Never saw that one coming. Glad to hear you've got it figured out.

Peace!
Chris

I too have recognized this. Not sure what to do. Garage band . . . same thing. My guess is these weren't meant to do professional work. Not entirely sure though.

Note: I'm not a Mac or FCP user, but these are some of my general
thoughts about these things.

If you just have a couple of shots of 4:3 footage I would stretch
them to 16:9 indeed. If you have a lot of 4:3 shots I would
convert everything to 4:3 letterbox.

However, if at all possible I would record all the camera's at the
same settings. Because I assume that those 4:3 camera's will
also not be doing 24p? That's probably gonna be troublesome
to incorporate and have it look good (unless it is some sort of
making of where you are mixing footage, doesn't make a difference
too much then I'd say).

Best thing you can do (as always) is TEST your workflow before
you commit to the ways you are going to do things. Test, test
and do some more testing! <g>

Good luck!

Hey all,
I am trying to burn my iDVD project. (i know it's no pro-sumer software but that's what i have to use) Here's my scenario and question:

I have a Powerbook with iDVD 4 and a compiled project that sits on an external drive. My Powerbook doesn't have a Superdrive, so my options are: open the project on someone else's system that has a superdrive and burn it there, or get an external DVD writer hooked up to my Powerbook and burn locally. Option 1 is more viable to me since my friend has a Powerbook with a Superdrive and I don't have access to an external DVD writer. The only issue is this: My friend doesn't have iDVD 4. I have heard that iDVD 4 creates a product that looks much better than 3. If I compile my project in iDVD 4, let everything encode with the "best quality" setting, then Archive my project AND include the theme, can I then transfer the Archived project (image i assume) to my friend's Powerbook and burn it from there with iDVD 3 with no picture degradation or other discrepancies?


___Luc

1st scenario:
Last I checked, iDVD won't burn to an external DVD burner, it has to be internal. That might have changed, but that was pretty standard. You CAN of course work in iDVD on one computer, archive it, and move it to a machine that DOES have an internal burner.

Try patch burn if you want an external burner with iDVD: http://www.patchburn.de/faq.html#PB3Frage2

2nd scenario:
Because iDVD4 has newer features than iDVD3 I don't know if it is backwards compatible, or will work as long as you use a version 3 theme and do not use any new features like autoplay. Thing is, I think the Archive is an only an iDVD4 feature, so I would guess it won't work because iDVD3 doesn't know what to do with an Archived project.

Good luck...

hi
about one week ago' i made a short movie with fce2.When i exported the movie, fc didn't load normally (with the blue line running..).Infact, when i opened the movie, there were only the sound, but the image was freezing.After, i tried to erase my short movie from final cut and to reimport and re-edit it.that time fc exported the movie without problems.
Now, i've make another short video with fc, i try to export but the blu line running doesn't appear..it loads immediatly, without loading.When i open the video, i see another time the image freezing, and i only listen to the sound.
i've a dual 1.8 G5 power mac with 1 giga of ram.
Do you think i've a defective final cut??what is the reason of that probel??
I export with the option "make quicktime movie", so no compression.
please, help me to know what's the problem..i don't' understand!

p.s i also tried to delete the preferences, as suggested by another thread, but my short move doesn't' appear anymore...only sound!

thanks so much
joseph

I tried hitting reverse in the scrolling titles I made in FCP, but the titles themselves went blank and there was nothing there.

Any other solutions?

THANKS!

heath

If you are using the simple scrolling text built-in to FCP (Video Generators->Text->Scrolling Text), there is a popup at the bootom of the Controls for you to choose the direction.

If you are using Title3D, then I think you must keyframe the position.


Mike.

THANKS! It says Up or Down, can't believe I didn't notice it before.

heath

hi all,

My system

iBook G4 1GHZ
768 RAM
80 G internal HDD
40 G 5600RPM external HDD
Final Cut Express 2
Firewire card that comes with iBook
PD150

My Problem: Ok i dunno which version my camera is, but i tried capturing in both NTSC DV and PAL DV and the capture is just not good...there are always drop frames, thus FCE stops captures. Why??? Is my system too slow??? I shot all my footage in 1/60 or faster shutter as its bright daylight.

I tried iMovie, it "'allow" the capture but i can tell there are drop frames and it sucks.

