. They do of course shoot at high frame rates, but as you said, that's just shooting off-speed for slow motion, same as always. It plays back at 24.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: it's time for 1080p50 and 1080p60 - 14 years ago
Not all that sure there are that many computers that can play 1080p60 either.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: it's time for 1080p50 and 1080p60 - 14 years ago
That's all well and good, and reasonable people can disagree. But it doesn't change the fact that no cinema can show 60 fps, and no television can play 1080p60.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: Display card replacement advice - 14 years ago
Quotedon't the MBPs run on two graphics cards? Not at the same time. When one's powered up, the other's powered down.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: it's time for 1080p50 and 1080p60 - 14 years ago
QuoteI with many film students (with very good eyes) were amazed by the sheer realism of the moving image. And if you're making a ride film, realism is exactly what you want. In all other cases, though, it detracts from the storytelling. And storytelling is what we're all doing here.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: File-Based Workflows and Clip/Bin Management - need some tips - 14 years ago
I need to practice more with subclip workflows. I recently onlined a documentary-style industrial that was as you describe: shot tapeless, with long interview takes. Before I got there, the media had all been logged and sync'd, but in several different ways. Some of the two-camera stuff was arranged as multiclips with location sound on A2 and guide track on A1. (Except for the takes that had guidby Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: What is best method to preserve 16:9 aspect ratio on 4:3 Broadcast - 14 years ago
I hesitate to suggest this, 'cause it'll just complicate things. But where I'm from, the trendy solution to this problem for a few years back in the 90s was referred to by the shorthand name "14:9." You take HD content and scale it down until it does not quite fit inside the NTSC raster. You get small mattes on the top and bottom of frame, but you also crop off some of the sides. The fiby Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: Shutter speed advice needed. - 14 years ago
Yeah, I see what you mean, and I apologize for the bluntness. I also apologize in advance for what's going to sound like pedantry, but this is a public forum, so I feel obliged to go into a little background. What you're talking about is shooting off-speed. You run the camera at a higher frame rate, then play the footage back at 24 as normal, and the result is slow motion. When you shoot ofby Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: export to Flash Drive - 14 years ago
Something to bear in mind is that the speed at which you can read from a flash drive is a function of the bus the drive's plugged into, as well as the drive itself. I learned that obvious fact by making a stupid mistake; I needed to copy a couple gigs to a flash drive, so I just plugged it into the keyboard. The copy operation took nearly an hour. Because the keyboard in question was a lower-speeby Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: Display card replacement advice - 14 years ago
I feel like an idiot for having to ask this, but I've managed to make myself profoundly stupid about modern graphics cards. Is there an idiot's guide to every major product currently on the market? Reason I'm asking is 'cause last night a good friend emailed me and said, in essence, "I'm deciding between two refurbished Mac Pros, one with an Nvidia GT 120 and one with an ATI Radeon 5770.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: audio fix - 14 years ago
What he said. In less technical terms, when audio clips, information is permanently and irrevocably lost. You can pull the levels down, but you'd just end up with a white-hot mass of distortion at slightly reduced volume. There's no way to reconstruct whatever sound information was slamming into the microphone at the time that that recording was made. It's always humiliating to go back to someby Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: it's time for 1080p50 and 1080p60 - 14 years ago
Quote24p, 25p, 30p frame rates are insufficient for good motion perception. Well, this is a matter of opinion, and it's not worth arguing about over the Internet, but bear in mind that the (from where I sit) overwhelming consensus of opinion runs contrary to this. We use 24p and 25p specifically because the motion quality is unrealistic. Higher frame rates are used most notably for things likeby Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: Shutter speed advice needed. - 14 years ago
Rent a proper camera for the day? I don't mean to be rude, but if you can't shoot off-speed, then you cannot shoot off-speed. It's really as simple as that.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: XDCAM EX Workflow Part 2 - 14 years ago
They sell bigass broadcast-oriented systems that I've never seen in person, but that make me nervous on general principle. I don't know much about them, and should probably read up on them to see what they're all about.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: XDCAM EX Workflow? - 14 years ago
1. Install the SxS driver on your laptop. 2. Use the Log and Transfer plugin. 3. Transcode to the ProRes flavor of your choice. ProRes 422 (LT) is a good choice.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: How to determine if a new Mac Pro defaults to 64 bit OS? - 14 years ago
Nope. Final Cut Server includes no kernel pieces at all; it doesn't know or care what ABI the kernel uses. What kinds of trauma did you have?by Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: How to determine if a new Mac Pro defaults to 64 bit OS? - 14 years ago
Sigh. Hardly a week goes by that I don't run into somebody who's deeply confused about this one. Four points: 1. The 2010 Mac Pros boot a 64-bit kernel by default. 2. All currently shipping Macs are 64-bit systems, and have been for some years. 3. All currently shipping Macs run Snow Leopard, which is a "64-bit environment," to the extent that that phrase even means anythingby Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: Monitor Calibration, ProRes, and QT prefs - 14 years ago
Why are you judging color on a computer monitor? Computer monitors might as well be black-and-white, for all the good they do displaying broadcast color.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: re: ProRes 422, 422 HQ and 4444 vs. Uncompressed HD - 14 years ago
"3:1:1" is shorthand for 4:2:2 at 1440 samples per scan line. It's equally correct to say that HDCAM (not SR) is 1440x1080 4:2:2.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: RED and external audio - 14 years ago
Just the other way around. The timecode tracks and a guide track (if present) are backups for the clapper slate.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA
Re: RED and external audio - 14 years ago
I imagine it probably does, but I'm not positive. The bottom line is that Red cameras are usually dropped into existing film production infrastructures, and obviously you shoot dual-system sound when you're shooting film.by Jeff Harrell - Café LA
