Everything works perfectly in FCP?!?!?

ullanta

ullanta

Veteran
(Sorry for all the conflicting moods of messages. I've been testing pretty intensively, and am posting all my results as they happen. )

So I shot 20 clips today, ranging from 10 seconds to 40 minutes, in HA, and PH 1080p30 and 24. Slow shutter, regular shutter, DRS on and off where possible. Controlled (locked down) shots of the same scene, plus long shots as I wandered around at night.

So, dig this:

I've been doing my testing on a machine at work (iMac dual-core 2.16 GHz), which runs Leopard - installed all software last week, so pretty up to the minute. At home I've been testing a bit with the MainConcept Transcoder on a slow laptop, pulling the DVCPro HD footage into my OS X 10.4.10 with FCP 6.0.1 .

Today, having finished some pending projects, I updated my home machine (Mac Pro Quad 2.66) to OSX 10.4.11, Quicktime 7.5.5, All the latest FC Studio updates, and for a kick decided to try importing all the footage in all test modes.

And... it all worked, perfectly. Flawlessly. PH, HG, 24p, 30p, 60i. Long PH clips.

This same card full of clips DID NOT PRODUCE THE SAME RESULT ON THE iMAC. Of course, slow as it is, it's still probably transcoding now. But of the ones I saw before I left, the PH mode clips had "green flash" glitches, and the 30p clips had some timing (stuttering issues). I'll make sure of all this tomorrow when it's finished. But the machine at home, still running Tiger, handled all this without glitches.

Again... not sure where exactly the problems lie; many variables, and slow to gather data on long clips! But it would be interesting if somehow the Tiger vs. Leopard issue plays in... Leopard has ruined a lot of things, but I didn't think this would be one of them?

Anyway, this is one card's worth of video so far, and I'll be testing a lot in the next few days... but for now I can say, FCP 6.0.4 on Tiger 10.4.11 handles all types of HMC150 1080 footage flawlessly (sorry... no 720p footage tested today).
 
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Upon full review, I notice there are glitches at the spanning points... but not as bad as the ones previously posted by others. For a few seconds around the spanning point, there's a rectangle in the image in which the colors are slightly off. No stuttering of motion, though.

Also, as has been reported by others, I notice that there are indeed a few seconds missing from the end of at least some of the long clips. Wasn't testing for this, and it's hard to tell in most shots... but in one shot at least, I'm sure some time is missing at the end!
 
Is the audio perfectly in-synch? I noticed mine was a little off due to the frame rate setting being like .02 off or something. I believe this contributes to it not capturing the last part of the cilps
 
Hmmm... in a number of long clips in 1080/60i and 1080/30p I'm absolutely certain the frame rate was audio sync was NOT off at all. On one long 1080p/24 clip, where I'm sure that the end was cut off, I can't talk about audio being precise to more than 4 or 5 frames; but is DEFINITELY not off by as much as the video is cut off. That is, I seem to have on the order of 5 seconds of video... but the audio can't have been more than 5 frames off (if at all).

I saw results similar to what you seem to be describing in some of my earlier testing, with the older setup, a while back. I don't know why, but for some reason FCP's default sequence setup was in a PALish (50i) mode. This shouldn't affect Log'n'Transfer, as far as I know; and when I dropped the transferred clips onto the sequence, it of course offered to change the sequence settings to match the clip, and I affirmed... but got serious sync issues. Changing the default sequence in FCP to an NTSCish one (60i) fixed the issue for all future Log'n'Transfer operations. Doesn't quite make sense, but it worked. Didn't help for clips already transferred... had to do 'em again.

Also, keep on top of DF vs NDF timecode for your clips and sequences, as that can have a similar effect. When I switched the HMC into 24p last night, it alerted me that it was changing its timecode to NDF. Haven't looked into this deeply yet.. and FCP seems to have handled it properly... but always something to be aware of.

If it matters, for this testing, I was using a 60i/30p timeline, even for the 24p clips... haven't tested a 24p sequence/timeline yet.

-Barry
 
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ullanta said:
Upon full review, I notice there are glitches at the spanning points... but not as bad as the ones previously posted by others. For a few seconds around the spanning point, there's a rectangle in the image in which the colors are slightly off. No stuttering of motion, though.

Also, as has been reported by others, I notice that there are indeed a few seconds missing from the end of at least some of the long clips. Wasn't testing for this, and it's hard to tell in most shots... but in one shot at least, I'm sure some time is missing at the end!
Click to expand...

Just a theory, but it seems to me that maybe the glitches are related to the GOP (Hope that is the right terminology). In layman's terms:

- my clip had very little motion (it was of the back of my head), therefore some parts of the image will have been repeated for many frames, so any glitch will last a long time.

- If the clip had been more dynamic, each frame would have less repeated from the previous one, so any glitch will only last a few frames.

Maybe this could explain why the length of the glitch varies?
 
I'm not sure that the length varied... it just wasn't as noticeable as in your example, and didn't cause motion stuttering (which I thought I say in your clip). But something to think about... still, my images didn't have much motion (a widely framed shot with one person about 1/5 screen height walking through)...
 
I have to say, first and foremost, though... the imagery is gorgeous, especially the low-light night shots I was working with yesterday.
 
Glitches

Glitches

I have the same set up as you - OSX 10.5.5 withFCP 6.06 and every latest software. I shot 48 short clips in 720P/24 and 5 clips have bad glitches - green/red pixelating. The weird thing is it looks fine on the camera, and even fine when I play it on the camera and hook it up to a TV, but putting the footage in any computer from the camera or through a reader has those glitches.
 
Renah - do you mean me? just to clarify: I DID have glitches in short clips in the 10.5.5 setup (mainly green flashes and motion stuttering). I DID NOT have glitches in the 10.4.11 setup. Tiger works; Leopard doesn't! In my 2 test cases, at least.
 
ullanta said:
Renah - do you mean me? just to clarify: I DID have glitches in short clips in the 10.5.5 setup (mainly green flashes and motion stuttering). I DID NOT have glitches in the 10.4.11 setup. Tiger works; Leopard doesn't! In my 2 test cases, at least.
Click to expand...

Thanks for this info... I was thinking of upgrading my OS Leopard. Good thing I read this before I bought the HMC!

David
 
we've been using the intensity card. NO problems there. I did the same thing when I got my SD9 cam as FCP would crash instantly upon transcoding... These are the usual growing pains.. but with the intensity card, it's rather painless and I say goodbye to overpriced P2 cards. YIPPEE
 
Got it - of course I have Leopard, so my stuff doesn't work right. I transcoded with the Panasonic download on a PC and the footage looked perfect. Looks like a Leopard problem
 
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