WakeWorld - My New Toy Completes my setup!!!! Check it out!

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- Video and Photography (http://www.wakeworld.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=87667)

- - My New Toy Completes my setup!!!! Check it out! (http://www.wakeworld.com/forum/showthread.php?t=660991)

Well, I started at Full Sail.....I got a new loaded macbook pro along with final cut studio 2 and adobe cs4 master collection. I got the Vixia HF100 last year. BUT MY NEWEST TOY completes the circle. My Sony a200 arrived today. What an awesome early birthday gift! It came with the 18-70mm lens and 75-300mm lens along with a 2GB Compact Flash Card and the bag to hold it all! I am so pumped. ON ANOTHER NOTE.....while final cut is nice and all. After fiddling with Premiere Pro and its NATIVE AVCHD editing, along with all the other parts of CS4 that rock, I have decided that personally, I am going all adobe. CS4 friggin rocks! I'm off to the Premiere of Fun Boots. Hope to see some of you guys there! -Nate

yep....it's official......FUN BOOTS is an awesome flick!!!!!

I'm curious what the advantage to editing in native AVCHD is unless your delivery format is Blu-Ray? Did you test PP with text / graphics yet?

I'd think the time saved from eliminating 1 extra step is the biggest advantage.

What extra step would that be?

converting the native files to AIC?

I thought that happened automatically on ingest? (rhetorical question) From what I've read Apple sees no reason (at least to this point) to support native editing with AVCHD since it's one of the worse codecs to recode when applying anything other then simple cuts (and even those are problematic when there are so few I frames.) Editing natively sounds sexy but I'd want to throw some serious graphics/slomo/text at it see the render times to reconform and look at the resulting quality before I'd automatically pick a native codec over the AIC or prores422 codecs (which are both considered highly efficient I frame based codecs.) I've converted some HDV to prores422 and it's very good, not as space efficient as the Panny ProHD codecs but much cleaner. I'd like to hear some detail about anybody's experience with the above and don't get me wrong I think AVCHD is a wonderful compression system but there is a reason Apple has not added native AVCHD support to FCP. It's not that they don't have the technological know how to do it but more that it's not going to be an efficient system. My point here is I'd do some serious testing with Premiere looking at both render time and results before I'd dump FCP.

everything seems tons faster in adobe premiere. don't get me wrong, final cut studio is very nice and it too is on my machine. However, 1. Even though I love apple, I believe what you may have read is their marketing talk, which they are good at. The quote you left about "having the know how" is funny because it's obvious they have instilled that image about themselves in you. They are an awesome company but there are things that they won't figure out first. When that happens how do you think they will deal with it? Come up with their own way and advertise that any other way isn't effecient or as good. Brilliant! Marketing Marketing Marketing! 2. Motion is ok but leaves me wanting so much more plus it's buggy as hell, crashing quite a bit more than after effects. I honestly love after effects and find it way more powerful. With the integration between the whole adobe suite, Premiere just fits the bill. 3. Compressor sucks and also makes me feel ashamed to say that apple uses such an aweful UI! For a company known to make beautifully simple and attractive User Interfaces, this is certainly worthy of being posted on failblog. 4. Overall, the integration between the programs that apple touts from final cut studio is pretty much poorly implemented. Especially when compared to the tight integration between all the CS4 apps. I don't know about CS3 but from what I hear, CS4 is much tighter integration between apps. Look at color, a program from another company that apple bought and then put into the suite. It's share's hardly fits in and works smoothly between the other programs. It reminds me of shake. Apple is slowly bleeding shake into motion so that the interfaces and integration seems to flow better. Eventually it will happen for apple and they will get it setup. Adobe has been doing this a lot longer though. I guess, it is just something you will have to experience personally to understand. Because up until I got CS4 Master Collection, I thought there was no way in hell anyone would pull me away from Final Cut Studio. It accomplished pretty much everything I ever wanted to do. But accomplish and streamline are two different words. I can do all if not more in Adobe CS4 apps than what I can in Final Cut Studio. One thing worth mentioning is that everything flys compared to the way things used to run for me, because i am running a new loaded macbook pro with 4gb of RAM compared to my 1 year old entry level imac with 2gb of RAM. And when, snow leopard comes out so I can start offloading processes to whatever GPU i'm not currently running. Things are going to get ultra fast! -Nate

