I tried to burn a FCP film with idvd but I've had some problems.

The film is 70 minutes long. First I tried exported it as a quicktime movie, I got 3/4 of the way through the burn and I got an error message. Then I expoted it asa "final cut pro" movie. Same result,

The error code is 2147352542.

Anyone know what this is about?

Thanks
Joe.

Thanks.

Jeff, I am in the middle of a long back and forth email correspondence with Sounddog--very good support. Thanks for asking. Grant

Hi,

I'm at a friends and we're trying to colaborate on a project. She's put together video and audio in Final Cut Pro 4 and needs to export or render it so that I can pull it into my PC editing program (I use Vegas).

AVI's are fine so I don't think this will be a problem. The problem right nos is I know nothing about MACs and she knows enough to get her projects done just on the mac.

We rendered from FCP4 but to my chagrin it didn't prompt for a filename or location and when we search her hard drives for files with names similar to the project and there's nothing sizable enough to be the 14 minute file that we rendered.

Can anyone help me locate this magic file or perhaps explain the best way to output a high quality project from the mac so I can import it into my PC for further editing?

Thanks,
Kevin

You have to export the movie.
File > Export > Using Quicktime Conversion...
Format: AVI
Options: Video: DV/DVCPRO NTSC
Quality: Best
Frame Rate: 29.97
Sound: Compressor: None
Rate: 48000
Stereo

Is that lossless? I thought render was lossless and conversion used compression?

Thanks,
Kevin

If you're going to the DV codec like I listed above, it will not lose anything from the timeline since it is not being recompressed, only creating a standalone file.

The DV codecs in AVI and Quicktime are the same. DV is DV. Only the structure of the format itself (Quicktime, AVI, etc) is different, not the actual data used.

If you're really concerned, install Quicktime on the PC and go to File > Export > Quicktime Movie (NOT Quicktime conversion). That just exports a standalone QT really fast with zero conversion, guaranteed.

Thanks a million. I just pushed the render out via export. Now I'm just going to have to figure out how to access the MACs firewire drive through the file sharing on this thing.

:)

Thanks again,
Kevin

To make the tracking shot to split screen work smoothly, I suggest you change the framing of the lead guy just as the girl's image wipes in.

The camera follows the lead guy and he's more or less centered in the frame. His phone rings and very smoothly, the framing changes to where he's now fully on one side of the frame.

The shot of the girl push-slides in at a similar speed to the change in framing on the guy. Which side of the screen you place them depends on where they're facing, but they should be facing sort of towards each other. The phone call ends, she's push-slid out back to where she came from and the framing of the guy moves smoothly to where it was.

You could even cut to the split screen instead of wiping or push sliding. The cut could correspond tightly to the guy opening his phone or pushing "talk." Aesthetically it would make perfect sense, especially since it seems this is the guy's point-of-view. The empty half of the screen a second before and a second after the split-screen cuts would enhance the effect.

I wouldn't even change the framing. You could just push the guy's image over. Or if you are shooting in widescreen (which you should be because 4:3 is evil) you could just take two full frame 4:3 images and butt them against each other. Like Jeff said, there are MANY ways to do this.

I'm pretty adept at altering colors of an image in Photoshop, but FCP (I'm in version 3) has several video filters that claim to be color correctors. Which of these do you guys prefer?

Also, I read a tip on here that to get a film look, you need to go into curves and make a lazy "S" curve. I can't seem to find a filter in FCP that has an actual curves adjustment interface (like the one available in Photoshop). Does anyone know if FCP even has this type of curves adjustment interface?

I recommend a good book on color correction (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1578202019/).

Thanks, Ken.

I've been doing more research, and found some links to more information on the internet. Here are the links for anyone interested . . .

-- very detailed article
www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/cc_legal_fcp3.html

-- a DVD on color correction, looks pretty in-depth
www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/review_cc_dft_dvd.html

-- a great little Quicktime video -- check it out!
www.dvcreators.net/media/colorcor.html

This was the best of what I found so far. If anyone else has any advice to add, especially if anyone can comment on locating a visually-representative curves filter in FCP, please do. Thanks in advance!

Just saw a couple academic version of DVDSP2 on ebay. Whats the difference? I mean If I am creating DVD's for home use is there any reason why I couldnt use this version?

