Final Cut Pro to VS4

QUOTE...
Final Cut Pro to VS4:

We are successfully doing this here in Santa Cruz. I may have a word or two
wrong but a little fiddling with your system and this can be duplicated.
1) Finish a project in Final Cut Pro
2) Using FCP, make a complete QuickTime Movie in a .mov file
3) Open Compressor and bring in your completed FCP QT.mov
4) Using Compressor, open the Inspector window and from within the Extras
tab in Inspector you can change the settings by checking the checkbox for
"Multiplexed MPEG-1/Layer 2 Audio.
5) this ouputs a MPEG-2 Transport stream or .mts file or .m2t file depending
on the process.....save this file to your desktop or drive.
6) to make this file playable by CableCast, simply rename the file suffix or
type to .mpg, ignore the warnings about damage etc.
7) move or copy this file over your network to the VS4 server
8) whala...

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How long does this process take for a 30 minute show?

Depends on the speed of your machine, and really on how fast your disk i/o is.

If you do one pass encoding, it can take a little longer than the length of your show. Two pass is about 2.5 times longer. This is on your average dual core dual proc machine with 4 gigs of ram and your regular Apple drive.

I did encoding on a dual proc server hooked up via fiber to a RAID 5 array split into two. The original footage was on one half, the finished footage on the other half. It took 1/3 of the time that the dual core dual proc with more ram took. Speed of your drives and how fast the computer can communicate with it is the most important factor when encoding in my experience.

At the very least, if you have two drives in a desktop not sharing a cable, it can speed things up a little when your source files are on one and your encoding file is saving to the other.

If you encode a lot, have at least a gig network, and a few extra OS X machines with compressor running (different serials), you can use compressor split over up to 10 machines which will significantly speed up your encoding time.

Saving as a Quicktime first and then bringing that into Compressor is a waste of time when dealing with longer program times unless your workflow forces you into it for some reason. If you use shared storage, you can even just open up a project file on another machine to do the encoding if you need your editing machine to do more work.

We had about 25 FCP machines using 13 TB of Apple RAID 5 over GIG-E but with the server using two GIG-E ports that were bound by the Layer-3 manager switch. Every machine could run about 3 to 4 streams of video at once with very little bottle necks. There were sometimes a little flakiness if kids tried to capture directly to the storage while many others were pounding on it. So we had 5 machines that we still used externals to capture to, then move the footage into their home directory and go sit on an editing machine instead of a capture machine. Everyone logged in via LDAP on one of the OS X servers so that all preferences for each user were defined and their home directory was present with all work files on any machine. Pretty slick setup, but certainly required me to watch over it. But it sped up work flow for 80 to 100 kids a day and maximized the equipment usage.

Michael Dube
617-290-6453
trmsboards@mikedube.com