Dimitris Stasinos

29 minutes ago, Thpriest said:

Hi Dimitris, yes, they remain pixelated. It's very weird.

Yep this is weird. Let's take this from start since i am using the same camera and software.

You are importing your clips and then create both proxy and optimised media, right?

Have you checked your project's codec settings for optimised media? Is it ProRes 422?

You can try to import one of the problematic clips without creating optimised media (with different file name) and see what happens. 

Maybe there is some corruption happening when the original media are re-encoded and then replaced by ProRes files.

3 hours ago, Thpriest said:

I'm editing a video shot with the GH5 in 4k 10 bit on a 1080p timeline in FCPX (like I have done 100s of times before) but some of the shots appear pixelated in the timeline (but not in the browser). Others are fine. I have the settings for Best Quality and Optimised Media but it's as if some shots are stuck in proxy. Anyone had a similar experience or know how to fix it?

High Sierra 10.13.6 FCPX 10.4.6

If you render those clips in your timeline, do they still look pixelated?

1 hour ago, Paul Jonathan said:

Dimitris, there seems to a simple software fix posted on the Macrumors forum, did that work for you?

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/any-one-notices-the-cracking-popping-sound-of-new-16-inch-mbp.2211902/page-7?post=28012328#post-28012328

Hi Paul. Yep this works on every affected unit. Actually what it does is keeping the internal audio interface in standby mode as the popping occurs due to aggressive switching. The only drawback of this workaround is that the battery life is affected as the switching was there in first place to prevent fast battery drain.

Hi guys, i will repeat my self once again just to make sure that you have been warned about this.

Three out of four 16 inch units are producing pop sounds through their speakers during media playback.

I have a 2019 15 inch model and it does this too, but the 16 inch models are producing louder pop sounds due to the new speaker design.

This is by 90% a software issue but it's not known when and "if" Apple will resolve this through a software update. So maybe you should wait for a couple of months.

If you are ready to spend 3000$ on one of those units, please take some time to read my thread on Apple's site before stepping in an Apple store:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250758649?answerId=251719472022&page=1

I opened the above thread regarding my 15 inch unit's problem but many early adopters of the 16 inch laptop came in to report the same issue. 

I have uploaded 2 videos on YT demonstrating the issue. You will find the links there (there are 4 pages, read them all). In the second video you will see that during an editing session inside FCPX you will hear thousands of pops by just skimming through your media. There is a workaround but it will drain your battery faster.

On 11/22/2019 at 8:23 PM, Emanuel said:

Sold : -)

 

I can see some terrible artifacts there on the trees and especially on fast movements. I am not talking about compression blocks, those are normal. During the first minute i could see an entire tree wobbling around. This is a very promising drone so i can't wait for some SOC footage.

5 hours ago, EthanAlexander said:

I guess I'm in the minority on the forum enjoying Apple. 

When I have to take out my wallet, being on mac sucks, but it's worth it just to be able to use FCPX and avoid Premiere. Maybe one day I'll have the time to learn Resolve for anything besides color and consider Windows then... 

Nahhh just kidding I'm a fanboy I'll never leave.

Don't get me wrong, i am enjoying the platform too. My iMacs have been real workhorses and FCPX is a gem. 

But when you get into a situation similar to the one i described above you are forced to reconsider the real value of these products, especially the hardware part.

Imagine paying 4500$ from your hard earned money for a laptop and then plugging in your earphones to avoid listening to the 2000 pops that will be produced during an editing session. Then imagine claiming your customer rights from a company that like @kaylee said above "doesn't talk about it". 

Also, the customer support in USA is way better than here in Europe. 

1 hour ago, Aquilasfx said:

ehi bro, your machine is faulty, mine doesn't produce this problem...

This is not my point. Of course my machine is faulty. 

My point is that a great number of these laptops are sold this way and Apple refuses to fix them. If your machine doesn't have this issue then lucky you.

Guys, believe me the latest MacBook Pro generations are total garbage. After too much scepticism I finally decided to pull the trigger on an almost maxed out 2019 model.

Just 3 months ago i ordered a BTO Macbook 2019 with 32 GB Ram and a Vega 20 inside.

The first thing i noticed was the crappy butterfly keyboard but i already knew the story so I ordered a silicone cover to protect it from dust.

Then while installing my apps i noticed that the right speaker was producing a pop sound every 30-60 seconds. After an extensive research i found out that this is a common problem with 2018-19 MacBook generations and Apple refuses to investigate the cause of this issue and fix it. You can find many videos demonstrating this issue on the net. Here is mine:

The audio popping in my case is constant. On the video above you can see just a way to replicate this. Working with Final Cut is a nightmare as every time the cursor is falling on a clip or the timeline a pop is produced from the right speaker.

