to all mac users : very important!

Adam:

Could explain on what set of principles why it is "puzzling" that Apple doesn't provide hardware acceleration for HDV rendering?

Is there a rule book somewhere?

Because who does provide that among the NLE software developers other than Matrox? And what NLE does Matrox sell?
 
I switched to FCP/Apple about 3 or 4 years ago from Premiere/PC. Apple has its issues (many of which came up right here), but it would take a lot for me to switch back. I just feel a lot more comfy with a Mac. My wife worked for 3 very large PC manufacturers in her career, but right now we have 4 Macs and only 3 PCs. I get the willys when I have to go on a PC for something.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to see Apple come through with better HD solutions as well. But for me, the plusses still outweigh the minuses.

And I can't blame a multi-national corporation for not catering to its clients, when by and large, it does. It just so happens that we are not the biggest piece of their pie.

I recently read Walter Murch's book about using FCP while editing Cold Mountain. Great read for a lot of reasons, but it will definitely give you an insight into how Apple thinks.
 
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[/QUOTE]=my fully loaded MBP would take over 24 hours to export a 60 minute project in HD. thats a joke, right?[/QUOTE]

like someone else said. you're still working on a laptop. go eight-core and you will be solid.

powerbooks/macbook pro's are good, but not great.
 
I've read about people getting along very well using Adobe Encore for their Blu-ray authoring needs.adkimery


ive heard both good and bad stories about compatibility playing on various dvd players, and heard its a battle to get the settings right to do it properly.


In the past Matrox was not able to put out a quality Mac I/O card so be careful what you wish for. :tongue: I've run into a number of users that won't even consider the MXO or MXO 2 because they are still bitter towards Matrox for the RTMac cad.

well matrox is the only company that i saw demonstrate acceleration, i dont care what company does it i just am puzzled why aple doesnt let any 3rd party companies help accelrate their weaknesses so their customers can be productive


Laptops are designed for portability, not heavy lifting. Maybe a desktop would better suit your needs.

maybe but i am puzzled why SD exports literally 30 times faster than HDV on my MBP, curious how fast a fully loaded macpro 3.0 with 8 gigs ram and a decent graphics card would export HDV.

I don't think desktop HD authoring was viable until the HD format war ended a few months ago, but I am disappointed that Apple hasn't offered a Blu-ray authoring option yet especially considering how much they were on the forefront of DVD desktop authoring years ago. Why would people switch from Mac to PC when there are HD authoring solutions available for the Mac today? Switching your entire operation from Mac to PC just because Apple doesn't currently offer a Blu-ray authoring solution is a bit like tossing the baby out w/the bath water, no?

the last thing i want to do is switch to PC but i also need to make money too, time=money, maybe the answer wil be connected to how fast the macpro will perform but everyone i talked to is doing 720p, different animal from 1080 60i HDV.



sorry about the bold, i can never get the quotes to work on this system
 
David S. said:
Encore is not DVD SP. MainConcept is not Apple's Compressor app.

But as Shane and other say, if it don't work for you, use something else.

It's that simple.

If I could shoot with a pin hole camera and edit with a stack of flip cards better than FCP, that's where I would be.

The OP mentions HD. My guess is that the OP is working in HDV which is processor intensive on any platform.

No problem in voicing concerns, but do it to Apple, not here or at the Apple Discussions.

This is a troubleshooting board, last time I looked.

Rants about Apple probably should go in the cafe.
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this is not a rant, this is a plead to multiple forums to voice their concerns to apple's forum about being behind the times.
 
like someone else said. you're still working on a laptop. go eight-core and you will be solid.

powerbooks/macbook pro's are good, but not great.
Click to expand...

still waiting to see if anyone has first hand experience with macpro and 1080 60i hdv exporting, how long does it take to export 10 mins, 20 mins, etc?
 
Adam Forgione said:
ive heard both good and bad stories about compatibility playing on various dvd players, and heard its a battle to get the settings right to do it properly.
Click to expand...
IIRC Adobe has a 30 day trial on all of it's apps so you could always test drive it for a month to see if you like it or not.

well matrox is the only company that i saw demonstrate acceleration, i dont care what company does it i just am puzzled why aple doesnt let any 3rd party companies help accelrate their weaknesses so their customers can be productive
Click to expand...
Going away from dedicated hardware has been a growing industry trend for years. Also, Apple is off loading more and more of the processing power onto the GPU (Motion and Color, for example, are nearly 100% GPU dependent) and speeds will also increase greatly when the Pro Apps become better able to utilize all of the RAM and processing cores that Mac Pros offer.

I remember years ago when hardware assist cards were common because just handling DV was very taxing for computers at the time. A conundrum many people ran into is that when they upgraded their computers their editing software would not be any faster because it was tied to the hardware assist card. So not only would they buy a new computer, but they'd have to buy a new assist card as well. Or people would want to upgrade to a new assist card, but their current machines weren't compatible with it so they'd have to buy a new computer as well as a new assist card. When computers got fast enough that companies started moving away from hardware assist cards many people jumped for joy because their lives just got easier and their operational costs just got cheaper.

maybe but i am puzzled why SD exports literally 30 times faster than HDV on my MBP, curious how fast a fully loaded macpro 3.0 with 8 gigs ram and a decent graphics card would export HDV.
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HDV is significantly more CPU heavy than SD is. 1080i60 HDV has about 4x the number of pixels of SD and the MPEG2/GOP compression of HDV is also much, much more taxing for the computer than then codecs we typically use to hand SD footage.

still waiting to see if anyone has first hand experience with macpro and 1080 60i hdv exporting, how long does it take to export 10 mins, 20 mins, etc?
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If let us know your work flow (what you are using to export, what settings, etc.,) I'm sure people would take a few minutes to do a test export on their Mac Pros and tell you how long it took. I'll test it on my 2.66 quad core and I might be able to test it a pre-2008 8-core as well.

