Weird Pixelation with Macbook Pro

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SplitFieldDiopter

Active member
Just got the camera two days ago. Using it with a set of Zeiss Compact Primes.

I'm coming off the T2i with Canon lenses and I must admit, working with Cine Style housings is a MAJOR PLUS. At least as far as the testing I've been doing.

Anyway, just imported some footage into FCP, transcoded to ProRes. No way of looking at the native files on my Mac, so I'm not certain that this was in the source footage, but I came across this really odd occurrence.

There was a 1 frame band of pixelated footage in the 10 minutes of tests I shot in a low lit kitchen. Has anybody seen this? Is this something that happens from time to time that will ruin shots?

I'm using Class 10 Sandisk cards.

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Halfway through Green's book and I'm finally starting to mess with the scene files which seem to help the problems this camera has image wise.

In low light though, it's fairly muddy. Just as bad, if not worse than my T2i. Then again, I'm sure that messing with these Scene Files will help. I've seen great results with the camera, so I'll chalk up this early disappointment to Operator error.

There does seem to be a lot of skew though as you pan, which I was told at an AF100 gathering held here in Chicagoland would be almost completely gone. As far as I can tell, the CMOS skew is just as bad as it is on a DSLR. Seems odd they'd make such a big deal about that being gone when it obviously isn't.
 

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I've had the same thing when transcoding via FCP on my 13" macbook pro, but it doesn't happen when i transcode on my Mac PRO. Using Clip wrap on the laptop seems to resolve the issue, but if you want to maintain the link between the raw cards and the transcodes within final cut, i believe the clip wrap workflow won't allow you to do that.
 
SplitFieldDiopter said:
J
There was a 1 frame band of pixelated footage in the 10 minutes of tests I shot in a low lit kitchen. Has anybody seen this? Is this something that happens from time to time that will ruin shots?
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This looks like an import problem. Have you played the footage in the camera? Does it do the same thing? If not, it is more likely the import process. If you have not already done so. Move the folders to your media drive prior to the log and transfer process. While it seems logical that the cards should be fast enough to do this, it seems as that is the first point of failure. Make sure your card is locked before transferring.


In low light though, it's fairly muddy. Just as bad, if not worse than my T2i. Then again, I'm sure that messing with these Scene Files will help. I've seen great results with the camera, so I'll chalk up this early disappointment to Operator error.
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Yes I have seen some pretty bad scene files where they really did make the camera look bad. If it were me I would carefully hook up the camera and go through each of the settings, all the way up and all the way down, and watch the camera's output on a monitor. And I would do it over and over until I could see what it was doing. Do not combine settings until you are clear about what each one does.

There does seem to be a lot of skew though as you pan, which I was told at an AF100 gathering held here in Chicagoland would be almost completely gone. As far as I can tell, the CMOS skew is just as bad as it is on a DSLR. Seems odd they'd make such a big deal about that being gone when it obviously isn't.
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This depends on the length of the lens you use, the longer the lens the more it would be amplified. I can assure you that it is no where near the 5D in its skew.
 
We had that exact same thing happen to us. It only happened in one frame of one shot, but it was that exact same size and look.

I was able to cut around it in my film, but it was ugly. It never occurred to me that it might have happened during the import. I still have the original footage on the cards and I will check to see if it is there tonight.
 
Jan_Crittenden said:
This looks like an import problem. Have you played the footage in the camera? Does it do the same thing? If not, it is more likely the import process. If you have not already done so. Move the folders to your media drive prior to the log and transfer process. While it seems logical that the cards should be fast enough to do this, it seems as that is the first point of failure. Make sure your card is locked before transferring.
Click to expand...

It's definitely an import issue. It happens to me regularly when i use my laptop to transfer. The raw footage from the camera is fine. And if i reimport it will happen on a different frame. It hasn't made a difference whether i transfer straight from the card, or move to a drive first.
 
If it is an import issue, it makes me long for my p2 cards. I shot and captured over 1000 hours of footage from them and never saw anything like that once.
 
Thanks for the quick responses guys.

I was importing on a Dual Core Macbook Pro. I don't remember if I did a log and transfer straight off the cards or if I first transferred the files to the hard drive. I hope this problem doesn't keep popping up though, otherwise, I'll have to look into another system, such as a Mac Pro, which will increase the cost of the purchase overall. Bummer.

As far as skew is concerned, I did notice that it was much worse with an 85mm lens as opposed to a 35mm lens. And to be honest, it was never a HUGE problem for me, even on the DSLRs. Just surprised to see it, first that it was acknowledged in Green's book, then in my short testing I did yesterday.
 
