Importing XML

As far as I can tell, the problem exists entirely within Final Cut Pro. Because even a straight-up import of xml causes it to freeze at 67 or 68%. Which is rude and ignorant of FCP.

The reason I figure it's Final Cut's fault is that I took an XML file and brought it into Text Edit. Then I found the following text in the XML:


3.00 : 1
7


7
And I changed the last value to "1" which should be the 1.66:1 letterbox. I did a search and replace. Very proud of myself, I was.
To no avail though. The import still froze at 68%.
So I quit. And I'm doing the changes manually. It's not as difficult as I thought it would be.

It'll eventually have to happen

Right now we edit on Final Cut Pro 7.
But...
But soon. We will have to hop off the FCP train.
Where does that leave us? I think not Avid. The only other option is Adobe Premiere.
One new advantage that Adobe has is this Adobe Anywhere thingy. My nominal complaint about these kinds of technologies is that they're tested under very weak conditions; commercials, music videos, and other short projects. A feature film is another ball of rabbits -- even at the low shooting ratios we tend to use. But being able to have multiple editors working on stuff simultaneously is rather intriguing. That is, if I could get multiple editors to work at the same time! ;-)

So. Yeah. I dunno. I suspect we're going to finish off this movie in Final Cut Pro.

My Three Pandora Machineries

Firstly.
So we doubled the amount of RAM in our Mac. It was, for some reason, only 4GB and that kind of sucked. I bought two more 2GB sticks and put them in.
For a while the computer was reading 10GB of RAM but that there were ECC errors on one of the old sticks. Then the computer decided it only has 8GB of RAM with no errors. Which is what I thought it would do. Still. Weird. But it renders a LOT faster now.
Firstwise Part II.
Then I quadrupled the amount of vRAM by installing a new video card.
That project has gone more weirdly. I do not, nor can I, understand video cards, what they do, and how they work. In the fantasy world of computers that my little mind lives in: one video card for each of two monitors should be better and faster. Right? That's how it works. Right?
Anyway, of the three video outputs on the new video card, only one is DVI. The other two are the tiny proprietary connector which costs another $100 I don't want to spend.
I have the old ATI Radeon HD 2600 the computer came with in slot three
I have the new fancier ATI Radeon HD 5700 in slot one
Right away everything seemed to work. But Final Cut Pro will not absolutely will not no way no how use the right-hand monitor (from the 2600) as a "Digital Cinema Display". FCP will gladly use both monitors otherwise though.
So I've set up a custom set of windows where the "Canvas" window is in the right-hand monitor. Which is essentially how we used to work with the "Digital Cinema Display" anyway.
And yeah, the "Digital Cinema Display" will work on the primary (center) monitor -- but when you do that you have no tools or anything because the display takes up the whole screen. This is, apparently, a known issue. But maybe I don't care about it because this seems like a perfectly reasonable way to work.

Editing in Final Cut Pro. That's Virginia Logan on the left/center and Jeff Wills on the right.

Groove to the sickly orange glow of the incandescent lights in my studio.

Thing number two.
I tried Manymoon for project management. It doesn't have task dependencies. I wanted to set up project management so that we could schedule, say, the mixing of an act to be dependent on it being edited first. But Manymoon doesn't work that way. So I'll be doing something... else.

Lastwise.
I'm considering formatting the camera drive for Dragon Girl using ExFAT. The advantage to exFAT is that both (modern) PC's and (modern) Macs can read and write to it using large file sizes. I'll tell you (you'll probably hear me screaming) how that goes.

Ram Me

It is beyond my meagre ability to understand why on earth the RAM in your video card should make any difference to your renders. But it does. Big time. I've been getting the "The effect 'Looks' failed to render..." and so I've had to unplug one of the monitors and render in 8-bit.
It's also beyond my understanding how my dual-quad-core Mac has a paltry 256MB of vram in it. Or... wait a minute... why does this computer only have 4GB of regular RAM? Crap. That means something happened. There should be at least 8. I thought I bought 12...
Poopity.
I bet those problems are related.
Here's an article on upgrading the video card on a Mac.

My dual-quad-core Mac is serial number NQ83601AXYK
It has an ATI Radeon HD 2600 with only 256(!) MB of VRAM.
CoconutID says my Mac was built in 2008. But the model identifier says it's a Mac Pro 3,1 which this site claims will not work with the ATI Radeon HD 5870
So the ATI Radeon HD 5770 is it.

The Apple versions of that card are, of course, upwards of twice as expensive as the PC versions. But we can't render out movies in 10-bit with Magic Bullet Looks without a better card. So that's $250 right there.
The other major issue with this dang computer is that I've always had trouble with the RAM. System Scanner tells you what sort of RAM you need.
In my case it's DDR2 PC2-6400 • CL=5 • Fully Buffered • ECC • DDR2-800 • 1.8V • 512Meg x 72
That's another $250 for 8GB of RAM.

