<<<-- Originally posted by Dylan Pank : AIC is 4 times HDV's datarate (1m=1GB) but much easier to edit. Conversion starts as you capture, but you have to wait, depending on your computer's speed, for the conversion to catch up. Only a dual 2.5 G5 seems capable of simultaneous realtime conversion. -->>>

My dual 1.8 (PCI-X) does real-time 1/1 HDV-AIC capture/conversion in iMovie HD. I have 2GB RAM so that probably makes all the difference.

<<<-- Originally posted by Murad Toor : My dual 1.8 (PCI-X) does real-time 1/1 HDV-AIC capture/conversion in iMovie HD. I have 2GB RAM so that probably makes all the difference. -->>>

I expect you're right about the RAM. Since I don't have access to any G5s at the moment my test was based on Internet reports, so it's good to have a real world example.

<<<-- Originally posted by Dylan Pank : I expect you're right about the RAM. Since I don't have access to any G5s at the moment my test was based on Interet reports, so it's good to have a real world example. -->>>

Yup... I recall reading somewhere in these forums that someone with a dual 1.8 and 1GB RAM (maybe Heath?) didn't get real-time 1/1 HDV/AIC capture/transcoding, so when I tried it on my system and got real-time 1/1 I figured it's the RAM.

I have a 1.6 ghz Power Mac, single processor. I'm curious how those with dual-processors are fairing. And the 1/2 to 1/4 speed was in capture, not playback.

heath

photos not importing correctly into imovie
 

I resized some photos in photoshop cs to 720 x 480. They are letterboxed (black bars on left and right sides) to maintain the correct aspect ratio.

When I bring them into imovie 4, the photos have a black bar on the top and are cutting off some of the bottom. They imported fine into fcp hd.

Anyone know why imovie isn't displaying the photos correctly?

Make sure the Ken Burns effect is not being applied by default. I seem to remember that being a problem with importing photos into iMovie...

iMovie expects stills to be 640x480. If you resize and crop your photos to that size, they'll import nicely (without letter boxing).

Mono to Stereo with Imovie?
 

I just recorded a family wedding with a lav mic. Imovie will only pick up the audio as a single track on the right side. Is there a way to balance the audio in Imovie? Alternatively, is there a low budget approach to balance a single audio input short of purchasing Final Cut?

This is a cinch with Quicktime (but I think you need the Pro key for QT) In iMovie, click 'Share' in the File menu and select Quicktime. Select advanced options and save your movie to AIFF on the Desktop. This may take a while depending on your processor and RAM, but you will then have a file on your desktop that is a Quicktime version of only the audio of your movie. Open that file in a sound editor (there are numerous good free onces available on the net) and when you have it open, you may see a stereo field where the audio is only on one side. Copy that whole side and paste it to duplicate on the other side also. This will give you audio for both left and right. Save the file.

Re-open your iMovie project and drag your new audio file into the timeline and make certain that it is in sync with your movie.

(Note: At this time, you will want to silence the video track and use the audio from your new stereo track)

Hope this helps.
-Jon

I got QT7 pro and it worked great, Thanks!

iMovie HD, export to FCP HD
 

Well, I'm picking up an FX1 in the next couple days. My problem is, I can't afford Final Cut Studio just yet, since I'm spending over $3000 on the camera. I don't want to spend almost $200 on LumiereHD or a similar program, since I do plan to buy Studio fairly soon.


So.... I came up with a concept for editing. Can someone with an HDV camera, iMovie HD, and FCPHD test this out for me? Here's my conceptual workflow:

1) Import footage into iMovie HD.
2) Export a full quality HD clip to QuickTime (Share option?)
3) Import that clip to Final Cut Pro HD
4) Edit in FCPHD

If this workflow is impossible (export from iMovie doesn't work or something), is there a way I could get the footage into FCPHD without buying any software? Any freeware solutions? Thanks in advance!

Eric,

What you are saying does work but in my mind is limited. The big issue you will see is that the Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) that iMovie uses to import the stream is less than desirable if you are looking to preserve full quality. With this method you downgrade the footage with the first step.

I noticed the noise that AIC introduced with the first time I tried it this way.

If best quality is what you are after, it is better to do the Lumiere approach or bite the bullet on FCP5.

Thanks for the advice. I want to get FCP 5, it's a matter of talking the parents into a loan to pay for it ;-).