Just the license. You cannot legally use it for projects in which you could make money. That's it. The features are the same.

My first suspect would be incompatible media. Please take a look
at the following site (http://www.macintouch.com/mosxreader10.2pt51.html) as well.

the article that Travis mentions at Ken Stone's site is written by the person who wrote the CC section for the massive Apple FCP4 Advanced Editing and Finishing book... which he mentions in the end of the article and is WELL worth the price.

My G Levels in Set 1 www.nattress.com will do the s shaped curves you require. I also incorporated the code into Film Effects, which as the name implies does this and a whole lot more.

Graeme

Dear Rob,
Thanks, I'd begun to lose hope. I'll see what versions of OS amd Idvd I'm running.

If I understood the post correctly, the person upgraded the OS and than it stopped working, so he went back to the old version and it worked.

FWIT I'm running and AO6 and it worked fine with imovie.

It looks like I've go some digging ahead.

Thanks for giving me something to go on.

I'll post if I make progress.

Joe

Hi... me again.

My partner is a MACette and I'm a PC person so I'm wondering if there's a longer term solution to our compatibility issues.

Can any of you MAC-ites out there confirm what file systems OSX can read? My firewire drive is formatted to NTFS and I thought I read that OSX MACs can READ but not WRITE to NTFS.

So I can convert it to FAT32 for READ and WRITE but then I'm going to get hit with the 2Gig file size limit.

Does this all sound correct?

Thanks,
Kevin

ok, my uncle is a human factors research scientist for an auto maker.
his team used a static dash mounted lipstick cam to record the eye movements of subjects in a vehicle.

hundreds of subjects, 4 hour tests.

as you can imagine, they reeled at the thought of collecting and archiving all that tape. the purpose of the video is..get this.. to plot eye movement by a assigning a numeric value to the parameters set for each different eye position. this is done manually, frame by frame. those value are then charted on a graph that corresponds with the vehicle behavior at the exact same point in time. so actually the video is just a means to an end. after humans, yes humans, (students really) evaluate each test frame by frame to assign the values.

they recorded direct to a hard drive, bypassing the tape problem. as they recorded/digitized video it was encoded to MPEG 2. (no audio needed.)
in order to sync the eye movement with the vehicle behavior, they sync all vehicle behavior to 30 seconds a frame.

I have no idea what he was talking about at this point as to how they did that...something about recording tire movement at 30Khz...

Here comes the question-

they have discovered that MPEG 2 does not necessarily render 30 frames a second. not rendering each frame if the background does not change.
and it doesn't due to the nature of the study.

Is there any way to recode the video from an MPEG back to raw 1s & 0s so that they may re-encode in a more suitable format?

raw digital information is long gone. have only MPEGs at this point.

In AfterEffects, I often find it more effective to double the size of my footage when doing keying or other effects work and then reduce it by half afterward. The result is often better than had I attempted it at 100%.

My question: is it possible to use the interpolation power of RE:Fill or Twixtor (or is there some other product out there?) to smooth out that doubled footage? AfterEffects is really only turning one pixel into four but there should be some way to estimate curves and such to reduce the stairstepping, particularly with in-motion footage.

Handy Diagram (http://www.globo-chem.net/~jay/FootageInterpolation.gif)

Any input?


-j


I apologize if this has come up before, I couldn't find it.

After Effects uses bicubic interpolation, as does Photoshop. This is good, but not best.

The type of interpolation you want is content adaptive, I have an example here of some R&D code I'm working on which, although not currently perfect, does show you what will be possible soon:

http://www.nattress.com/scaling_test.jpg

The project I'm working on should eventually produce even better results that you're seeing in my early test, but as you can appreciate, it's not easy to do - or everyone would be doing it!!

Graeme

Cool stuff.

Would this "new project" be a part of Set 3? Are you developing with only FCP in mind, or do you forsee any AE functionality?

I'm going to try a couple of your free ones for FCP and see how they work for me. I can think of one suggestion right off the bat - a plug-in that will inpret the footage with the LAB colour model and allow separate blurring of the a & b channels to reduce the blockiness in DV footage.

Nice pics of Halifax, by the way!


