Has anyone heard about FCP 720P24 support?

[Scott Jaco]

Originally Posted by Cal Thorpe

When the Apple codec for JVC 24p support will be out.
Cal

Never! Apple won't release the 720/24p patch because market research has proven that it is more beneficial to wait until the next version of FCP.

We did this to ourselves. If everyone hadn’t been so vocal about 24p support, Apple would have simply given the upgrade to us for free as a routine software patch. They’ve had the ability to do this for quite some time. Now they know how hungry we are for 24p and they are using this to their advantage.

[Daniel Patton]

Originally Posted by Paolo Ciccone

In FCP I can have a sequence with HDV for input and then I can select whatever codec I want for the rendering. Each codec has pros/cons. AIC is what I use the most because is fast at rendering and preserves quality nicely. HDV, as we know, is not designed to be an editing codec. Apple and Adobe and others have worked around the GOP problem but it's still harder and more processor intensive than transcoding to something like AIC.

So in other words... what you would like to see is the AIC better supported within Premiere on a PC, that would make it a better overall editing solution. I'm not sure I see the point since the AIC should be faster and run better on a Mac, hence the name. But if that's the format of choice then that explains your solution. It's funny however that we use Aspect HD for the very same reason, "because it's fast at rendering and preserve quality nicely". By the way, I can also render out to a slew of other formats at render including MOV, AVI, FLV, WMV, so how exactly this is limited I'm unsure.

As for the additional cost of Aspect HD... I too wish it was included and that Adobe would get off their butts and license the technology so that new users can go straight to work without an additional expense. I could not agree more Paolo. Regardless it works and we use it for both edit and export.

I both like and respect you Paolo, So please don't take my questions and position to personal or close to the heart. You have taken the time to share the setup with your HD100, and that has contributed to our company shooting better video, so my hats off to you. However I can't help but feel that you might be more than just a little biased in your chosen workflow. When you know as well as I that no one system is supreme and without fault. Right down to the hardware it's run on. It's how you mold the clay in front of you. Tools come, go, break and change only the cycle never changes.

Peace, back on topic :)

[Paolo Ciccone]

Hey Daniel.
Be asured that I don't take criticism personally. I always assume that we are adults talking our heart here with max respect for everybody's opinions.
I worked both on Premiere and FCP and so I believe I gained enough knowledge, if no experience, to judge both systems impartially and I have to say that FCP comes out as the more professional tool. Not much as features but as overall design (UI) and robustness.
Regarding my bias toward Macs, I have to say that it doesn't exists. I started with the original IBM PC (4.77Mhx 8088), I tried every single OS for PCs, including OS/2 and Linux. I built my own PCs that still run today, after 9 years. The Mac is a different thing. You have to experience it to understand. Kinda like sex :)

Regarding the rendering in Premiere, no there is no option for internal rendering of effects like transitions, plugins etc with a codec different than the input one. What you refer to is not rendering but exporting. That is another step that I find sorely lacking compared to the options provided by Apple Compressor. Both as fine tuning of the codecs available and the number of codecs provided. Not to mention the fact that Compressor frees FCP from that task and that I can use dstributed processing to work on a *batch* (as opposed to a single task) of compressions. For example, I can send a single job that takes care of compressing my footage into wmv, H.264 1/2 res and MPG4 for the iPod. All this in the background while I keep editing. On a laptop.
:)

I don't mean to be disparaging of Premiere. It's a fine product for short videos and SD work. In my experience it's just not as advanced as FCP. That's all.

And yes, let's keep the peace :)

[Antony Michael Wilson]

Originally Posted by Stephen L. Noe

Have you tried to use Liquid in long form? I, like Chris with Edius, have many years experience with Liquid and long form projects and very complex timelines. Please tell about your hands on experience with these products. Where were these products lacking? We cut on Media Composer Adrenalin, FCP and Liquid. Liquid and MCA get used most. Liquid gets HD duty and MCG gets SD duty.