Doings and Goings On

I could be working on a script. I could be doing some rotoscoping. I don't like doing either so I'm writing on this blog.
+++++
Via Chance Shirley, Ron Brinkmann on FCP X. Ron points out that Apple trashed Shake, which was a pretty important compositing program 'till they bought it and decided they didn't want it anymore. I bet the makers of Nuke and AfterEffects are pretty happy about that decision.
So Apple may be bringing the "pro" part of Final Cut Pro to an "end of life" in the product development cycle. Which is very good news to Avid and Adobe.
Hey, I actually edited a feature on a... Cube? Sphere? D-Vision? I don't even remember what it was. It was on a PC and it was a real bear to operate, that's for sure.
So, where am I going with this? I have no idea. It's a good thing I didn't get that dual six-core Mac I was talking about.

The Philadelphia Desert in Earthkiller. Matte painting by Joe Chapman.

+++++
Boy, on the movie Earthkiller we're having quite a hard time with our bluescreens. For some reason they're really hard to key. They look like they're correctly exposed. The GH1 is hacked so it's operating at 30Mb/s, so theoretically it should work better. But we're just having a bear of a time with these keys.
+++++
Today I eliminated one or maybe two characters from the screenplay of Earthwar. Just think of the money that will save on lunches.

Final Cut, Premiere, and the GH1

So, there are some limitations in Adobe Premiere when it comes to so-called "merged clips". We really need to have the option of using at least two tracks of audio. What if we have two characters and one is far behind the other? Normally on set we would put a plant mic or a lav on either the close character or the far one. That's standard operating procedure. We don't do anything nuts with multitrack audio like they do in TV or big-budget pictures. We just want to have the option of two tracks. Most of the time we'll use only one track (I think we did all of Android Insurrection with one track.) But we need the option of two.
And Premiere won't let us do that. Phooey on them.
There's another way to go and that's to make each clip a sequence. And then to edit by cutting a sequence made up of other sequences. Whatever you do, though, never ever alter one of those originating sequences.
Or, you can sync all your footage on timelines and then copy and paste from the "synced" timeline onto an "edit" timeline. We've actually made quite a few pictures that way. It's not necessarily the world's most awesome way to work, but it's a way to work.
Another advantage that Premiere has over Final Cut is that it'll read the .mts files that are made by the Panasonic GH1. With Final Cut Pro you have to convert those files to Quicktime movies. And presumably FCP X can read the files directly -- although it still seems to need to convert them. Yeah, I know.
The strange thing about FCP X is that we don't have to do anything right now. I do have a list of things I want changed though:

1. Oh please heaven can't we have a simple key command to export a still image? "File > Export > Using Quicktime Conversion > Format > Still Image"? You're kidding, right? Who thought of that? 
2. I know that you guys at Apple only edit home movies. But you've been shouted at by professional editors for many years until you've gotten most things right. Still, you can't seem to fathom that I have more than one hard drive with (shudder) more than one project I have to work on each day. The default location for all the render files and such should be saved with the project. I shouldn't have to manually change the scratch disk drive every damn time I change drives and/or project. It may be that FCP X has fixed this, I don't understand their new and much bemoaned data management system. Premiere, on the other hand, has always had this problem under control.
3. I do kind of hate how I'm married to a codec (specifically ProRes) when working with an Apple product. I don't mind the Quicktime wrapper even, but making me work in ProRes (although it's a perfectly good codec) but not letting a PC write to ProRes is pretty obnoxious (and exactly the sort of thing people accuse Microsoft of doing.)

Now, with numerous editors editing on different machines with hard drives comprised of identical data, we've found another exciting issue with the Panasonic GH1. Whenever you format the SD card on that camera, the counter resets the name of the movie file to "00000.mts". What this means is that every danged day we start out with files that have exactly the same file name as every other day on the shoot. So yeah, we're very careful to put each of those files in their own directory.
But -- if you go from a drive named (say) "0801 edit" and work on a drive named (say) "0801 drew edit", you can find that Final Cut can lose the location of the files pretty damned easily. And now you have the problem that your files all have the same names. So you go in and manually reconnect the media. But sometimes Final Cut decides that an entire sequence should come from (say) "day 04" and your edit gets very very wack.
I wish the GH1 would let you manually reset the counter to zero on movie files. Interestingly the GH1 does let you manually reset zero on the names of the still picture files. What I'm thinking now is that we shouldn't be re-formatting the SD cards but rather should be erasing the data inside them on a computer. We'll see if/how that system works in a test at some point before we shoot the next movie. (Ha! Like we ever do tests.)