NLE Mac / Final Cut questions from 2002

[Adrian Seah]

Your powerbook doesn't support USB 2.0. Get a firewire drive instead... it will connect fine but will only run at USB 1.0 speeds (12mbps)

cheers.

[Marc Betz]

This is a quote from apple's website. I don't know if it is still accurate.

FireWire drives

These drives are not currently recommended for video capture or playback with Final Cut Pro. We are in the process of testing various FireWire drives as they come out. These drives are suitable for the backup and transport of broadcast quality QuickTime clips from one editing suite to another, and due to their ability to be hot-swapped, are particularly valuable for this task.

Hope I'm not off base with this quote but it is from apples site

Good luck

[Jeff Donald]

Which G4 do you have? The newer ones have better FireWire ports, improved buss speed. I know many PowerBook users that use the internal drive for capture. A high speed internal drive is now available also (60GB,5400rpm). External FireWire drives do work and are much faster than USB 1 (400-Mbps vs 12 Mbps). When picking a FireWire drive for external use people are torn between speed and size.

Ken Tanaka really likes the new Wiebetech enclosures and drives http://www.wiebetech.com/ You may want to look here http://www.barefeats.com/ for reviews of various drives for your Mac.

Jeff

[Mac Daddy]

You are right-
an air conditioner is very "broad-band", and would be next to impossible to take out. I have managed to remove frequency-specific sounds, or sounds that are on a narrow bandwith by using inverse-phasing. This is where you put a microphone on the source you want to remove (hum from an electrical device- usually 60 / 120/180 hertz) and another mic on your talent etc. Flip its phase and add it back to the mix to remove that sound. Works so-so.

Again, having someone who is concentrating on your sound for you, that you trust, and knows their stuff really makes a world of difference when you are directing and have a ton of other issues to tackle. I usually travel with an audio tech, and I never think about audio. Then I can light, frame, and direct talent.

Jeff Patnaude

[John Locke]

If you drop a thin metal rod down one of the compressor vents, that'll usually put an air conditioner out of commission. Then you can shoot noise-free. (Morale: always carry thin metal rods...and tranquilizers for barking dogs) ;)

Just wanted to add my 2¢...probably doing a VO is best. Knock out the audio on the clip completely, go get some ambient noise that fits what you had in mind (you don't have to go back to the same place - you might get compressor noises again), and layer the dialogue over it.

[Ken Tanaka]

Indeed, I -do- like Wiebetech drives. I've had a few weeks using one of their new SuperGB drives (120Gb) which is 7200rpm -and- powered strictly by the 6-pin Firewire connector (no power brick!). Works great with both my TiBook G4 as well as my Quicksilver G4. I also have a Wiebetech 40Gb MicroGB drive which is 5400rpm and also bus-powered (much smaller enclosure).

In my experience with these drives, a well as a 5400rpm 80Gb Maxtor drive (yeah, I have a hard drive fixation but I'm working on it) I can say that 5400rpm will do fine for FCP capture and editing. But 7200rpm drives really do make a notable difference in editing performance.

There are so many brands of Firewire drive enclosures today (Weibetech, Granite, Firewire Direct, et.al.) that it's a great time to be shopping for high-capacity Firewire drives. The sizes of these drives boggle my mind. Weibetech just announced their 200Gb Super DesktopGB drives this week. Kowabunga!

[Vic Owen]

For the typical 2 to 2 1/2 hour community theater productions I do, I've been using full size DV tapes as a Master for later dubs to VHS. Those babies are expensive, and you can still get the occasional dropped frame during playback (a DV "feature").

Authoring via a Superdrive is not practical for the lengths that I need. Also, even making a 1-hour DVD takes way too much machine time for my purposes.

Has anyone had any experience with actual DVD recorders, such as the Panasonic or Toshiba? I'm not looking to author here, only to make an archive master. I saw a post somewhere that mentioned these, indicating they were selling for around $600 or so, but I can't locate it. Maybe I imagined it.

Gotta be a better way to make quality archive copies than using these $28 tapes.

[John Locke]

Has anyone on a Mac used Cleaner 5 to make Windows Media files? So far, I've only made QuickTime files and have tinkered with it enough to get a pretty fair ouptut.

I was reading the Cleaner 5 manual today about creating Windows Media files and it's a bit confusing. I'm wondering if I'm making this more difficult than it really is. Is it simply a matter of changing the settings appropriately and uploading the file to the server (like QuickTime)? Or is a "pointer" file necessary?

[Ken Tanaka]

Building the Windows Media file is really just a matter of telling Cleaner to build a wmf, which it can do in the same batch as your mov compression. (You may have to tweak the wmf settings a bit to get good results, though. WM seems to have a different perspective on imaging than Quicktime.) Getting your server to actually stream the file will require some server-side monkey business.

[John Locke]

Thanks, Ken.

I went ahead and clicked the "WMV Medium Download" preset and gave it a try. Ack! What a lemon compared to QuickTime! Lots of pixelation, and the sound isn't as good. And what the heck are those huge black strips on each side? I know QT has the black strips too...but not as wide as Rhode Island! And don't EVEN get me started about the clunky control bar.

I'm sticking with QuickTime.

[Ken Tanaka]

Yeah, that's the hitch. I've been away from that end of the business for a little while, so my knowledge may be dated. (Any absence longer than a month makes a person ancient.) But, if I recall correctly, a Windows 2000-based server does need to be configured to stream (with a facility called Windows Media Services, if I recall correctly). That is, a wmf file cannot stream without assistance.

Conversely, and wonderfully, Quicktime 5 introduced a self-contained streaming format whereby an mov file can be formatted to automatically stream to the viewer by itself with no server-side fiddling.

But the best way to check on the Windows front is to look through support.microsoft.com and look-up Windows Media in the knowledge base.

[Ken Tanaka]

While the taste of the experience still coats your tongue you might be interested in this little tidbit from the news wires today.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...osoft_video_dc

Not to disparage Microsoft (my "partner" for 20+ yrs) but, really, speaking as a shareholder maybe they should just concede this front to Apple and move on to other fronts. Well, a billion here, a billion there...

[Phil French]

Here's something you can try in FCP:

1) Open the captured audio in the viewer. Try to isolate a frame with only the air conditoiner noise.

2)Use the zoom tool to maximum zoom and count the number of cycles in one frame and multiply by thirty.

3)Apply hum remover filter to clip and enter number from 2) in the frequency slot.

4)Check off at least the first harmonic (experiment with harmonics and Q if it doesn't work right away)

I found that by entering 150 and the first harmonic it removes the XL1s motor noise from my quiet nature footage almost entirely without ruining the other sound. Maybe it will work for your problem and is free if you have FCP. Hope it pans out!

[Mac Daddy]

I'm burning dvd's off my superdrive. With the iDVD program included with the computer- its way simple. Just "drag and drop." Burning time is like- 20 minutes to more for longer lengths. Max time is 1 hour on the disk, and with DVD studio pro, you can go longer by adjusting compression.

DVD media is only a couple of bucks, and its lossless off of the computer.
Superdrives are about $400 (cheaper if someone has a lead?).

Good Luck.

Jeff Patnaude

[David Slingerland]

my question is perhaps very simple, how do you output to a standard which toast recognizes as videocd and lets me burn it that way. I have fcp 3.0 and i dont know how to do it.