Very basic question.. it seems alot of people are using photoshop to colorcorrect.. How does that work? Can you work with moving images in PS too? If you can do you then export it to QT file for FCP import?
Yes, you can color correct images in Photoshop. Export an image sequence (under QT export). In Photoshop, use "actions" to automate processing for the image sequence.

Is PS that much better for correcting than FCP?
No, not unless there's a certain filter in Photoshop which you really like.

In Final Cut you can keyframe your adjustments if need be, which Photoshop can't handle well.


Wayne Orr (sorry Wayne, I might be misquoting you here..) said in the "sex thread" ...

"Yipes, Rob. You don't have Photoshop? Most people working in digital video find PS to be an absolute "gotta have it" in their bag of tricks."
I guess Wayne can answer that one. I'm not sure how Photoshop is better for color crrection.

Nice to see that I'm not the only confused one.. ;-)

Thanks for clearing it up Glenn. Do You use PS and if so, what for?

Thanks.

I would eventually like to buy a proper video monitor in the short future. Are there any short term ideas like a tv that i can hook to my G5 to playback my FCX projects ?

You can always play back your footage through a deck/camcorder into the TV. It would go Computer-to-deck/camcorder via firewire, then deck/camcorder-to-TV via s-video.

This is fully capably of playing back video real-time. Is that what you're looking for?

Can't one connect a monitor directly to the G5?? Seems like a detour for the signal to go through a deck..

Hi,

Planning on buying a dual G5. Have an iBookG4, nice and new. Will want an external HD to switch between both, not just for FCP, but also database of photos and locations etc.
Any minimum specs that I should be aware of? Any known brands or combinations that I should stay away from?

Thanks folks!

Dan.

Actually the Deck performs the Digital to Analog conversion of the video. You _could_ hook a monitor directly up to a spare video card and do it that way, but it would not be as acurate because the video card would be doing the Digital to Analog conversion.

Best to go thru the camera or deck. That is the TRUE representation of what your video looks like. The monitor must be connected thru the firewire out, and the only way to do that is thru a deck...or converter like the ADVC-100.

7200 RPM with an 8MB cache. minimum.

I have heard many complaints about Maxtor drives..and some people who still defent them. But any complaints...expecially the amount I have been hearing, means there are issues with them.

Western Digital or Lacie are good bets.

The more I look at it, the more I think that G Nicer will get me just as good (if not better) a result without all the extra work. Thanks for the help, Graeme.


-j

My firewire stopped outputting any data from the camera. I took it to Canon here in Manila, and they said the motherboard in the camera was blown, that the firewire component was no longer working.

Luckily, they had a new motherboard in stock, and replaced my old one at the hefty cost. When I picked up the camera this afternoon, they connected the firewire to a Toshhiba laptop to demonstrate that the laptop did indeed detect the presence of the firewire data from my XL1-S.

I was satisfied, and came home and plugged everything in. They had made the point that the camera SHOULD NOT BE POWERED WHEN CONNECTING THE FIREWIRE. I believe I had connected it in the past many times while the camera was on, but suffered no adverse effects. There is nothng in the users manual about connecting the firwire to a camera already powered.

Now, tonight, I mistakenly had the firewire connector (the 6-pin connector) in the computer upside down. I proceded to turn on my Mac G4 and the camera, but found that Final Cut Pro was still not detecting the firewire.

What is going on here? Is it possible that putting in the 6-pin connector wrong would or could blow the mother board in the camera?

Since the 6-pin connector's form factor is square on one side while pointed on the other, doesn't that prevent any disallowed contact between the wrong pins in the connector and the computer connector?

Any wisdom on this topic would be appreciated.

Collis

My understanding is, that putting the cable in backwards can indeed cause a short. The cable could also have a short as well. Have you tried other FW cables?

Hello Collis,

Firewire is meant to be hot swappable. Hardware-wise, this is fine. Software-wise it really depends on the application, I think. Some apps have difficulty recognising FW devices when hot swapped or moreso, the change in FW bus speed may also affect applications.