Why not get FCP Express, doesn't it support HDV? $250

Not a bad idea, is there any way to export from Express to Pro 4.5? I'd like to be able to use Pro for some of the more advanced stuff.

Final Cut Express HD is not any better than iMovie HD for HDV work. Both use the Intermediate Codec.

I digitized some footage last night using IMovie HD. Man, was I disappointed. It looked like hell, totally unusable. Sometime in the last month or two I remember installing an improved AIC from Apple's auto-update, I'd hate to have seen the old one.

I then went and downloaded the Cineform AspectHD demo app and digitized the footage. What a difference!

My advice is stay out of IMovie and FC Express.

Wow- I had no idea it employed a different compression scheme---- I see why everyone was waiting for FCP5 with native HDV editing.


How does the Lumiere workflow compare- does it compress or alter the footage on export back to camera?

Importing to iMovie
 

When I import to iMovie with the automatic scene detection on i get a couple frames from the next scene at the end of the previous scene...this seems to happen quite a few times in a 60 minute miniDV tape. How can i stop this from happening?

We'll see, but unfortunately I don't think you'll get much response to iMovie questions here. We seem to be more oriented towards FCP. Have you looked at the resources on Apple's support site:

http://www.apple.com/support/imovie/

and their discussion groups:

http://discussions.info.apple.com/we...ed2QU.0@imovie

thanks for the links i'll check them out.

i do have education discount though and FCP express is only 200 canadian. Is this a problem in FCP as well? right now i'm just editing my family's home videos...is FCP express overkill? I've kind of mastered iMovie and am strongly considering switching up...maybe it's time.

FCE would give you a lot more control in your editing, but would require a little more learning on your part. Nothing to be too scared of however!

I can't really answer your question. I don't use automatic scene detectly like iMovie has. I'm not even sure if that's supported in FCE and FCP. Generally you can use something called "capture now" whereby you roll the tape and watch it on a viewer. Then click the capture now button and it will begin importing your footage until to press the ESC key. If it encounters a timecode break it will stop though.

But the preferred method of capturing is called "batch capture." With this you play through your whole tape, and you manually click a button to mark where to start and end capturing, then give each segment a name. So one tape might be manually broken down into a dozen or more separate clips. When you finish designating all the in and out points for these you click "batch capture," the tape rewinds, captures the first clip, fast forwards and captures the next, etc. The advantage to this is that if you keep records (which I'm pretty sloppy at unfortunately) you could recreate your project again by just popping in each tape and letting the computer recapture all the clips, based on their time codes.

Sounds good, thanks for the info Boyd. I ordered Final Cut Express...can you recommend some books or online articles I should check out to get started or should i do what i normally do and just start messing around?

iMovie 4 projects in iMovie HD?
 

This might not be appropriate for most users of this forum who use FCP, etc, but I have been waiting a few months to do some upgrading on my system due to the contancy of projects that I have been working on.

I am about to upgrade to Tiger that has been sitting on my desk since April, right next to iLife '05, and the Apple Production Suite.

I have been running Jaguar (10.2.8) and cannot run these apps on that. I skipped Panther, and have been waiting for a 'dead spot' in my production schedule to do all my upgrades and deal with potential buggy aftermath before my next production comes around.

I still have a few projects done in iMovie '04 that I might want to open and tweak a little bit. I undertand that iMovie '05 organizes its media files differently in a project folder than iMovie '04 did. If this is true, than my question is the following:

Will I still be able to open earlier iMovie projects using iMovie HD ('05) with point and click ease, or is it even possible?
-Jon

I recently upgraded and had 1 old Imovie4 project that I needed to open. It opened it, and just asked if I wanted to change the attributes. Once doing so I could not go back. I clicked ok and haven't had a problem.

I think that was the answer you were looking for but perhaps I missed something in your original post.

Hi Jonathan. It's certainly appropriate, although I don't think we have very many members using iMovie... so thanks for your input Nathan!

One of the best places to get more feedback on iMovie would be Apple's own support forum which you will find here:

http://discussions.info.apple.com/we...JrVeX.0@imovie

Note that upgrading to 10.4 creates issues with Apple's "Pro Apps" like Final Cut Pro and Motion, but if you aren't running these you will probably be fine.