-j

No, the new R&D project is a stand-alone app, utilising cocoa, quicktime and open-gl acceleration of my unique algorithms for image upscaling and sharpening. It will hopefull do a lot more than scale up video, but that's the major component of it.

As for your plugin request - check out G Nicer as part of Film Effects - it's an intelligent chroma upsampler and works wonders with 4:1:1 footage, producing excellent results. I'll include this technology as part of the stand alone app mentioned above.

BYW, there's no need to convert DV to LAB because it's YUV native, with U & V being the downsampled colours. I work in YUV space to do the chroma upsample and it works a lot better than a blur!

Yes, that was a great trip to Halifax - really enjoyed it! Nice city and great fun.

Graeme

A little disclaimer: I don't have a Mac or have ever worked on
one (yeah yeah, I know). That link was basically the only thing
that came up when I did a google search on your problem.

On the PC different types of media can sometimes generate
burn errors. That's why I suggested trying a different brand.

I am trying to put in sound from my Mini Disk. Earlier it worked but now I can't get a complete sound, it stutters. Now whenever I turn on my mini disk I constantly get stuttering. It could be in Garage Band, FCP, SoundTrack etc. But can't get a flowing sound. I am working with a USB audio interface, it is the US 122- by Tascam. I phone up their tec support and they said that it might be that their interface is not compatible with the Dual G5, maybe less powered duals but not the Dual G5 2 gig like mine. Their not sure. Any suggestions would greatly be appreciated.

Bill

MPEG2 was definitely the wrong choice since MPEG2 works on
storing the individual changes between frames instead of full
frames (yes it stores full frames every so often). So looking at
individual frames is very hard (as you / they've found out). It
might even be that some information is lost if the compression
was high enough.

The best way would be to convert the footage to some other
format like DV so you can access it easier. There might be some
other Mac codecs you could use as well. Since I'm not a Mac user
myself I cannot tell you much more then this I'm afraid. Sorry.

I'm currently running a Adobe premiere on a G4 400 with a 20 gig hard drive, when I save video in premiere, it tells me it has dropped frames, does this mean my Hard drive is'nt fast enough? plus I only have 6gig left, I think it's time to install a second HD dedicated to video, how do I do this? what do I need? is a 7200rpm fast enough or something faster?

Thanks for any help.

On a typical project we get a mixed bag of .JPG, .TIFF files, 72dpi, 300dpi, you name it. Is there a standard file format and resolution to convert to that displays all the image quality for standard res DV projects. In many cases the large .TIFF files stall in the timeline, as well as causing noticeable moire patterns and bad jaggy edges. Anybody have a "rule of thumb" format, resolution that they convert import images to?? Thanks.

Instructions at http://www.info.apple.com/usen/cip/index.html

Get a 7200rpm drive instead of a 5400rpm. Bigger capacity drives are slightly faster, have more storage (which you can easily use up, and you are very unproductive when you don't have enough), sometimes give a better GB:$ ratio, and are more futureproof. I'd lean a bit towards getting a bigger drive than you think you need.

Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi are good. You can wait out for a hot deal on hard drives by checking hot deal sites. Look at expired deals to see what kind of capacity you can expect. Otherwise check pricewatch/resellerratings.com and newegg.com for a new drive (newegg.com is the least hassle of all the choices and the other choices aren't too much cheaper).

Thanks for the info, checked out the apple site. Do I need a ATA hard drive or a Scsi, can I
have two ATA hard drives fitted in my G4 at once?

Get ATA, not SCSI.

2- Yes, you can get 2 in there.

I was just finishing a project.. Had sent the audio to be cleared up and then it was supposed to be delivered.

Today when I got the audio back I realised that I must have thrown away the wrong data in an attempt to free up some space on my harddrive.

So.. I logg everything back in, but alot of it is just not on place.. Some is alright but the vast majority is slightly off sync or completley diferent track..

Please tell me there is a divine FCP "undo stupidity and restore and fix to what I had" button.
I really didn't want to spend more time on something that was supposed to be finished..

O dear...

If you did your log and capture properly you should just see that all the clips have gone "offline" and it will just be a matter of importing the clips again from tape.

Well they did go "off line" But when once on-line again, things had happened for the worse..