My Final Cut Express went wonky when I pulled out my camera while it was running a movie in the timeline (at which time it is busy accessing the external FW HD) because the bus speed suddenly changed.

As for connecting the 6pin wrong, you really must have forced it in to have connected it upside down. The connector shape forces the user to connect it correctly. If indeed, you forced it in all the way, you would have reversed all the pins, but more importantly, interfaced the power and ground pins to the signal pins - which is really asking for it.

Just need to be careful in how you connect these devices and never use extreme force.

Try the following to see what is working:

1. reconnect your camera properly and see if Final Cut will recognise your camera.

2. if not, try a different FW port

3. if not, try a different FW device on the original port.

4. if not, try your camera on another Mac (or PC)

cheers,
Peter

That's cool because LaCie is what the guy who sells Mac here offered me. (one guy for a population of maybe 1 million in the entire province...) ... and thanks!!!

Peter,

Many thanks for your thoughtful reply.

I have isolated the problem, once again, to the camera.

I checked the cables using my Sony Media Converter box (has a FW interface) and digitized some analogue video. No problem there.

I am not quite sure that I "forced" the FW plug into the computer, although it seems that the FW jack on the G4 is feels looser than the one above it. This makes me suspicious.

But I am quite sure the 6-pin went in upside down when first conecting it, and it's easy for me to see the dire consequences of doing this wherein pins are consquently reversed.

I am depressed about this, and it seems reasonable that such an action might blow out the FW component on the mother board.

Collis

Jeff,

Yes, I tried other cables besides the original I was using when the problem occured.

I bought another cable, thinking that it was the cable that was strained as I opened my G4 to add some RAM without really disconnecting any of the cables attached to the rear of the computer.

But this was not the case, meaning no cable failure or short.

I tried a 6-pin to 6-pin between the cam and my Sony Media Converter which was then outputting analog to a field monitor. The screen was black upon playing back a tape via the Fire Wire.

As explained in my reply to Peter, the FW connection to and from the Sony converter box works just fine.

Operator error seems to apply in this instance. But thank you for your response anyway.

Collis

Lacie doesn't make the harddrives themselves, they put drives from other manufacturers in their external enclosures. I've had a Lacie 250GB drive a year or so, no complaints on it's performance but it does make a constant hissing noise and it makes enough noise when writing to bug me.

Now I'm getting a "Samsung SpinPoint P80 160GB_IDE ATA/133 8MB cache 7200RPM" to put in an external box. I have two of these in my PC and they are much quieter and cooler (as in generating less heat) then my Seagate 200GB drive that I have in the same machine.

This is the firewire enclosure I'm checking out now since they have it in the same store I'm picking up the harddrives.
http://www.zynet.com.tw/download/manual/ee/D5-U2FW.htm

Any better alternatives?

I'm a first time user of FCP (just purchased FCP 4.5) I'm shooting a Canon XL2, 24p normal 3:2 pulldown. After capturing at 29.97 I reverse telecine to 23.98 with Cinema Tools. After importing the reversed clip into my FCP project I attempt to add it to a sequence with a preset of 23.98 fps.

It requires rendering. This seems counterintuitive to me - is this proper or do I have some preset qualities set wrong?

Any help appreciated.

Hi
I am using FCP HD with a DV PAL VIDEO CAMERA.

I captured a projects footage as 'DV to OfflineRT PAL(PhotoJPEG)', mainly due to lack of disk space because of another large project I am working on.

Now that I have edited up a short 10min project, can I recapture just the footage needed for the project as 'DVPAL 48 kHz'?

If so, how do I go about recapturing the footage so I have a DV PAL master?

Hi Andrew,

If you plan to edit in a 23.98fps timeline, you should shoot in advanced pulldown mode (2:3:3:2). Final Cut Pro has the ability to remove the pulldown during capture to extract the true 23.98fps source footage for you to edit in that kind of timeline. You just have to make sure you have it set to remove advanced pulldown in your capture settings.