ALSO: when i do playback in the camera, the sound is not smooth, sometimes i hear it sometimes i dun. I believe its because its an old camera. but i am sure the footage is good because sometimes i hear the "full" audio during playback for the exact same footage IN the camera.

where is the problem?!?! Help!

Your system is plenty fast enough. The only problem might be the 5600 external FW drive...

Try capturing to the internal Hard Drive and see if you still have the problem. That will help narrow down what the problem is. If even your camera that you recorded the footage with is having problems playing it back, then you could try cleaning the heads with a cleaning tape. Are you reusing an old tape and re-recording over old footage?

My experience is that 5600 RPM drives are not fast enough for capture. In fact, an older 7200 RPM drive that doesn't have something equal to the Oxford 911 chipset may also give you problems.

You can get dropped frames if the firewire signal from the camera is not good. You can make it happen when you have the camera converting analog to DV on the fly and you take the A/V cable in/out.

Maybe something similar to that is happening? You could troubleshoot by capturing a good tape, or trying the camcorder in another computer.

2- Try capturing to the internal drive. Make sure it has over 15% space free.

Are you trying to capture to the firewire drive while it's in-line with the camera? Meaning, if you only have one firewire port, and the camera AND the drive are connecting to it daisy chained, it never seems to work. Other than that there are a bunch of settings you could look over to make certain they are correct. You shouldn't have any problems capturing to the built in drive either. DV only uses just over 3MB per second so in reality almost any drive should handle the capturing process, assuming everything else is in good shape and the tape is good (which coming from a PD-150 I think it should be as long as it's a good quality tape to start with). I never had any problems capturing to the 80Gig drive that came in my Powerbook and it was a 4200RPM.
Try capturing to the internal hard drive and see if it solves the problem.

Hello all,

Okay, here's the situation... I shoot wedding video's. I've never had a problem with downloading the footage I take to my G5's for editing in FCP. I shoot with Canon GL2's, use Maxell (DVM60SE) mini DV tapes, and clean my video heads when the cameras tell me to.

Today while downloading footage from 2 weddings I did over the weekend, something strange happened. While importing, all that was showing over 3/4's of the screen was a frozen scene from the particular wedding reception the tape was used to record that evening, and on the right 1/4 at the beginning of the tape showed what was supposed to be playing back all pixelated... w/o any better terminology for it. There's a link at the bottom of this message with actual video of it... but read the rest of this before you check it out.

I figured out that at a certain point, the video begins to play fine at roughly 27 minutes into the tape. From there on out, for the final 33 minutes, perfect footage. No problems. Whenever I tried to go back to within the 'problem' 27 minutes, the frozen image shown on the left 3/4's would be whatever I played last with no problem, and the right the pixelated stuff. The same camera was used to shoot the footage that turned out fine. The tape was a brand new tape... I never recycle. So, what in the world could be the problem?

I'm absolutely stumped, and scared to be honest with you! The 'problem' footage covers all of my staging scenes before the ceremony, the processional and a handfull of 'cut-in' shots.

Give it a look-see (need Quicktime):

http://www.buerhausdesign.com/problem2.html

Can this footage be saved? Can I save it? Can somebody else save it? What do you think the problem was/is?

I'm completely lost, and need a solution... if there's one to be had.

Thanks in advance for any help,

Matt

I've created a 23 minute film om FCP HD that I exported using the "QuickTime Movie" option with chapter markers and self-contained movie selected. FCP exports the movie fine, but when I try to open the movie in QuickTime Pro, or FCP, I get an error message that says:

"Couldn't open the file "Whole Movie" because an unknown error occured. The number of the error is -2125"

I checked apple's support site and all the error codes I found pertain to OS 9 or earlier. I tried restarting and that didn't help either.

Any ideas? I can export other movies fine, but this sequence is screwed up for some reason.

G'day all,

I'm running Final Cut Pro HD on my G5, which runs through my camcorder to a PAL monitor...

It's happening for a while now, and has only started to bother me a lot today, but the image literally skips every second. I thought it must be a frame rate issue of some type (and I'm sure it still must be), so I set Sequence and Capture Preset to DV PAL 48 kHz, yet the image still jumps.

It is especially noticable with fast movement, and the frame will literally jump forward and looks very poor.

Any ideas as to what it could be?

Hi Matt.

Believe me, I do share your agony. I also shoot weddings and I know that horror feeling when things like these happen.