I tried to capture some footage from my TRV900 last nite and my G4 couldn't recognize my camera. I tried it on my PC and it worked fine. When I plug in my camera to my Mac via the firewire I noticed that the viewfinder shows DV IN on it, but Final Cut doesn't recognize the camera.

I'm wondering if the firewire port on my 900 is screwed up and needs to be replaced. I tried my PD170 and that worked fine. I called Sony for the firewire connection board in the camera and they want about $50 or so plus 2 weeks time to order the part. Anyone else have a similar problem and found a solution? I've tried resetting the camera but that doesn't work. Suggestions?

I am shooting footage with a SONY DSR-PD170P (pal) and capturing into FCP 4.0 with an older VX-1000 for a pre-edit. I tried to use the start/stop detection after capuring an entire tape, but FCP tells me it doesn't see any start/stop mark in the time information on the tape, so it can't put markers into the clip.
Does the PD170 make such marks ? (I guess yes...)
or maybe does the VX-1000 not read or recognize tem ?
or even maybe my software configuration has got something wrong...
does anyone know someting about it ?
cheers !

The date/time has to be set on the camera. This is non-intuitive but true in my experience.

If you didn't set it... then DV start/stop detection won't work. The easiest thing to do would be to manually log and capture, or to capture the whole thing and add markers on your own and then make subclips.

Ok, I will have a look in the settings / menu to see where it can be set. If anyone has got an idea that can help me, I'd be most grateful !

I have found some Sony products like being turned on before booting the mac, and others don't care.

I know it shouldn't be so, but... they're Sony... THEY don't have to care. ;)

Kevin's suggestion is a good one.

Failing that, be sure to look at Apple's support pages and message boards to see if anything specific to the camera is listed.

Failing that, I would try the old method of trashing your FCP preferences (Search for tips in this section of the forum).

Good luck.

Well, I got it fixed! I took apart the entire camera and pulled out the circuit board with firewire port on it. Put everthing back together and hooked it up and it worked. Wierd!!!

Now my problem is that I captured 4 hours worth of tape and my Mac has a problem booting now. I determined it was a problem with the 2nd hard drive with my video on it, I couldn't repair it and resorted to erasing the entire drive and starting over. Not sure why it does this but this is the 2nd time.

I'm attempting to import a .TIF image into Final Cut Express. FCE doesn't directly import a .TIF image, so I'll have to convert it in another program. The desktop icon preview shows the image correctly, however everytime I open the image in Preview, it changes to very psychodellic colors and anything exported from there also results in the same wacky colors. I know the original file is correct because Quicktime opens it properly as a 2 frame movie. I can export the image as a .TGA from Quicktime, but does anyone know what's going on with Preview?

I just captured my 5th tape from a series of tapes that I am editing and pulled some of the video into the timeline in Final Cut Express 2. The audio is out of sync with the video. The other tapes are fine and I've tried to recapture this one tape several times but it is always out of sync. Anyone know why this is? I'm assuming that I'm dropping frames as is it being captured. Any reason for this? Is it my computer or my camera/tape?

It's probably not your computer. Final Cut can be set to report if you drop frames (I think it always does), and it can be set to stop capturing if you do drop frames.

Possible causes for audio out of sync:
A- Your camera's audio clock is a little off, say 48.009khz instead of 48.000khz sampling rate. Nearly all consumer cameras do this, although Canon is the worst. You may be able to check by right clicking your clips in the bin and checking their properties, it'll tell you what their sampling rates are.

B- If you have no audio in sections then FCP will mess up.

C- Maybe the tape was shot in 12bit audio mode- 12-bit depth, 4 channels, 32khz instead of 16-bit depth, 2 channels, 28khz. You should nearly always be shooting in 16bit mode.

D- Timecode breaks will cause audio to go out of sync. One fix is to dub the tape to generate fresh continuous timecode.

What camera was the tape shot on?

I go to the Apple home page about 5 min's ago and i see this

http://www.apple.com/software/pro/

all i can say is WOW.

New toys for us :D

sheesh no wonder after effects bit the dust.

it advertising real time... hmmm.

yeah thats what made me say hummm. i guess i ignored shake 3.5 since i know thats the price of everything i own now LOL