Final Cut Express vs iMovie vs FCP Pro studio
 

The final cut express for 299 purchased with an imac seems pretty powerful.

1) what makes it different from iMovie and can I get by with it without getting Final Cut Pro studio? I am new to this game and can't afford the studio right now.

2) Would i be better served saving up for the whole studio set or getting express?

3) Also, could I simply upgrade from FC express to pro later on? I couldn't see that info on Apple's site.

Thanks for any info!

G

I cut on FCP alone for about a year and a half. Don't bother to get Final Cut Pro now, you'll be too swamped with the interface alone to cut anything that FCE can't handle. The studio package is good, but as you said, you don't have the money yet, so why bother waiting? You can upgrade when you've made/saved enough money.

Gilbert,

From reading your other posts and reading this one, your experience is similar to the progression I have gone through.

I started cutting last fall on my powerbook with imovie. I hit the limits of imovie really fast because I wanted to do things that just weren't possible in that program (there are still a number of things i really like it for. if you need to do something quick and have it be very simple imovie is great), so I moved on to FCE. I have a very good understanding of FCE which correlates directly into FCP, but FCP has many more capabilities.

I know you are considering purchasing a computer with the program so your decisions are bigger than mine were at the time. I would ask myself this question and answer very honestly. "How committed am I to making this go all the way?" If the answer is that you are 100% committed, then do not pass go, purchase a Powermac G5 dual and Final Cut Studio and pour yourself into it. I just read a post from Chris Hurd in another topic that made it clear "If you're waiting you aren't creating." I really agree with him on this one.

If this is something you just want to dabble in, and hope that you get lucky and one day find out you can do it professionally, than I say buy the imac you are considering, and get FCE. With this you will have two great programs (imovie comes with the imac)

The ending to my story went like this....I'm an addict. A fixator as my parents always called it. I can't get enough, and as soon as I figured my way around FCE, I wanted to begin learning Motion while I perfected final cut. With some financial luck, I purchased Final Cut Studio, and a Dual G5 and haven't regretted it for one second. I am still in the very early stages of my development as an editor but I am never going to be limited by the tools at hand. That is a very good feeling for me.

I wish you the best of luck.

Thanks a lot to both of you! I think I will get started with FCE and iMac so I can start creating!

G

The upgrade from FCE to FCP is $700, not cheap. However I suppose there's little downside since FCP costs $1000 new while FCE plus the FCP upgrade also costs $1000.

But you might just ponder this a bit more. I don't think it will be any harder to learn how to use FCP than FCE, and if you're serious you will someday want to upgrade I suspect. It's annoying - Apple used to have a chart which showed the differences on their website, but now it's gone. The link is still there, but it's broken.

Just off the top of my head I can think of a couple nice things that FCP offers over FCE. For one thing, FCE doesn't have the 3 way color corrector which is something I personally use a lot (it has the 2 way corrector). It also lacks the batch capture feature which I also find extremely useful. Using this, you set the in/out points for all the clips you want to capture as you play through your tape. Then you start the batch and only those segments you've chosen will be captured. AFAIK, in FCE you would have to individually capture each clip, or capture the whole tape. FCE also doesn't support DVCPRO, in case you think there's a Panasonic P2 cam in your future ;-)

I'm sure there are other differences as well. None of these prevents you from doing good work certainly, but if you're serious about editing and if you can afford it then I can't see any reason not to dive directly into the full version of FCP.

for $79 (or freely installed on some machines), i would highly recommend imovie to get started. it has a ton of features for the price.

i would also ask, what is your intention in learning to edit. if you're editing home movies, imovie is more than sufficient. i still use it to edit home movies--instead of FCP, which is considerably more time-consuming to operate, for my own family and as presents for friends with no editing skill, because i can get the job done more quickly and efficiently than with more complicated editors. my friends who do not edit are usually thrilled to get edited footage of their kids. if that is the limit of what you want to do, imovie is perfect.

if you are editing with an eye towards a professional or semi-professional goal, then skip FCE and make the jump to FCP. you can always upgrade to Studio from FCP. but FCP is a pretty substantial universe of learning in itself.