As for what you've done with your footage, you shouldn't have to render. Did you change any other settings in your clips that you performed the reversed telecine on?

For those wishing to edit low res, master high res..here is the way you do it ( worked it out last night)

Go to media manager - set media setting to recompress - Recompress media using DV PAL 48 KHz ( in my case)
Media destination needs to be set - I chose capture scratch

Then select each footage item in the browser and batch capture

Do any of you have experiences going from pal to ntsc with either of these ? Please share your thoughts. thanks alot- Kurth

Hello Folks,
Set up: G5 OSX 10.3.6 FCP4 (Drive 1)Lacie 160GB d2 EX firewire 800 Near full of media. New Drive (Drive 2) lacie 250GB d2 EX daisy chained to drive 1. firewire 800
The question is how do I work inside FCP4 and have access to both drives. Is there a way to do this. I am half way into a project and need more hard drive space. FCP4 has you dedicate one drive for your media and what can you do if you need the use of media on 2 separate drives. Any help with this would be great.
Thank you,
Brian

Is there really such a limitation in FCP4? I am still using FCP3 and there's nothing to stop you from using as many drives as you want. You do need to specify a scratch disk which is used for captures, but you can change this as you go if desired. In fact, I find that one of the "gotchas" with FCP. If for some reason your scratch disk is offline (like an unplugged firewire drive) FCP just goes merrily along and chooses your boot disk without telling you. Everything will keep working transparently afterwards, even though your files are split between the two drives. Where it can bite you is if you assume all your files are on the external drive, then move that drive to another machine. Then you will suddenly learn that some of your clips and render files are actually on another drive.

But I don't think you will have any problem other than that. If one drive is almost full, just specify another drive as your scratch disk. As long as both drives are always available I don't think FCP will complain. Or at least that's my experience on FCP3.... is something different in newer versions?

Boyd,
Sounds good to me...I will try this. It sounds like just because you designate and place media on one drive it does not mean FCP will not access media on additional drives as needed.
Thanks,
Brian

Guys say i have After Effects 6.5 and I want ot learn how to use it will the training video for 6.0 give me the basic idea on how to get started and fell my way around or are the two programs totally different?

Thanks

Also does anyone know if the plug in Frischluft is compatible with all the AE versions.

How do I change the field dominance in a project? from not set to lower in FCP. In the item properties it says (not set) and in the sequence presets it says field dominance lower (even). I imported a clip fom live type its field dominance settings are (lower even) but when imported to FCP they change
to none. The video file is not accepted in DVDSP3.

I just go an extra firewire drive. What I did was to copy over my two current projects to the new drive following the guide at: http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/media_manager_fcp_4_balis.html
Look for the topic "Copying And Moving Project"

Also to avoid/work around the problem of having a single projects files split between different drives and folders:
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/ambitious_fcp_4_x.html
Under "To correctly set your Scratch Disk Preferences"
This way all projects media files stay in separate folders in the drive you specify, much easier to back up and get an overview of.

It is changed in the sequence preset editor. FCP>Audio /Video Settings>Sequence Presets>Field Dominance.

Can I capture with my 1.6 ghz G5 uncompressed BetaSP footage with my Decklink card, directly onto a firewire-800, 300 gb hard drive, 7200 rpm? Or is it too slow?

heath

Hi Jeff Thanks for replying to my post. I changed my setting under user preferences to prompt for new settings on new projects and sequences. My Audio/Video settings are DV NTSC 48 KHZ for my capture presets and sequence presets. In the browser column for sequence under field dominance. It says lower (even) but when I capture a clip it says none in the column for the clip.
Thanks Dave

Thanks for the info Benjamin.

Hello.

Does anyone know an easy way in FCP to restore the audio of a clip once it's been deleted? My situation is this: I edited several clips in the timeline and deleted the original audio, replacing it with a music bed and narration. Now the client wants to mix in the original audio. Is there any way to get the original audio for each clip back without having to re-edit each clip?

Thanks in advance.