Now, some thoughts:

You say "...and clean my video heads when the cameras tell me to." --> Maybe when they tell you, it's too late. In my humble opinion you should clean them more frequently (I do it at least every 4 or 5 shoots).

Have you tried to shoot any more with that camera on another tape?

One thing (I'm only speculating) that could of hapened: The video heads where dirty and the tape slowly cleaned them untill minute 27 when good recording started.

If this is the case and you footage is in fact ruined, talk to the B and G and explaine them that your equipment had a malfunction. Ask for their help, you'll be surprised how people react when they see that you are beeing honest with them. Ask them if some of the relatives taped the event with their cameras. Get hold of those tapes and try to get also the still fotographs. Be creative, do a mix of the best footage from the relatives's tapes, some stills and good music.

Please tell us how all come through. I hope all ads up to you.

Best regards and good luck.
Arnaldo

Have you tried playing the tape on another deck?

This has been a problem with some of the Canons for some time. I had a similar problem with my XL-1 -- it took a head replacement to fix it. I saw horizontal banding, pixelating, etc. Typically, after 15-20 minutes into the tape, everything was fine. That included using, among others, new Panasonic MQ Master tapes, so it wasn't a tape issue.

It might be possible to recover your material with a VCR that has Dynamic Motion Control -- the DSR-1600, DSR-1800 & DSR-2000 all have this. It's "iffy", though.

I'd like to be more encouraging about this, but my experience was not a good one until the drum change.

I'd get the camera into Canon ASAP.

Have you trashed your prefs? Might help.

hi all,

I got PAL and NTSC footage in the same project, dun ask me why i shot with 2 cameras format...it was a choice when i had none.

anyway, i read through the previous posts and i tried the following

1) Export NTSC into PAL Quicktime
2) Import that Quicktime file into project.

frankly speaking, i cant see any difference in quality.(then again, i am seeing from an iBOOK). but i realize NTSC is 29.97fps while PAL is 25fps.

My question is, is it better to convert PAL to NTSC instead using this method? since i believe FCP will drop frames when doing NTSC to PAL. So, PAL to NTSC it will add frames. is that right?

Also, is burning footages into DVDS, and then import that into the needed format a better way if i want as little quality loss as possible?

thanks!

Hey guys,

Thanks for your replies! If anything they act as good 'therapy' for me:) As a side note... this is like the same of 5 other threads on the same topic all across the WWW that I put up....lol! Everyone is telling me 'dirty heads', etc., etc., etc... and now that I think back on it, while I was recording the camera did tell me to clean the heads, which I did. I now realize that the footage that is 'clean' was taken after I cleaned the heads... hence halfway through the tape everything is fine. I had the camera in for service last week to get a grain of dust from out of the lens that was causing focusing problems. Canon overnighted it back to me Friday and I literally pulled it out of the box off my front porch and threw it into my case and began using it. I suspect that maybe the camera was jarred around during shipping and knocked something slightly out of whack. When I cleaned the heads, everthing was lined back up again... who knows. Somebody said my only hope is the Sony 2000 deck ($20 grand). They said that is the only machine that was able to play something like this back just fine... or at least they thought so. I'm going to see if I can rent one and give it a go.

Regardless of what happened, I didn't lose much. The biggest part was the processional from the front of the aisle. My 'main' camera was filming it from behind and I should be able to use that. Everything else was 'staging' shots of the church, flowers, etc. I'm going to drive back down to DC Tuesday to get a ton of those kind of shots. Unfortunately the processional is lost, and I'll just have to explain what happened to the B & G and maybe get in touch with the photographer and see if she can share some of her stills with me so I can put them into a montage at least in the highlight part of the video... we'll see:)

Thanks again guys!

I just trashed all my preferences and went to an easy setup, started a new project and captured again... and everything seems to be running smoothly.

It's a pity I had to kill everything like that, is there any other options to get old work back?

I'm running FCP HD capturing 24p footage from an XL2. Everything is set to 48 kHz audio... the capture, the sequence, and the original audio recording. When I import the footage and view it in FCP, there is a drifting audio sync problem. At the hour mark it is offset by more than a second. However, when I open the .mov files in Quicktime, there is no syncing problem. Any ideas?



Benjamin Kantor

anyone help???