-A
 
seriously? it takes 24 hours to export 60 minutes of hdv? is that an hdv thing? dvcpro hd plays in realtime and exports very fast on my macbook (not pro). stupid fast on my 8 core.
 
On some points i agree and disagree.

Personally i use FCP, because im quite fast on it, it doenst have a lot of bugs(for day to day editing) and it has XML. The XML is a pet thing of mine and i wouldnt loose it for the world. But I program for a living so i have an advantage there.

Things i hate/and am worried about. Media mangler. c'mon guys....its really CANT be that hard to get this sorted. Ive thought of it and am going to in the future do a basic version of this that just cuts down the amount of footage for post workflow. This is a big one that needs to be fixed.

The second one is the Bit depth that is used in FCP. Now im hoping that this will go away when Quicktime X comes out. But at the moment it is shocking. But hey, you only edit in FCP anyway (well i do anyway).

On the blu ray front. Just because you "cant" burn out from DVDSP to blu-ray doent mean in any way shape or form that a Mac wont burn blu ray. As a previous poster mentioned, Toast will burn data on a Blu ray drive. there are a few burners that have been found to work on Mac that are actually PC. go have a look at http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ for a few tips on which ones work. Do your HD-DVD in DVD-studio pro, then output a disk image.

"You can create a disc image in one of two industry-standard formats — Cutting Master Format (CMF) version 1.0 or version 2.0; or Disc Description Protocol (DDP) version 2.1 or version 3.0. Write images to a hard drive, DVD, or digital linear tape (DLT) for transfer to the replication facility."

Find a peice of software ON MAC that burns these formats (and there is one, Roxio DVDit Pro HD i think? it was something like that when i had a look around) and burn out your Bluray disks. If you on the bleeding edge (and lets face it if you were trying to output to VHS, a few months after it had "won" you would be on the bleeding edge) you kinda gotta look around a bit. as a disclaimer i havent actually done this, but it *should* work.

Now unfortunatly i think you have been tripped up more by the camera companies than apple on the HDV front. HDV has/is and always will be VERY CPU intemsive in all sorts of ways. Thats why a lot of people re-encode it before they edit with it. Ive only used DVCPRO-HD and always loved the speed at which FCP does things. Unlike Barry I quite like the way that FCP does its P2 workflow, and am completely mystified by how adobe does thiers. Just does my head in. Thats a personal thing. I LIKE the fact that there is two copied of things. But thats a personal opinion.

But i do hear you on apple being a closed shop.

The way i see it apple does some things REAAAALLLLL well. and that why we love them.
Other things they completely miss....and thats why they frustrate us.....

For me they do more things right....
 
Simple and its been said before on here; use what works best for your project.
I run FCP on a Mac and Avid on a PC. Both are used for different situations.
 
I'd wager you'll see blu-ray support, among many other speed improvements with the release of Snow Leopard coming in the year. If not sooner for FCS.

I love how the assumption is that "apple doesn't listen" as soon as they are behind on one feature.

If they didn't listen to editors FCP would still be as clunky as version 1.0.

Hardware acceleration from a software package is an unrealistic feature to ask for. I find it hard to believe that apple 'shuns' 3rd Party hardware developers.. one just needs to look at how FCP operates and it becomes apparent that statement is ridiculous.

And if they are not promoting 3rd party support it only hurts them...
 
adkimery said:
If let us know your work flow (what you are using to export, what settings, etc.,) I'm sure people would take a few minutes to do a test export on their Mac Pros and tell you how long it took. I'll test it on my 2.66 quad core and I might be able to test it a pre-2008 8-core as well.

-A
Click to expand...


i am using FCP to export to an HDV file (simple export>quicktime movie>use source settings) directly off an HDV timeline. 1080 60i

i mena is a fully loaded mac pro only twice as fast, or 10 times as fast?
 
i am the orginal poster of this thread. i want to thank everyone here (even the ones i bumped heads on) after this tornado of threads i have learned some things that i was not aware of prior to the post so again i thank you. to my conclusion HDV is just not a codec thats right for me and apple.

because i shoot with a Z1 (hdv) and fx1 (hdv) and ex1 (1080 60i 25mbps-hdv format) i am stuck dealing with this horror show. although hardware solution with pc will work more efficient, i feel its better to explore converting/capturing into another codec so FCP can play happy.

i will now be in search of best methods for converting my ex1 files (via cards) to another codec like prores, etc.

although i still feel apple needs to improve their HD solutions asap, i must apologize for what to expect when using HDV. i will be posting this directly on apple's forum as well. thank you to all.
 
Doesn't the EX1 have HDMI out?

If it does look at the Intensity board.

If it has component out look at the Intensity Pro board.

Both relatively inexpensive.
 
Adam Forgione said:
i am using FCP to export to an HDV file (simple export>quicktime movie>use source settings) directly off an HDV timeline. 1080 60i

i mena is a fully loaded mac pro only twice as fast, or 10 times as fast?
Click to expand...
I took some HDV 1080i60 green screen footage, keyed in some MiniDV, and added one text layer. Making a self-contained QT movie using source settings I exported 1 min of footage and that took about 4 minutes. So extrapolating that out a 60min seq would take about 4 hours to export. This was on a 2.66ghz quad-core w/5gigs of RAM.


-A
 
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