Fair enough, but you were talking about AVCHD native editing in Premiere vs Final Cut Pro in your original post as being the shizz not about the integration of the apps in FCS or whether Motion is superior to After Effects etc. so I was just questioning how much native editing in AVCHD you've actually done? I own a MBP 2.8 with 4 gigs as well, so I'm well aware of the speed of the workflow using FCP and long GOP codecs vs I frame codecs like DVC ProHD / ProRes422. I'm currently shooting and editing XDCam EX natively and it's certainly not burning down the house but it is faster then editing HDV natively. I would like to see some of your AVCHD work though when you get a chance, if it handles motion better then HDV (which on paper it should at the 24 mbs data rate) then it will be a winner. A wakeboarding or other sports type clip with 60i and 50% slomo applied would be great (rendered in Premiere not AE). Also if you could ingest some of your footage in prores422 in FCP, edit it, throw some heavy FX on it and then report back as to the rendering times and final IQ vs native I'd be interested in hearing about that as well. I'll bet you'll find the workflow isn't that bad! Let's not get too carried away drooling over Snow Leopard, they haven't made true parallel processing a reality yet using the 2 cores on the main processor, let alone dumping part of the main processing load onto an idle 2nd GPU (which I have read isn't wired currently to be active when the other GPU is enabled). What you're talking about may become reality at some point but I doubt our hardware in it's current configuration will support using the 2nd GPU for general processing. The 2nd GPU in the MBP is a power saving device and I can see why they added it, battery life when the 9600 is enabled is nothing compared to what I'd get with my previous 15" MBP 2.33. How do you like the A200? I'm hearing some good things about that body, I'd like to see some shots from that too when you get a chance.

A couple of things... I believe that the time zone of my post is west coast....so you can imagine how late (or early for that matter) it was for me with no sleep so i went off on the whole comparison instead of answering your question. I am super busy now but will try sometime in the next couple of weeks to run some tests for you. I love the A200 but I am sending it back to get another one because my Super Steady Shot is broken. No, it isn't that shots are coming out blurry, it makes a funny noise and the bar indicator for the steady shot blinks non-stop. So yeah, something is wrong. Overall I love the camera. So yeah, before I really got to dig deep and get really good shots i had it boxed up to send back in less than a week of owning it. The body fits great in the hands and the controls are very easy to use for adjusting all the settings on the fly. People complain about not having the live view but really, i have no need for a live view. I am happier having just the control settings displayed while shooting. I just wish I had the money for more lenses. I haven't really looked at the old minolta lenses available yet. Right now I have to still get a polarizer filter. Of course, I have the UV filters on both lenses for the sake of protecting the glass. Something else I am looking into are the macro filters that stack. It's the cheapo way of doing macro since the macro lenses are expensive....School is already costing me enough without buying lenses for fun. On the GPU thing, I believe that if the software can switch the video cards without a full reboot then they would be able to send processes to the unused video card. It's a matter of software. I don't think they are advertising these new machines as being able to do it soon so they can "surprise" current owners when they release Snow Leopard. Apple is famous for making announcements like that. But that's just my theory. We'll see soon for sure. It would be nice if they offered a better battery to use in the 15" model but I can not complain when compared to other laptops I have encountered. Heck, I haven't encountered anything that comes close to the battery on the mac. Apparently silver-zinc batteries are supposedly pretty awesome. Hopefully I will be able to get one for the for my laptop in the next year or so. We will see about that one though.

I hope you're right about the second GPU, I'm all for more processing power. I'll settle for FCP to start rendering in the BG on a single unit.

oh yeah, i forgot to mention....this years version of my camera does 24mbps....My AVCHD camera does 17mbps. Still not too shabby. but just thought i would clarify that. -Nate

also it's using CMOS instead of CCD's. So that may affect the quality. not sure, as I am still somewhat a newbie. That's why I am going to film school, so I can learn. I finally have a saturday free and will try and get something put together as far as a test. Also, will be receiving the replacement a200 this friday too. so i will go out and shoot some shots for ya. Do you want the image as is? in other words, i don't really shoot perfect shots, because i am still new to using manual settings. I usually process with the RAW tool so i can fix the little things like the exposure. let me know whether thats ok or you want the unprocessed shot. I could send you a link to download the RAW file yourself so you could examine. However you would like, just let me know. -Nate

Post the video on vimeo where you can get a good sized version with low compression. CMOS imagers are only usually problematic where you've got strobing lights on a dark background or when you pan too quickly. Rolling shutter artifacts like half frames and skewed backgrounds are the result of the above. My Sony EX1 has CMOS imagers and I haven't seen anything bad from it yet but I am careful not to whip pan it. As far as the A200 goes you can throw them up here. It's pretty easy to tell how the cam is doing. I'm not sure I've seen anything from the A200 since I'm usually just hitting the Canon forums.