"Have you ever received an error telling you to BUY something?!"
As some of you know, I’ve recently been editing a commercial video for Samsung’s latest line of BluRay players. As part of the promotion Fort Productions (www.fortproductions.com) has produced a short film designed to show off the astonishing quality of the Samsung BluRay technology.
After a lightening fast edit, I prepared the sequence for mix. When Chris, our very talented sound recordest / editor / engineer (yes folks he knows it ALL!), attempted to open the natively 23.976 fps timeline we encountered an error unlike anything either of us have ever seen: An error telling us not only that a feature wasn’t available but that we had to BUY a very specific upgrade if we wanted that feature!
What? I mean really?
Wait, please, allow me to provide some context. Chris is editing on a Hardware Dependent ProTools 6; G4, OS X 10.3.9 (Chris correct me if I’m wrong on the tech details!). A little out-dated? Given, yes. YET, some of the greatest music of the late 90’s was cut on this system. Besides, if Jaws, The Godfather II and Star Wars was in stereo, who really needs HD surround sound?
The closest encounter I’ve experienced to such droll was Avid informing me to update my Dongle to run Media Composer on OS X Leopard. But that’s an upgrade path. Review the statements made about the hardware; THERE IS NO UPGRADE PATH. ProTools 6 is locked in to a very specific system and I believe is technically EOL according to Avid. The Sync I/O the error is requesting an upgrade to? I couldn’t even find a working one on eBay for this version of ProTools. Ouch.
Of course, being the nerd that I am, how could I not offer a solution to the problem?
We walked the fine line of 24fps timebase. Yup. Commercial work is so short that we found that sync was not affected in any significant way.
:: BUT :: I know that this won’t help all of you out there. The next best solution: if you have access to Apple’s Cinema Tools you can open the *.wav / *.aiff and conform the sound file to 23.976 ; allowing a perfect sync match. Neato huh?
Okay, off to finish the new website upload!
Nice writing style. I look forward to reading more in the future.