FCE is more for the seriously addicted hobbyist or professional on a budget. it allows you to do complex compositing and motion effects. but unless you have a lot of free time as a hobbyist, it may be more than you need. to answer your question directly, imovie lets you work with only one layer of images, FCE lets you pile on dozens of layers and composite those images into one apparent image, which is fun, but do you need this feature? would you use it? that's the main distinction, i think, in jumping from imovie to FCE. i don't add compositing or motion effects to home movies. i could, and some folks probably do, but it's overkill, in terms of how i want to budget my time.

so to figure out which of these fine NLEs is best for you, just figure out which category best describes your needs....

Thanks Nathan, and Boyd. Exactly the info was looking for...much appreciated.
-Jon

I started out on videowave 3...hehe...then premiere, then premiere pro, now I work on various non-linear editors...premiere pro, vegas, fcp, whatever I have access to...luckily i have a powerbook coming with FCStudio

Gilbert, it seems you are making the same decision that I did a few months ago. Believe me, if you're new to this game (as I was) you are going to be completely overwhelmed by the complexity of FCE. As Boyd pointed out, FCE and FCP have practically the same interface and learning curve, with the primary difference being a few major/pro features stripped out. So far, I haven't been bothered by the lack of those features enough to desire upgrading to FCP....although I must admit I did sling a few of curse words towards the general direction of Cupertino while manually capturing and logging a stack of ten DVCAM tapes. ;-)

Personally, I bought a 20" iMac G5 (2GHz) and FCE...my total out-of-pocket was around $2,000. Sure, I wanted a Dual G5 tower and FCP, but by the time I bought a monitor and everything, I was looking at a minimum of $4,000 which was just WAY too far out of my budget range. Maybe someday, if I'm making money off this venture, I'll upgrade to FCP...but for now I'm 95% satisfied with FCE.

:-)

H.264 and iMovie on iBook
 

A buddy from a Mac User Group has posted a dilemma that confuses him regarding his first attempt to compress an iMovie project into H.264 to post to his .mac site. He is finding it considerably longer than he ever expected, even with an older, less robust system.

Here is what he is experiencing. He has a 15 minute project done in iMovie. He is trying to compress using the Quicktime Expert settings for H.264 video and AAC audio - both codecs in default settings. He is using an iBook G3 700 MHz with 640 MB of RAM and the project itself on an external FW hard drive through Firewire 400. He hasn't found that the disk is needing to spin up regularly, so he does not suspect that scratch disk or virtual memory are coming into play.

He posted his dilemma a few days ago after it had been encoding for 5 hours, and he stated that the ETA was still rising. Even though we batted back and forth that these ETA's are rarely accurate in such conditions, so far it not only continues to rise, but after 48 hours, it is still encoding, and indicates that at this point it is only 1/3 finished.

As I have not yet worked with H.264, and I do have faster hardware than he does, I cannot speculate on whether or not his situation is supposed to be normal.

I figured I would post his situation here to see if anyone can offer input from experience. Thanks in advance.
-Jon

48 hours seems extreme, but H.264 is very processor intensive. It takes a really long time on my Dual G4 800MHz, so on a G3 it might take even longer because it doesn't have alti-vec. Try a much shorter segment, like 10 seconds, and see how long it takes.

I haven't played with QT 7 yet so I don't have specific answers, but others have noted how slow the H.264 compression is. I know we all need to work with the tools we're given, but a G3 iBook is really showing its age these days (I know because we have several of them at work, and they seem maddeningly slow after you get used to even an entry level G4).

A search for "H.264" turns up some interesting things which might help:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...ighlight=H.264
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...ighlight=H.264
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...ighlight=H.264

Yeah i am running Dual 2.7(havent tried it since i upped the ram to 3GB) and the process does take a long time to compress one recommendation would be to do a single pass of it which comes out okay but when you do the multi pass the final looks like it wasnt even compressed.

Just try and picture what this compression process is doing on a multi-pass and you can see why it takes so long especially when you see what finally comes out of it. Yeah one minute of footage for me took about 2 hours to compress multi-pass H.264. Also the file size is greatly reduced and still looks good. So i can see why your friend wants to use the H.264

If you have the time to wait then its worth it but if you dont find another method i really feel its good for shorter clips 6-8 mins is really pushing the time threshold.(for me atleast)

those compression times are absurd! nero will create killer h.264 using two-pass encoding, from dv source, with minimal delay... the sorenson encoder may be slower than that, but nothing like what you guys are talking about here.

there must be something seriously wrong with that quicktime encoder... has anyone talked to apple support about it?