Almost every 2019 model produces this pop while playing - skipping any type of media, although in a different volume. If there is a volume threshold where this is starting to annoy you, mine is over that. I visited 3 different Apple stores and i could clearly listen the pop on their display machines, although in a much smaller volume than mine. So many models have been affected.

It is not known yet if this is a software or a hardware issue.

As i said above, Apple technicians are refusing to investigate this. I don't know if the new 16 inch model will have this issue, as they changed the speaker configuration.

So be aware, this new 16" model might seem ideal for video editing but if serious problems like mine appear, Apple may never fix them.

PS. Shot on GH5 and Olympus 12-40, LOL

24 minutes ago, leslie said:

the 4 was ok for me, mind you i wasn't shooting marathons or anything. I did notice with the 6 there was a flare or sunspot with the original lens cover on the front which annoyed me. It is with some irony that i say i  have bought a battery eliminator for the 4 i own and the eight has now been released. Maybe i'll see some issues running the gopro for extended amounts of time. i will continue to use the four and six till something breaks i guess.

Some people have been using them for a longe time without serious issues. My worst experience was with the Hero 7. I lost almost a full day of shooting on a kayak. I had the latest firmware back then, a tested SD card formatted in the device and while everything seemed perfect the camera didn't record a single frame. Actually i pressed record many times as i didn't want to end up with a single file and i could see clearly the record status on the display. 

On 10/16/2019 at 10:56 AM, JudoSurfer said:

Osmo Action has inferior video quality and exposure balance, lacks GPS, ONLY has super cropped stabilization (vs HERO8 On, High, and Boost), does not have auto cloud uploading, has very limited language support for voice commands, lacks stabilization in 4:3, lacks Superview, doesn't offer 2/7K/120fps, has inferior audio, does not offer the much more efficient HEVC (which HERO8 not only has, but has at 100mbps, surpassing h.264 100mbs considerably), lacks live streaming, and has a poorer version of TimeWarp (stabilized Time Lapse).  When it come to actual video quality, Osmo Action doesn't even match HERO7 Black.  Considering the HERO8 has even better dynamic range and quality, the Osmo Action is far from competing with HERO8 Black (even without the Mods).

This is just specs comparison. In real life OSMO action works like a charm with acceptable image quality in Cine D while GoPro cameras where always glitchy and unreliable. I can't tell about the new GoPro as i don't have it but Hero 4, 5, 6 and 7 where simply unreliable. Those bugs where never resolved so i wouldn't expect the 8th version to be better. 

For the majority of content creators (including my self) this machine simply does not exist. It was released yesterday in a parallel universe. Stop looking at it.

If you need 28 cores and 1.5 TB of RAM for your every day jobs then this price tag is probably just fine for you. 

If you are about to start saving money by sacrificing other needs that you may have, so that you can buy the base configuration in the next year, then don't this. It's just silly.

When you are buying the base configuration of a Mac Pro, you are actually paying for things that you can't use until you stuff it with overpriced components. You are paying for the "fact" that your machine has the "ability" to get significant upgrades like 1.5 TB of Ram, 4 TB SSD, 4 x Vega's etc. If you need to "save" money for the base configuration then good luck with the rest. It won't happen. Stop looking at it.

The iMac 2019 right now is the perfect balance for almost any content creator that can't afford the new MacPro. iMac Pro is also overpriced for the majority of users.

I' am working with iMacs and FCPX for the last 10 years as a full time video editor for TV shows. Every 3-4 years i am selling my iMac and getting the next one, so the actual cost for every upgrade comes to 1500 to 2000 euros. FCPX is a truly unique and reliable application and yes i have worked with Premiere, Vegas and Resolve before. You have to actually "work" with an application and not just "test" it to make conclusions. If you are editing 10 min highlights or low budget commercials then all of these work just fine but wait until you need to edit a full length movie or a 2 hour documentary to see how the app reacts to this massive amount of data. FCPX is "rock steady". Period. 

A "slightly" upgraded iMac 2019 with Intel Core i9, 1TB SSD and Vega 48 (plus user upgraded RAM to 32 GB) will cost you about 5000 bucks. Is this overpriced? Of course it is. But it's also much faster from the base configuration of the cheese grater and you get a great monitor plus peripherals. Is it upgradable? Of course not. But nothing is upgradable nowadays, even this cheese grater. In about 5 years from now, this badass Mac Pro 2019 and it's tech will be totally obsolete and in 10 years from now that fu*^%ing  bul*&@t Afterburner (that i am sure it will cost 10.000.000 dollars plus tax) will be sold for 100 bucks in ebay.

12 minutes ago, Kisaha said:

Cinematography dreams can only be expensive!

Lol, I think i will have my first dream about this in about two years when the prices settle down.