No, we haven't tested Liquid thoroughly - just Edius. Years ago, we were impressed by Fast products but dropped the idea of moving over the instant Pinnacle bought them. Now that Avid have them, my guess is they'll either disappear or be lodged firmly at the pro-sumer level, which is a terrible shame. Of course, I could be wrong about that but my misgivings are considerable enough not to bother with it for now. As to Edius, I'd like to make it clear that I have always been a big fan of Canopus products and I am delighted that Edius is on the up and up. That is precisely why I volunteered to help develop Edius with beta testing. IMHO, it's good and it is useable but I wouldn't swap it for MC - yet... FOR OUR PURPOSES, the Avid interface offers us the best solution for long-form broadcast offline, with regard to media management, flexibility and depth of the UI, system stability, upgrade options, codecs (particularly DNx) and interface with facility houses for online work at any level. If we were cutting pieces for output straight to DVD, or doing anything approaching challenging effects I'm sure I'd feel very differently.

Anyway, I certainly did not mean to offend any committed users of Liquid or Edius. I'm glad they work for you guys - and I'm extremely glad they support HDV1 properly!

[Steven D. Martin]

This discussion has been extremely helpful. Here's my capturing/editing workflow-

-shoot with HD100A at 24fps
-capture to my Firestore FS4 and to tape
-copy transport streams from FS4 to my Apple G5
-use MPEGStreamclip to convert the transport streams to my editing codec

which up until lately has been AIC. I'm now considering using the method on this thread to create HDV 24p *.MOV files. Why? to conserve hard drive space. Right now for each piece of video I'm placing a 19mbps(?) transport stream and a 100mbps AIC file on my machine; it would be great to bump it down to 19mbps for the MOV files too. Any thoughts? Suggestions?

[Chris Hurd]

No offense taken at all, Antony; just very interested in your feedback. Many thanks!

[Steve Benner]

Originally Posted by Chad Terpstra

Just to clarify, they're going to make it so that it skips the repeated frames, right? Just making sure. There's no reason to import 60 frames/sec when you only want 24.

Yes, it will work like 30P (Which creates a 29.97 files), the 24P will create a 23.98 file. The 60 Frames though are different than on DV. They are only Repeat flags not extra frames.

[Drew Curran]

Originally Posted by Keith Ward

That's a scary thought, Steve. But you may be right. The workflow with PP 2.0 and Cineform (or not; I hear you don't even need to have Cineform these days, although I haven't checked it out) is so much easier than FCP. A couple of weeks ago, I was seriously considering getting a core duo MacBook Pro; now I'm starting to check out PCs instead...

Keith

You're forgetting that PPRO 2 has just caught up with FCP 5.

I know. I use both daily. FCP is always my preference. And I'm not an Apple freak. I have a selection of mac's and PC's. FCP just seems more... its hard to describe... powerful or complete when I'm using it. Premiere frustrates me a little. IMHO

Andrew

[Steve Mullen]

Originally Posted by Stephen L. Noe

Have you tried to use Liquid in long form? I, like Chris with Edius, have many years experience with Liquid and long form projects and very complex timelines. Please tell about your hands on experience with these products. Where were these products lacking? We cut on Media Composer Adrenalin, FCP and Liquid. Liquid and MCA get used most. Liquid gets HD duty and MCG gets SD duty.

Chris and I have been Canopus NLE fans from the days of StormDV. EDIUS 4 certainly seems to have almost everything -- although I expect like most editors I would also use Photoshop and AE. Nothing new here as I think most folks use these Adobe products.

Liquid has everything. I finished a project and in an hour I coverted it to Dolby 5.1. This week I'll try going from 720p30 HDV to a letterboxed PAL DVD "automatically."

Bottom-line -- for the next decade we'll be inter-mixing SD and HD, 4:3 and 16:9. That need is why I think Apple is re-engineering FCP internally.

[Steve Mullen]

[QUOTE=Antony Michael WilsonAnyway, I certainly did not mean to offend any committed users of Liquid or Edius. I'm glad they work for you guys - and I'm extremely glad they support HDV1 properly![/QUOTE]

Note that I qualified my comments about Liquid to Avid's NOT consumer market. It is focused on the fully independent guy/gal who shoots DV and HDV and releases on DVD -- and will release on Bluray. Plus a range of SD and HD tapes. Folks who want to learn ONE application that does everything.

