During the edit of a 60-second spot using RED footage I used QuickTime proxy files. Although this meant continuous rendering of transitions and effects it was painless. Eventually I needed to conform the proxies to their 1080/24p ProRes 422 counterparts. I didn’t bother with Crimson because there were only about 20-30 cuts.

With speed changes and video effects reapplied I prepared for the final render. It wasn’t long before Final Cut Pro generated this error message:

The effect ‘Scrub’ cannot be rendered in a sequence of this size with the current graphics card.

The Scrub filter had been successfully used throughout the entire edit: from proxy files to scrubbing the timeline in ProRes. I tested different video effects and received the same error message.

A forum post at CreativeCOW describes a similar problem. This was just one of many issues plauging my project so I took the easy way out by replacing the Scrub filter with one from Joe’s Filters.

While I was writing this I found a solution at LAFCPUG. Modify the render depth from 10-bit to 8-bit in the sequence settings.

This solution is also referenced in an Apple Support document. Unfortunately it doesn’t address why late-model Apple video cards generate the error. Lack of 10-bit color support or a bug?

I’ve been using IMDb to research the relationship of film editors (and assistants) with directors and having difficulty because the web interface doesn’t provide any type of advanced searching and reporting. IMDb Pro purports to have these features and, lo and behold, the Advanced Search page has every field you’d want to use when generating a custom report.

Anticipating great things I entered an extensive amount of search criteria spanning decades, film grosses, English language, etc. The results were a mess: not a single criterion was met.

Thinking I was taxing the system with complexity I tried this simple search with the intention of finding popular films in 1990:

• Released films from 1/1990 to 12/1990
• US Box Office Gross between 10M and 999M

Result? Films from the 1970s through 1990s and the BO gross was disregarded completely. Not good.

I sent a tech support request to IMDb and their answer wasn’t reassuring:

Greetings from the Internet Movie Database;

Thank you for contacting us.

Unfortunately, our current search forms do not provide a way to find this information. We are working on a number of enhancements to the site that will include a way to perform this search. There is no announced launch date for this new service.

You can also try posting your question in one of our online message boards (http://pro.imdb.com/boards/). One of the boards, called “I Need to Know”, is the right place to post questions you don’t know the answer to. Perhaps one of your fellow IMDb users can help:

http://pro.imdb.com/board/bd0000001/threads/

Please let us know if we can offer further assistance.

Nice to know what I’m paying for doesn’t actually exist but that’s another discussion. On the positive, IMDb offers their entire database as downloadable files for personal use. After downloading gigs of text files I opened one and expected to see a record format like this:

"Snyder, Zack","Watchmen"
"Snyder, Zack","300"
"Synder, Zack","Dawn of the Dead"

Instead:

Snyder, Zack[tab][tab]Watchmen
[tab][tab]300
[tab][tab]Dawn of the Dead

This is nearly unusable because it needs to be parsed into a column format for import into a database system. I attempted to use IMDbPy, a Python search library, for custom reporting but getting it to run is another matter. I decided against using software such as Eric’s Movie Database and JMDB because their reporting features weren’t detailed.

This leaves one option: writing my own software. Considering I don’t need to report on all IMDb data (just movie titles, editors, and directors) it makes the work a bit simpler. A record parser is being written in Perl to generate a properly formatted CSV file then imported to FileMaker Pro or Access where customized reports are a no-brainer.

It’s unfortunate IMDb Pro’s reporting feature is broken. Even worse that they advertise it as feature.

We’ve had numerous issues with our Final Cut Pro 6.02 project. Playback which simply repeats the same frames, media won’t stay connected, edits that magically undo themselves. Some of these are likely bugs while others are related to the six-year old project file and media.

In the hopes of righting whatever is wrong, we dumped (via XML export) our main sequence to a new project file. All was well until I began cutting it into separate reels and sequences respectively. Upon using the “Export to QuickTime Movie” option and the auto-render which takes place, I was greeted with a dialog box of General Error (48). This occurred 60% into the render.

This is actually an OS X (not FCP) error and according to this Apple Support topic error 48 is described as “Duplicate filename (rename); File found instead of folder.”

There are not many Internet references to error 48 but some suggest deleting SWF files and/or trashing Preferences. Neither of these worked for me.

I found a solution but, unfortunately, but the details are foggy in my head. Until the answer reveals itself I suggest a few places to look:

• Ensure you have enough free disk space on the render and autosave volumes
• Ensure you have sufficient file permissions to all FCP folders
• View project XML in a text editor and ensure file paths are correct

Digital Heaven’s VideoSpace widget, a disk storage calculator for video footage, has a new home on the ‘net: http://www.videospaceonline.com/. Use it anywhere your browser and iPhone can reach.

The ability of the Mac to put internal and external drives to sleep is excellent to reduce wear and lower power consumption. Unfortunately it’s not convenient while editing when your workflow is paused as drives spin up.

I considered writing an AppleScript to automate the on/off of “put hard drives to sleep whenever possible” in System Preferences but hadn’t gotten around to it. Digital Heaven has beat me to it with a start-up application called Disksomnia.

Once loaded it looks for any running instances of Final Cut Pro or Express and keeps the drives from falling asleep. According to the Studio Daily Blog it doesn’t work with Avid or Premiere but we can hope Digital Heaven will support them at a later date. Free download from this page.

[via Studio Daily Blog]