Let's wait and see, but this is definitely going to be a killer tool.

L5 Rumor

Panasonic Cine Lumix  S1H will be announced on May 31
It’s L-mount
New Full Frame sensors
Records 6K24p and 4k60p
Records 10bit 4:2:2 internal at 30p and external 60p
14bit Dynamic Range
Cinematography dream gear
It’s built like a tank.
Slightly bigger than the S1-S1R for better heat dissipation
full built-in log settings
lot more epxensive than the S1R (Lol)

“I know it was THAT dark because I saw it.”

I am watching everything on a 31" calibrated LG monitor.

If i calibrate my monitor to pull out the blacks from this mess then everything else will be a pain to watch. Or does Mr Wagner suggests that we create a dedicated profile on our monitors so that we can watch GOT? So lets take this a step further and ask Mr. Wagner to create a GOT Color Chart.

This is like blaming the audience for not being able to calibrate their 200$ speakers so that they can listen to the bass track on a 10.000$ audio production that have been mixed on a 100.000 audio workstation. WTF?

It seems the Pana has adopted Sony's pattern in their mirrorless names. We have a plain S1 and S1R so maybe a model named S1S will follow later this year just as G5S came after GH5. I haven't seen a single rumour about this yet but it's very logical and possible to happen. Maybe they are waiting for A7 SIII to come out and then fight back. 

Given the fact that the pricing is on par with Sony, making them serious investments, i wouldn't buy any of these two at the moment (maybe a second GH5 would be a better purchase).

Also, the pricing of the 3 new lenses is not competitive at all. These are normal prices for full frame lens but quite expensive for Lumix users that will make the jump into the new system. The new 50mm lens is seriously overpriced. I am curious though to see the build quality, hoping that it will be a step up from Pana's MFT line with their lame plastics.

10 hours ago, pathfinder said:

 

I've never met anyone with an 8K monitor. If someone out there is salivating over the idea of trudging through the arduous process of adapting their worklow around 8K, then... well... there's one born every minute they say. I dread to think what the render times are like with 8K, but it must be a downright misery.

I am no fan of 8K either at the moment, it's too soon for our systems to handle it. I even wrote 2 articles last year on redshark about how the industry is pushing us to this direction with no reason at all (i mean there is no benefit for us, the reason for them is of course long term profit).

But it will eventually happen and we have to accept this. Of course it will take some time as 4K is not established yet, i am still delivering in Full HD and no client has asked me a 4K export yet.

Anyway, as i said the Axiom camera is an admirable effort but the concept of an adaptive body is not that simple. You can't just swap a camera's sensor with a newer one and expect it to work without serious software development and hardware updates. Even their prototype has a long way until it's fully functional and the specs are getting already obsolete by this year's releases.

They where also getting close exactly 2 years before today. This is definitely a huge effort and i can partially understand the various difficulties behind the project but it is moving too slow in a fast moving market. By the time (and if) this camera is 100% functional, 8K will be a must, new sensors with better DR & sensitivity will flood the market (this has already happened) and ProRes (if not RAW) will be a standard codec in the sub 2000$ (if not less) category. As far as i know (i am not an expert in any way) this design is based on a couple of 5 year old (or more) sensors and i don't think it will be THAT modular and adaptive to newer sensor designs. Correct me if i am wrong on this but i think this project needs massive funding and a group of 10-20 full time developers to keep going, or else it's doomed.

@Andrew Reid Some food for thought as winter is coming. EOSHD is already a big and healthy community. Guess what could compliment your site...

Right! A bunch of servers. It does't have to implement personal funding. I would prefer paying a fee to you and this community than any company to store my videos.

Not big enough to be subject to those silly regulations. Big enough for your videos to reach your audience. 

2 hours ago, dslnc said:

Sure, that is the basic way embedding a video onto a webpage today. If that’s all you need you are good to go ?

However if you need stats or having the minimum ambition regarding the player functionality and looks it is another story.

And more importantly the distribution on the internet. The user experience.

If you want your 1080p or 4K video to play relatively fast forget about uploading it to your shared web host plan thinking that is it.

To perform well and stream fast the video has to be hosted on a good CdN too

Further more people are used to adaptive streaming. Not just one bitrate version of the video being downloaded. It is more important than ever since many are watching using their phone on the go.

It seems simple but for high performance delivery and smooth experience the embed code is just a very small part of the equation.

 

 

These are all valid points. I am going to try this anyway and give you guys some feedback here. The plans are monthly so it won't be o costly test.

We can do some other tests too. I can post a video here and you can give me some feedback about it's playback performance.

The facts are solid though. YouTube is low quality, Vimeo is unreliable and all the alternatives are expensive, at least for the majority of users.