EDIUS is clearly aimed at those who work in Broadcast as well as the independent. Therefore it supports all the SD and HD news and doc. formats. Very clean interface. Only wish it DD 5.1 built-in plus at least an iDVD level DVD creation capability. Again, for folks who want to learn ONE application that does most everything.

I'm not sure either replaces a Composer or FCP with hardware. But, I think many of us are now only using laptops and IEEE 1394. We are obviously NOT interested in uncompressed HD!

I suspect this is the growth area for the next few years.

[Stephen L. Noe]

Originally Posted by Antony Michael Wilson

No, we haven't tested Liquid thoroughly - just Edius. Years ago, we were impressed by Fast products but dropped the idea of moving over the instant Pinnacle bought them. Now that Avid have them, my guess is they'll either disappear or be lodged firmly at the pro-sumer level, which is a terrible shame. Of course, I could be wrong about that but my misgivings are considerable enough not to bother with it for now. As to Edius, I'd like to make it clear that I have always been a big fan of Canopus products and I am delighted that Edius is on the up and up. That is precisely why I volunteered to help develop Edius with beta testing. IMHO, it's good and it is useable but I wouldn't swap it for MC - yet... FOR OUR PURPOSES, the Avid interface offers us the best solution for long-form broadcast offline, with regard to media management, flexibility and depth of the UI, system stability, upgrade options, codecs (particularly DNx) and interface with facility houses for online work at any level. If we were cutting pieces for output straight to DVD, or doing anything approaching challenging effects I'm sure I'd feel very differently.

Anyway, I certainly did not mean to offend any committed users of Liquid or Edius. I'm glad they work for you guys - and I'm extremely glad they support HDV1 properly!

AFA Liquid, there are more releases in the pipe. For the entry price, it's worth it just to cut ProHD.

Have fun and of course no offence taken. I like to hear people's experience.

[Stephen L. Noe]

Originally Posted by Steve Mullen

Note that I qualified my comments about Liquid to Avid's NOT consumer market. It is focused on the fully independent guy/gal who shoots DV and HDV and releases on DVD -- and will release on Bluray. Plus a range of SD and HD tapes. Folks who want to learn ONE application that does everything.

I hazard to say that you're just scratching the surface. Sharing projects over LAN is a snap and collaborative squence building is build right into Liquid. I realize they (Avid & Pinnacle) have marketed it as much less than it really is. Try that next Steve, if you have the time. Load Liquid on another workgroup computer and share it's media drive and project folder. Now suddenly you and your fellow editors can work on the same project, at the same time with the same media and use the intercom function (next to the eyeball in the taskbar) to chat with each other about the project. Usually a gigabit network is required. Fast ethernet (100BaseT) may be a little sluggish.

Now, plug in a firewire drive and select the "backup" function and back the entire project up to the firewire drive (including render files). Now the project in it's entirety is on the firewire drive for you to take with you. How about taking it on laptop to the client? or taking it to a friend across town? It happens all the time here and that's an incredible thing for a product that const $500. Not all that long ago a FAST Silver system cost $30,000. The only thing that has changed is that they don't offer the hardware mpeg encoder board with Liquid anymore.

It's funny that the Adrenalin machine is just about equal to what our old Silver machine was (and about the same price). Now Avid wants over $10,000 just for the HD board for our Adrenalin? No thanks, the Liquid system is clearly better.

[Tom Harbaugh]

Is it possible log and batch capture HD-100 720p30 footage using Liquid? I'm currently using Avid MC and can only capture on the fly via firewire.

[Stephen L. Noe]

Originally Posted by Tom Harbaugh

Is it possible log and batch capture HD-100 720p30 footage using Liquid? I'm currently using Avid MC and can only capture on the fly via firewire.

The short answer is yes. You can type in your EDL or you can import it and then batch capture. This works with 24p, 30p, 50p and 60p HD-100 ProHD source.

[Daniel Patton]

Paolo, now I understand, your talking about the encoder for the transitions in PPro. Understood, thanks. :)

Just doing my part to fragment a thread. j/k ;)