Difficulty with preferences/settings on our system. Using Firewire, but machine drops frames and seems to look for input from the Miro card we already had installed. We thought that when we specified Firewire as source during disk installation that this would be the default.
Any thoughts??
(primarily stills photographer, but our edit suite had to be replaced and we've gone digital - also got a learning curve with Nikon D1 - not quite so steep!!)
Brendan, FCP switches nicely between my Miro card & DV simply by switching the preferences.
For a DV project go edit > preferences. Click on the Device Control tab and ensure that enable device control is checked.
Then click on Capture tab and check that your video settings are DV-PAL with a frame size of 720x576 CCIR601/ DV PAL (5:4). Audio should be uncompressed 48khz. Click on abort on dropped frames.
Now CLick Sequence presets and select "DV-PAL 48khz" from the list.
Finally click the Scratch Disk tab and set the video & render check boxes next to your fastest hard drive. You may need to click the "set" button to choose a destination for captured & rendered files.
try this then post your findings so we can get to the bottom of this. What Mac are you using?
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regards
Steve
[ O U T L A W : S D G ]
Originally posted by s.hood:
[B]Brendan, FCP switches nicely between my Miro card & DV simply by switching the preferences. QUOTE]Thanks for the swift response.
We're utilising existing kit with FCpro. A G3 with a 9Gb Hard drive (ultra wide scsi)
When we fire up and go to Log and Capture, it seems to have held all previous settings but CONSTANTLY indicates that video input will be from the MIRO DC30. So FCpro seems to know that this card exists, but we thought that the package could work without reference to this card , that on board processing would be via Firewire within mac - this may reveal naivete and ignorance of some aspects of Non linear editing but that's just the way it is!!!
We bought the package from Apple dealer NOT a video specialist so we have to rely on advice from other more experienced users.
Before we go down dead ends, we would hope to shoot on DV, edit via Mac, dump to DV and use this 2nd DV as master for any distribution copies to be dumped onto VHS. Is this reasonable?
What compression ratios/quality settings would seem appropriate within FCpro.A basic problem is that the manual presupposes a basic knowledge of NLE editing parameters with which we are as yrt unfamiliar.
Any Dummy's guide s to NLE??!!
Brendan
Brendan - FCP works without reference to the DC30. The DC30 card is just another way that FCP can capture video ie from an anologue source. DV video is already compressed by the camera so no compression/decompression is required on the Mac.
Are you using the DC30 card at the moment with another video editing package on your mac?
What you plan to do is exactly what DV based NLE is all about. Shoot on DV, capture that footage to the Mac via FireWire using FCP with no loss in quality, edit the DV footage, and export it back to DV tape (providing that your deck or Cam has DV IN ability).
What G3 are you using exactly? Beige or Blue & White?
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regards
Steven Hood
[ O U T L A W : S D G ]
quote:Originally posted by s.hood:
Brendan - FCP works without reference to the DC30. The DC30 card is just another way that FCP can capture video ie from an anologue source. DV video is already compressed by the camera so no compression/decompression is required on the Mac.Are you using the DC30 card at the moment with another video editing package on your mac?
What you plan to do is exactly what DV based NLE is all about. Shoot on DV, capture that footage to the Mac via FireWire using FCP with no loss in quality, edit the DV footage, and export it back to DV tape (providing that your deck or Cam has DV IN ability).
What G3 are you using exactly? Beige or Blue & White?
DC30 was being used for SVHS editing prior to our DV camera arriving.
Switched the associated extensions off and FCpro no longer switches to Analog in!!!?
Cannot perceive any visual difference from digitising/compressing at High or Medium quality so we appear to be flexible there but we HAVE sussed that our external super wide scsi Hard drive is not up to the job - same digitised clip on internal drive plays all the way through, from external - every 5 secs we are advised of frames dropping and this interruption braks the playback of every clip. Have now reformatted this disk (now realise we should do this at every project start and this has helped).
Getting there!!
Thanks Brendan
Brendan, when you disable extensions with extensions manager you remove the ability of the Mac to communicate with the DC30 card. There is no need to disable the extenions, but it is preferable to run a "lean" system as fewer things can interfere with your task at hand. Create seperate extension sets to enable and disbable extensions required for the DC30.
DV video is a single quality (3.6MBytes a second) - so stick with online quality when working with DV footage captured via firewire. DV footage doesn't rely on the DC30 card at all for playback, which is handled by the G3 processor.
Analogue source footage captured via the DC30 card can be of varying quality depending on what datarate you set when capturing. The DC30 card is only capable of 3.5MBytes a second, more than enough for SVHS quality. The video captured by the DC30 card is stored in a Miro MJPEG format that is compressed and decompressed by the card and not the G3 processor. That is why broadcast video that is uncompressed needs a powerful computer but also a powerful video card like a TARGA.
Ultrawide drives are still the choice for top-end systems. If your disk performance is poor a reformat or a optimisation using Norton or DiskWarrior will help. If the performance is continually slow then the drive itself may be damaged.
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regards
Steven Hood
[ O U T L A W : S D G ]
Hi, new to this forum. I just discovered one thing, I am running FCP and installed my DC30+ card in my 533 G4, although I haven't actually used it for capture yet, just the inbuilt DV . The suggestion to create an extension set just for NLE is a good one. My new G4 is lovely, but after having moved several cards from my old UMAX into it, the spiffing Sleep function stopped working. Cure, remove the Miro extension. I've encountered a lot of people who have a similar problem with Sleep, it really does seem that OS9.1 has some issues with 3rd party extensions. Just thought this might be of interest.