So we can push this further from being a debate to a collective effort towards a simple and clean solution. Apparently we are not trying to cover an extreme scenario, say a website with 2000 visitors a day and 4 digit number of videos. Something like this would produce a significant amount of income so the cost would not be a problem.

Let's put down a typical scenario, something like a 100 video portfolio collection and 50-100 visitors a day. Would a dedicated server nail this? I don't know... 

But if there is a place we can address this it's this forum.

I think we lean towards Cloud Storage VS Dedicated Server, money wise.

1 hour ago, webrunner5 said:

The biggest fear I would have Owning your own servers is not mechanical problems, it is outside attacks. Viruses, trojans, worms, spyware, etc.. That stuff is a damn hard cookie to control for the average person.

Some (actually many) server providers have an extra back up service (paid). It is like the Time Machine in OSX. If you get an attack and your data are corrupted (or lost) you can contact the support and ask them to restore your system from automatically saved backups. The cost for this varies from one company to another but on average it's about 50 bucks/month. Too expensive for my needs though...

Also, if you worry about disk failure you can choose a system with 2 drives and go with soft. raid. The extra cost is minimal, about 3$/month for an extra 2TB disk.

Cloud storage works differently. The data are stored in multiple locations and their servers are software protected (kinda..) so they are less vulnerable than dedicated servers.

4 hours ago, tomekk said:

 

O/S troubleshooting if something stops working, well, if you can fix it yourself then that is fine, some problems are easy to fix but if you cannot fix it then you have to pay someone or learn how to fix it. If you do not mind having your server down for long periods of time and spending days/weeks learning how to fix an issue then fine.

 

Almost every company i spoke to takes full responsibility of server maintenance. Even on the cheapest plan the company is committed to change a faulty drive/power supply (these are the most common problems) in 3 hours. And this is the most self-evident thing to do as you are not the owner of the server, you are just renting it so you are not responsible for it's proper function. 

Many of these companies are offering free basic support services as well, like setting up the software for remote access and creating direct links for your data. 

Overall it's much simpler these days than it was in the past. Better & cheaper servers, simpler & more effective software plus better support.

4 hours ago, andrgl said:

I'd take this a step further an investigate how competitive $$$ a dedicated server is versus using cloud storage from the big 3: Amazon S3, Azure Blob and Google Cloud Storage.

Yeah, the truth is i could use some help digging this

The cost in cloud storage is calculated through many factors of usage. I am not sure yet what role does data storage location plays. 

It could be an alternative (i just saw vimeo in Google's client list for cloud storage)

On 11/4/2018 at 11:46 PM, andrgl said:

@Dimitris Stasinos

I took closer look at this.

Dropbox does not re-encode your videos. So you get whatever quality you want, BUT, you have maximum bandwidth of 20 GB free and 200 GB paid, per day, for entire account.

Elite Player method for streaming Gdrive videos is bad. Can't do large files and your videos stop streaming arbitrarily due to exceeding an unknown amount of bandwidth. You'll be seeing a lot of this... (edit: actually you won't, the videos will simply not stream.)

I just did a quick search on dedicated servers & pricing. Prices start from 8 bucks/month to 100 for a dedicated server (dual core Atom, 2 TB of storage and unmetered traffic for the cheapest option) and there is also the solution of a virtual machine where your data are being copied to different machines and stay intact in case of a hardware failure. You can rent a virtual machine with 18 bucks/month for 100GB of storage (again with unmetered traffic and 100mbps speeds). 

It seems like a solid solution. A little more expensive than vimeo but definitely cheaper than Wistia, Vzaar etc. You can always split the cost between associates.

We just did a test by uploading an HD clip on our site's host and playing it through a free video plugin for wordpress and it worked fine. The video plays instantly (i can't say this for vimeo) and you can upload three different versions for different devices.

29 minutes ago, andrgl said:

Those videos are re-encoded on upload, no different from hosting on YouTube.

A user would have to download the file from a Google drive link to actually get the original quality.

Are you referring to self-hosting videos? This is the case with Vimeo also. The only difference is that Vimeo uses adaptive encoding.

So will the same thing happen when using a direct link from Google drive or Dropbox into Elite? Will the player by it's self re-encode the file?

On 11/3/2018 at 12:43 AM, andrgl said:

Google drive direct linking has been dead since 2016.

You used to be able to hotlink to media files but now you can only share the file, which means whatever link is generated, takes you to the google drive page.

The developer of Elite player gives some workarounds on their Envato support page plus you can buy the Wonderplugin which is a direct link generator for Google drive. This is by far the most cost effective solution for hosting videos on your low traffic page. It may not fit Andrew's needs for EOSHD but it is a good option for building a simple portfolio page. The suggested alternatives here look way overpriced, at least for my needs.