MacVideo GURU himself Rick Young.

A good evening had by all especially this lucky chap Mr Crawford Brown who won an AJA Express worth over £1400.

Alister Brown…Mr Glidetrack himself giving us some background into making and upgrading sliders.

Matt Davis (Director/Editor) had a hard task trying to convince hardened FCP users that Adobe Premiere Pro might be a better path to take.

The Rick and Phil show…coming to a small screen near you soon on MacVideo, thanks to Matt for this picture.

Over the last 6 months I have read various posts about people having “lighter” footage after using Apple’s Compressor. This happened to a friend of mine recently…he was sending a self contained HD file out of Compressor and hey presto it was a lot lighter than it should be.

Strange…everything he was doing was the same but for one important difference…HD footage. He had only ever compressed SD DV footage up until this week.

Knowing the type of man he is Norrie set out to discover why this was…the solution !

If you are using FCP with HD footage and you come across the same problem “lighter” footage you must do the following…

Send your footage from FCP as a reference file NOT as a self contained file, it seems that compressor gets upset with certain self contained HD footage which lifts the Gamma causing the footage to look lighter than it should.

Nothing exercises the mind more than delving into Motion 4 with a complex animation in mind. I needed to show fire exits from a building starting with the back of the building sweeping round to the front.

My main problem was lack of basic knowledge of how you should approach the 3D buildings. I thought you could just add various shapes to build up the scene then look at them from various angles. That approach does not work, Motion 4 needs you to apply rectangles, boxes all on the same plane otherwise you get a peeling apart effect as soon as you move away from your scene.

After pulling my hair out I emailed Mark Spencer of Ripple Training who looked at my first example and told me that all my rectangles were not on the same plane I did not understand at first then it clicked…everything must be at 90˚ to each other as shown below.

Once you get your head round the 90˚ rule the rest is plane sailing…or not…as soon as you start to add lights to your project it starts to look sexy but sexy at the cost of rendering, without lights your 3D subject can take an hour or so…add three lights and you are looking at 3,4,5 hours or more. One initial project was taking so long that I abandoned it 6 hours later !

I am about to do some sexy 3D photo frames today I will post you the results once I have something worth showing. PS. Maths was one of my worst subjects at school and working with lots of rectangles in a 3D environment brings it all back…who said you don’t need maths once you leave school…me !!!

I want to thank Mark Spencer for his invaluable input.

Having loaded Snow Leopard over 14 weeks ago onto my iMac I have seen the benefits, quicker start up’s, more responsive and very stable. Only last Thursday 22nd October brought the updated drivers for my AJA io HD now V7.1, along with these drivers came an update to Final Cut Studio V7.0.1.

As soon as these drivers appeared I loaded them onto my MacPro and “WOW” it was like going from 2 star petrol to 4 star petrol, the difference was remarkable and still running 32bit.

It was most noticeable in Motion 4, things that ran sluggishly were given a new lease of life and the best was still to come…if you use Motion you will appreciate that if you want to make “Tummy tabs” (TT) as they are known in the trade, an ident like the one on the picture to your right with my name on it.

In Motion 3 if you wanted to make a TT you had to make sure the output was an animation, millions of colours plus and choose movie plus alpha, then you had to export this and render it on the FC timeline… TTs took ages.

Now with Motion 4, FC and AJA io HD you can choose Apple 4444 ProRes as your export preset and thats it no faffing about, it exports twice as fast and once it reaches your timeline it renders at least 3x faster than choosing the animation option and better still you get a far superior picture…no more banding or shallow colours.

Final Cut seems far more positive…I have 20 SATA drives via four DP500′s and they are twice as fast to load up it’s all a plus, plus experience.

As I mentioned in an earlier post I did not recommend bringing a previous project into FCP-7 as it crashed to the desktop…with some anxiety I did this with a major edit and no problems, worked like a charm. All in all I am delighted with my switch over to Snow Leopard and Final Cut Studio 3…I will put my hands up and applaud AJA for their amazing drivers and the ability to use Apple 4444 ProRez in a box of tricks that I am not so sure was designed to give us that level of resolution, once again well done Apple and AJA.

Yesterday evening I got an email from George Griswold from Video Now in Louisiana telling me he had been working with FCP-7 and the AJA io HD for over a month now.      www.videonow.info

I had a long think about this statement and came to the conclusion that George had upgraded Final Cut Studio rather than a fresh install. By upgrading his machine had retained the AJA settings and V6.0.3 firmware.

I was excited maybe if I installed the AJA firmware I too would get a working FCP-7 and AJA io HD. I downloaded the software from AJAs site and hey presto I also had FCP-7 working finally with my AJA.

This would be a good workaround till the new drivers appear so I did some preliminary tests to make sure the AJA was talking to my HD recorders and did some HM100 tests for someone else, everything was going smoothly…till…I tried to import a project from FCP-6 to FCP-7 and it crashed to the desktop. I repeated this 3 times and decided to re-install my FCP-6 SATA drive.

I can only assume that Mr Griswold has not had the need to import a project yet…how stable it is, time will tell but sadly I am back using FCP-6 on my second SATA drive.

After finding this out I thought it only fair to Email AJA with my findings…

“I’m pretty sure Engineering is aware of this issue but I will forward your findings to them just in case.
Regardless, I’m sorry for the delay but not too much longer.

Thank you for your patience.”

Best regards
Rudy

AJA Video Technical Support

I do question how 7 AJA engineers who are supposedly working 7 days a week with Apple on the new io HD drivers can get on with their work in the middle of a major move ?