When you hook up a camera and monitor how does the QuickTime file look playing on a Television or NTSC monitor?
You're most likely going to want to take a look at http://nattress.com/ for the Standards Conversion plug-in.
I've had to pay over $100 per hour to get good results from a service bureau after trying to transcode in Cleaner and QT. After Effects works too for conversion, but read-up on the Nattress site. Good stuff.

well i heard about nattress's plugins, but right now i do not have cash to buy .

how about the export into DVD and import route? thats a lot easier and cheaper for me (although i dun own the DVD burner). is the quality loss low?

iDVD 4 is not backward compatable to iDVD3. If you even remotely know anyone in education (K-12, college, student or teacher), get them to buy the iLife suite for you - $29 w/ education discount. You'll get iDVD4, iMovie 4 too so its worth it.

If none of that works, send it to me. i'll burn it for you.

matt, maybe some local TV studio has some good player and they could help you... ?

You scared the ^&( out of me. Last time I've read about a XM2 (GL2) camera was about the "zoom issue" and I got that at the next wedding...
I wish I hadn't read this topic! :)

I'm installing holding my breath.. do you think they might have fixed the soft canvas problem in FCP?
Time will tell..

Hi.

I'm a new user of Xl2, last week I shot in 24P mode 2:3 pulldown, and capture that in FCPHD, when I playback the tape in the camera the audio is in sync, but when I playback the shots in the time line the audio is in no sync , some one know the correct setting for capture from 24P to edit in 29.97 NTSC ? drop or non drop? 30fps or 29.97fps?

Thanks for all.

Carlos from Valparaiso.

Use the NTSC DV easy preset.

Graeme

it fixed mine.

hey ill try to explain what id like to do and hopefully you guys can figure it out. first of all ive been using basic 3d in AE to make it seem as if the text were on a wall... my question is how would i curve the text... for example id want the text while flat to be like ______/, as if each _ is abcde, and then at f it bends up like / sorry its pretty hard to explain, and i was just wondering which effect i should use to do that... for instance here this might be clearer.. if i wanted to spell Computor, id want the "comp" going level as normal, and "utor" to bend and start going diagonally to the right and upward. thank you,

Use text on a path and you can make it do whatever you want with the handles. I don't know what version of AE you have but in AE 5.5 Production Bundle it is an option in the effects panel under "Text"-"Path Text". Hope that helps.

BTW- I completely understood what you were trying to describe so, good job.

thank you very much, lifesaver!.. and im using 6.5 pro

Yes I agree, mine too. It seems safe to do the upgrade for those of you that have lingered.. =)

I have the dual 2.5ghz G5 and want to upgrade the ram to 8GB- what's the best price you guys have found-----I've found $1536+.......what about u guys?

Link---->
http://www.memorytogo.com/componex/itemdesc,CartId,{E4183F16-0E95-47AD-9AD4-E26EVEREST3A18BEA5E},ic,MEMTG646531,eq,,Tp,.htm

RAM is one thing I especially do NOT price shop for! get it from http://www.crucial.com/
It will set you back just over $2000 but it's the best RAM you can get and carries a lifetime warranty.

Cheap RAM can cause problems that you just can't figure out and can't even pinpoint to the RAM easily. It's not worth it. Also, Crucial guarantees their RAM will be compatible as you move forward. Apple has upgraded the specs they require from RAM manufacturers in the past and those who bought "cheaper" RAM sometimes got stuck with useless memory that no longer worked in the machine after an upgrade to the OS. That will piss you off I guarantee and it will make the money you saved up front seem minimal.

If it's a matter of money you could buy a little less now and save for more later but DO NOT sacrifice the quality.

p.s. Never buy RAM from Apple. I know they recommend it, but it only carries a one year warranty (unless you buy Apple care, and then it's only for 3 more years) AND it is vastly overpriced!

Rhett,

actually memtogo does include LIFETIME warranty and compatibility on the ram I mentioned for $1536......I have a buddy who does actual hexadecimal coding using Macs and he buys from them- but I don't think they're the least expensive- there's gotta be lesser costing ram with similar warranty.......I used CL2 class ram on my older Mac G4/933 but I don't know if there is a class structure to the new ram....

