A few days ago RED quietly released a beta plug-in for the Log and Transfer tool in FCP that makes the RED workflow very similar to the P2 workflow. I tried it out yesterday, and it worked well.
Once it's installed, you can drag in a RED clip directory and it will automatically bring up that clip and all other clips in the same hierarchy, along with what you'd expect from a P2 import (thumbnail, "proxy", ability to mark in/out, etc, and a bunch more information. The Editblog has a bit of a rundown on it.
Every once in awhile, I pull out the old Griffin iMic to record some quick voiceover. Because I do it so infrequently, I always forget how to set it up to get rid of the terrible buzz. Here's how to get a pretty quiet signal out of the iMic:
Open Quicktime Pro, and open a new audio recording. Put headphones on and turn the little volume slider on the left up so that you can hear the microphone passthrough. If you can't hear it, open system preferences, sound, select the proper input (iMic in this case), and make sure the input volume is turned up. Once you have it working, close and restart quicktime to make sure all of your input settings are being used properly.
Now, at this point I always have a fairly clear signal, but with an annoying underlying buzz.
To get rid of the buzz, I open a new Quicktime recording, and turn up the volume slider on it so I can hear the passthrough again. Then, I open the Audio Midi Setup in the Utilities folder, and mess around with the channels drop-down menu. In my case, it was set at 44.1kHz, with 2ch-16bit. Changing to 2ch-8bit produces a different, yet equally annoying noise tone. If I change to 1ch-16bit though, it's crystal clear (or at least as clear as the iMic is going to give me).
If you want to use 48kHz, you'll have to set it, then restart quicktime to test it out, as it will go silent otherwise.
I usually use a Seinheiser G2 wireless Lav Mic setup with the iMic. I don't have a sound booth, so by going wireless, I can leave the room and go into a nearby quiet room to do the recording. I use the lav because my only other choice is a shotgun, and the lav has a lot less ambient noise.
The Sony XDCAM EX requires XDCAM transfer software 2.5 or greater to get the footage into FCP. I have that installed on the Mac Pro for general XDCAM HD work, but the Mac Pro doesn't have an ExpressCard Slot. What to do?
One of the editors here has a Macbook Pro, but instead of installing the software on his machine, capturing, and then copying the footage over to where it needed to be (requiring multiple steps), I did the following:
Note: This is certainly not the fastest way to do things... the footage imported at 0.5x. It is, however, very hands off and a quick fix when the camera is out of the shop.
update: We have since purchased a Sony SxS external card reader, which solves all of our problems.
I'm in pre-production on a 30 minute short film being shot this upcoming weekend on a new RED camera. We did a camera test yesterday, and the editing side of things looks to be a bit more complicated than I imagined. Here are some of my notes, along with my thoughts on how I plan to tackle the project.
More after the jump...
I just discovered that you have to fiddle with a Dell display to get it to look right on a Mac.
After my main editing system died last week in the middle of a project (long story), I had to quickly switch and finish the project on my macbook. It was a 720P project on an external hard drive, so this was no problem.
So I unplugged one of my Dell 24" displays from the dead computer, and set it up as a secondary monitor for the macbook. What I noticed through this process was that the footage looked way brighter on the macbook screen than it did on the Dell screen.
I went fiddling in the physical menu of the monitor, and what I discovere was a setting on the monitor menu that changed everything!
Open the menu, and use the buttons to go over to "Color Settings". Next to "Color Settings Mode", you'll see PC Mode and MAC Mode. The interface sucks here... light blue means selected, and bright white means unselected. So unbeknownst to me, I had been in PC Mode for a whole year! I switched to Mac Mode, and all of a sudden, the screen colours brightened up and matched the macbook perfectly.
BTW: I highly recommend Dell 24" displays. They are reasonably priced, and absolutely comparable in quality to the 23" Apple Cinema displays. I like them better because they are a bit bigger, a lot more adjustable, and have a black frame instead of silver.