I am having problems importing a .mpg file into FCP4.5HD. I get the video but no sound.
I have tried to convert via Cleaner6 and Quicktime Pro, but nothing seem to help. Any advice?

What was used to encode it? There may not be a Mac codec (plugin) to decode the video portion of the file.

Can't you just drag the clip(s) into a new timeline and then copy/paste the audio tracks to your project?

Hi Pat,

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly. You mean drag the clips from the browser into a new timeline? This would work if the in and out points were still set for each clip, but they no longer are. Most of the clips are quite long, and I used several parts of each one, which means I set the in and out points many times.

Solved it. Since FCP4.5HD accepted the video, I figured if I could somehow just extract the sound, I would then be able to sync it up in FCP.

Luckily, cleaner6 worked to extract the sound from the .mpg file into an .aiff sound file which I then synched up with the video. Worked well. Printed the whole thing to tape in DVCAM and handed it over to my client this morning. Done. Thanks Jeff!

That sounds right. You should be good to go.

8-Bit uncompressed.

I don't have scsi drives, so I'm having to do it with my camera and do a conversion.

heath

I'm not sure if I understand... however all editing in FCP is "non destructive" so unless you actually went in with the Finder and deleted your files, then the audio you originally captured is still there.

On the timeline, place the playhead so that it snaps to the beginning of the clip you want to fix. Now double-click anywhere on the clip and it opens in the viewer. Note the timecode. Now move the playhead to the end of the clip in the timeline, doubleclick again and note the timeline in the viewer. You can then go back to the original clip that was used in your sequence, set the in and out points to match, then drag or paste the original to the timeline.

Notice that when you open a clip by double clicking it from the timeline that the viewer window shows its in and out points right below the image. I'll bet there's an easier way, but I can't think of it right now ;-)

I'm not sure if I understand... however all editing in FCP in "non destructive" so unless you actually went in with the Finder and deleted your files, then the audio you originally captured is still there.

On the timeline, place the playhead so that it snaps to the beginning of the clip you want to fix. Now double-click anywhere on the clip and it opens in the viewer. Note the timecode. Now move the playhead to the end of the clip in the timeline, doubleclick again and note the timeline in the viewer. You can then go back to the original clip that was used in your sequence, set the in and out points to match, then drag or paste the original to the timeline.

Notice that when you open a clip by double clicking it from the timeline that the viewer window shows its in and out points right below the image. I'll bet there's an easier way, but I can't think of it right now ;-)

Thanks for the suggestion. I thought there may be a quicker way (like a "restore audio" function), but this seems like it will work with a bit of effort.

I am having trouble rendering my after effects compositions (mostly ramped slow mo's and some color corrections) to use in FCP. everytime i choose "best settings and full quality" from the render queue i end up with a lot of noise and jumps in the video clip. also, these are only like 4 second clips so its not like i am taxing my powerbook and making it work super hard.
any ideas?

Rob,
Click on the video clip in the timeline. Press "f". The original clip with in/out points set will show in the viewer. From there you can restore the audio, a number of ways -- depends on the target audio and video tracks, and if something is already there, etc. But, You can now see the original audio in the viewer. Not quite as nice as a "Restore" audio command...

Michael, thanks for your suggestion!

This does exactly what I need, with minimum effort.

Thanks!

It shouldn't be that much of a difference. Ofcourse if you can it is
always best to match the tutorial/book/video/etc. to your exact
version to make sure it follows closely the program you have.

Are you going to get this second-hand or buy this new? If new
then just ask the company how well it works with 6.5? It is at
least better to work with a 6.0 training for a 6.5 version since
the basics should be the same, but I don't know that for sure
(not used AE in a long time).

I hope someone who has experience with both versions can give
you a better insight into what is different!

Thanks Rob. I'm going to get it new but I don't think there are any 6.5 training videos thus my question. I'll definitely ask if they are close enough for me to use one for another :)

Dmitry

nobody?

I don't think there are many Mac After Effects users, so it might
not be that anyone knows. Did you try asking the question on
the Adobe forums?