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 ?

Here we are once again …week 11 since FCP-7 was available still no drivers for the AJA io HD…this is becoming a joke…if you can’t fix the problem give us all a refund or give us some idea when your so called engineering department will get their act together.

UPDATE…I have spoken to an AJA representative tonight and he did not give me any timeline for these drivers but gave me an indication that Apple and seven AJA engineers are working to make this happen. This unit relies heavily on Final Cut so I take from this that there are bugs with Final Cut Pro 7 that need attending to before the AJA io HD drivers can be finalised.

Having spoken to various members in AJA over the last 4 weeks they have all been very pleasant but due to some legal agreement with Apple can’t divulge the true state of play or give us a timeline for the drivers. This has also been the longest driver update in AJA’s history and it had to be the io HD !

You can be assured that when we see these drivers they will work with FCP-7 & Snow Leopard.

I must emphasise that although JVC claim that the HM700 and HM100 produce quicktime files that will sit on your Final Cut Pro timeline with no rendering…that’s perfectly true but there is a compromise and that is the way the file is brought in.

MPEG-2 is directed at broadcast formats at higher data rates; it provides extra algorithmic ‘tools’ for efficiently coding interlaced video, supports a wide range of bit rates and provides for multichannel surround sound coding. That’s the official line…

How does it affect you…I have been forced to use Final Cut Studio 3 without my AJA io HD therefore forcing me to ingest footage via the SDHC card itself, I soon discovered a very dark side to editing without my trusty AJA Pro-Rez box. My first serious filming with the HM100 was at my sons wedding in Italy and as I knew I was going to be busy I decided to edit a 2min sequence to upload onto Exposure Room.

Everything went fine till I used a program called “Looks” this is a program from Noise Industries that gives your footage a certain look…I added Looks to my footage and pressed render all…to my amazement I got a box telling me that my MPEG2 footage was conforming, the two minute sequence took almost one hour to render.

Since then I have re-installed my Leopard/FCP-2 hard drive to use the AJA box again and hey presto as if by magic my HM100 footage is now ingested via Apple Pro-Rez and no more MPEG2. As an aside I was filming a theatre show using a Sony EX-3 and a JVC HM100 at 1080 50i and you cannot tell the cameras apart, except for one tel-tail sign…the EX-3 suffers from IR discolouration on the blacks turning them a brownie red, the HM100 having a CCD gives me perfect blacks. Fortunately the HM100 is on wide and the EX-3 is tight so the problem is minor.

The moral of the story is do not be fooled by the hype …you can edit MPEG2 on a FCP timeline as long as you do nothing to it…and don’t expect to be able to use 2 HM100/700s ingest via the SDHC and try to edit a two camera multicam edit…IT WON’T WORK (WRONG IT DOES). The only way to ingest HM100/700 for two camera editing is via an AJA io HD, Express or a Matrox MX02.

Although I would still advise ingesting via a Matrox or AJA as Pro-Rez I was mistaken by telling you not to use HM100/700 as a multicam edit….

SEE HERE… http://www.hdwarrior.co.uk/2009/10/15/multicam-indeed-works-with-jvc-hm100-mpeg-2-file/