......I was hoping some of you Mac savvy G5 users out there knew of a better price for 8GB ram.....or else it's $1500 for new ram!
(getting ready for HDV editing)

I have purchased from memtogo before and yes, the RAM I got was good quality (but I bought 222 RAM), I was one of the lucky one's who passed that last Apple RAM upgrade fiasco.
I purchased from Crucial this last time (for my Powerbook) because the last batch of CL2 RAM I got from memtogo (for one of my PC's) had one bad stick and I can't find the receipt (bought it online) and they won't even respond to my inquiries. I've always heard good things about Crucial and now they get my business because someone at memtogo didn't want to reply to my emails or phone calls. I don't reward bad business with more of my business.

so anyway... I think as long as they are giving you good quality RAM you should be ok but no, I don't know of "cheaper" reputable RAM dealers.

I'm having a problem. I'm editing a short project on a powerbook Mac 1.5 G4 laptop with 1 gig of ram. I have a 80 gig hard drive with almost 40 gig free.

Editing and viewing the project on the laptop is fine, but when I hook up my camera using firewire, it plays back choppy. The video plays a little better then the audio, the audio plays a little, then stops, a little, then stops.

Has anyone had this problem?

Im not really a cumputer guy but ehy I thinking about purchasing a Dual 2.5 G5 w/8 gig of RAM and the best graphic card that apple offers, is this enough for everything.

Im also buying the production suite from apple it includes everything from FCPro HD to motion etc. Another question does Final cut Pro HD capture 24p, if that make sense....

Yes. Have fun.

yeah i'd say that was enough :)

Steve,

I'm envious. Just to let you know, currently Mac OS X does not have the ability to use 8 gigs of RAM, I think 4 gigs is the limit. Tiger, or OS 10.4, is the next release due in the 1st half of 2005 and I think it will have more 64 bit abilities, which is the main point of the G5 processor.

Dollar for dollar the Mac G5 is the best desktop computer you can buy, and the cheapest I might add. Speaking of price, 8 gigs of RAM will run you $4500 (yes, that's four thousand five hundred dollars), $1500 more than the coputer itself.

Oh yeah, have fun also :)

8X1GB of RAM will cost you "only" $2080 at crucial.com (this may be better quality RAM than apple's... and comes with lifetime warranty, which isn't terribly useful as RAM rarely fails).

You probably don't need anywhere that much RAM. 1GB or 2GB should be enough... having more than enough RAM makes zero effect on performance. Not having enough will slow down performance drastically. So the key is knowing how much RAM is enough.

The ideal RAM configuration is pairs of the exact same model. You get a bit more performance that way.

Video card: It doesn't affect performance except for previews in Motion.

Another question does Final cut Pro HD capture 24p, if that make sense....
Yes. Read up though, as you may need to change settings and such. It depends on the camera you have.

2- You may not want to spend so much on a computer until you start doing things and figure out what you need.
A- Computers lose value really fast. In 2 years, computers will roughly double in speed / halve in price. A $8000 computer will lose roughly $4000 in 2 years.
B- You hit diminishing gains with your money fairly fast. You have to pay a lot extra for small increases in speed.

You might want to go for a refurb/academic discount G5 (i.e. dual 1.8ghz) with 1GB of RAM.

If you're just learning, you could learn on a dual processor 500mhz G4. It will get real-time cross dissolves (and real-time titles... kinda), so if you do just do cuts and dissolves it's really all you need. It also helps to have a crappy computer in a way so you don't get distracted by technology.

Hey all. I'm currently editing some 16:9 24p footage in a 4:3 24p timeline, and everything was working fine. For the first minute and a half there are 'black bars' above and below all the footage, as there should be in the 4:3 timeline. At a certain point however, around the 1:30 mark, the footage starts to stretch instead of bring up those 'black bars.' The little green line at the top of the timeline which was above the 16:9 footage is now absent. Any idea what could be happening? thanks a lot.

For some reason FCP is not recognizing that particular clip as 16:9 (normally there is a signal embedded in the video that takes care of this). I'm assuming there is a clip which begins at this point, if not then I have no idea what's going on! It could also be a clip inside another sequence if you're nesting, or maybe you accidently switched the camera out of 16:9 mode while filming?

Open the clip in the viewer by double clicking on the timeline. Now click on the motion tab and then click the triangle next to distort. The aspect ratio will probably be 0. Change this to -33.33 and the clip should become letterboxed. The absence of a green line means that the footage doesn't need rendering. That means FCP believes the clip is really 4:3 and not 16:9.