I had something similar to this happen yesterday. After reimporting the clip the issue has gone away. But it is a bit scary that this can happen as I may not have the luxury of going through each clip is detail right away. I backup each SD card while the project is active but I wish I could have some more confidence in the media while logging and transferring.
 
yes, jan, I Am using shotput pro to transfer the raw cards to two separate hard drives. Then I use log and transfer inside FCP to transcode to prores LT on my scratch disk. I usually have the scratch disk set to a firewire 800 drive. The glitches appear on average about 1-2 times per 10 minutes of footage when doing this on my mac book pro. I have not seen this issue if I transcode on my mac pro.
So far i've also never seen it when i use clipwrap to transcode, but i prefer not to do that because then i have no way to link my FCP edits back to the raw backups.

Also, the cards are always locked before mounting to the computer
 
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I just checked my camera and the footage was clean, so I can confirm it happened during the log and transfer. FYI, I import my footage from the camera into FCP using a usb cable and log and transfer.
 
So at this point theres something causing this when transferring via macbook pro? Therefor I think it important for those using macbook pro to continue this discussion to solution. Obviously something on macbook pro is making something freaky.

Maybe a good place to start would be:

If this happens to you what model / version macbook pro are you using?

If your using mac book pro and this doesnt happen to you - again what macbook pro model / version are you using?

(FWIW - never had an issue on my mac pro and have yet to use my field offload system with the AF100 as yet due to the amount of footage I can fit on one card).
 
Seems odd this would be due to data transfer. The files' MD5 checksums should be the same between the file on the card and the file on the drive, which would be a good verification check. I can see something occurring during transcoding if some process in the chain can't keep up.
 
Chris Messineo said:
I just checked my camera and the footage was clean, so I can confirm it happened during the log and transfer. FYI, I import my footage from the camera into FCP using a usb cable and log and transfer.
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Hey Chris, From this point on, move the footage off the card and onto the HDD. Then log and transfer in. There is probably something about buss speeds or some sort of nonsense that is causing this. Lock your cards before letting the MAC mount them.

Best,

Jan
 
Jan, what is the reason for locking the cards before mounting? I don't think we've had any problem not locking the cards. Not that I noticed at least.
 
The MAC indexes drives and if you have a card that is not locked and yet is very full, it might cause it to become overly full. This happens on P2 as well. Lock the card, it can't happen. The downside of this is that it can cause some clips to not transfer, most common impact in P2. Get rid of the indexing, and life goes back to normal. Just seems surreal in the middle as you don't know why they won't transfer, you see them there, but they won't budge.

Best,

jan
 
Said it before, will say it again - "Log & Transfer" is the root cause of these problems, and I really wish it would just go away. Hopefully in the next FCP, Apple will recognize that recorded digital files do not need to be, and should not be, re-digitized into another format before they can be used.

At some point in the next few months Panasonic is supposed to release a file format plug-in for FCP/Quicktime that will let you natively edit the .MTS files. Not you would necessarily want to, but at least you could, and that would remove any question mark over whether a glitch was in the actual recorded card footage or whether it was from the L&T process. For the record, in nearly three years of AVCCAM usage and over six years of P2 footage, I cannot think of a single instance and will go so far as to assert that we have never seen a report of any of these cameras recording the footage bad on the card, in any manner of intermittent glitching. We did have one report of a guy whose codec board had failed in his HVX after five years, so it needed repair, but in his case every frame was terribly glitched.

In ALL other cases of glitched footage that have ever been reported, where the source footage was available on the original card to verify, it has always been traceable to computer error and the source footage has always been verified to be intact.

Glitching during transfer is still a big mystery, as to why it happens. There has been some theories put forward about using external firewire drives causing it, specifically an external firewire drive running FAT32. For you MBP guys getting an occasional glitch -- are you using firewire or USB drives or card readers? Can you try transferring through the MBP's onboard SDHC card slot directly to the internal drive? Or, is there anyone out there who can testify to already seeing such a glitch after using the internal SD card reader and L&T'ing to the internal drive? That would be an extremely interesting data point, as it would remove firewire or USB as a potential source of shy the glitching happens.
 
I've been using a MacBook Pro with my AF100 and haven't seen anything like this. I've only done two small test shoots with it, so maybe it just hasn't cropped up for me yet.

I'm running FCP 6 on a 17" MBP with 2GB of RAM, still have the same OS(10.4.11) that came installed on it when I got the computer back in early 2007.

I've been copying the cards to an external hard drive. Just a simple copy and paste, then using Log and Transfer off the drive to get the video into FCP. Takes FOREVER, but again, I haven't seen anything like this.

No additional software used.
 
Jan_Crittenden said:
Hey Chris, From this point on, move the footage off the card and onto the HDD. Then log and transfer in. There is probably something about buss speeds or some sort of nonsense that is causing this. Lock your cards before letting the MAC mount them.
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I'm sure you're right and that's probably the way to go.

The challenge I face is that I am using the camera to teach with. So we are shooting in class, capturing, and working on the edit all in the same class. Unfortunately, capturing is incredibly dull and I try to make it happen as quick as possible for the students. I hate to do anything that will slow that process down.

So, I will probably continue as is, but at least this way I know if get another corruption I can always copy that file manually.
 
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