I have downloaded these sound files from Sounddog. I downloaded them as aif, 48,000 Hz, 16 bits. The files are about 10 mgb. When the download is finished I get a player on the desktop and the sound begins immediately. I can't find any file on the hard drives related to this player and the player cannot be imported, opened, etc. I got the following from the Sounddog site FAQ. This would seem to be the problem but I can't see what to do in either Quicktime or Explorer.

"Q. My sounds are coming up as RealPlayer only files. What's wrong? A. On your system, RealPlayer has been specified to control all audio passing through your browser. This often causes a problem if you need to hear the sound without using RealPlayer. To resolve, reinstall Quicktime or Windows Media Player or alter your settings in your browser preferences so that sound files are saved to disk."

Thanks Grant

Final Cut Pro and Clustering
 

I ran into instructions the other day on how to cluster your macs together. I was thinking this will be great if FCP is aware of parallel processing. Well i have not been able to find out this info so i thought somebody here might have an idea.

If you want more info on clustering: http://www.daugerresearch.com/pooch/gettingstarted.html

Dropped Frames
 

I've been backing up tapes from a project in Final Cut Express, and all is going well except for one tape. When I try to capture this tape FCE tells me that frames were dropped and it quits importing the video. I've tried to capture it a few times and it seems like it stops capturing at different times on the tape.

I was wondering if anyone might have an idea of what's causing this and how to stop it, or get around it.


Canon GL2, Mac OS 10.3.3, FCE

I cant tell you what is causing it but if you want it to stop it from aborting capture then go to user prefences and uncheck "abort capture on dropped frames." Just so you know this is how you do it in Final Cut Pro, but i think it is the same way in express.

Brian

To the best of my knowledge FCP is not set up to network render like After Effects and other processor intensive software.

Did you resolve this issue?

what version of QT are you using and you should update to the latest version of FCP, 4.1.1 If that doesn’t solve it, try trashing the three preferences files FCP uses.

Thanks for the info. I didnt know after effects was. I guess ill set the cluster up. Then try to figure out how to use AE lol

Is there any reason to update to 4.1.1 from 4.1 since 4.1.1 only deals with Chinese characters?

My understanding is you are correct Ted. However, I didn't want to confuse Dave, if he ran Software Update and saw the different version. I don't know of any individuals having issues with the update, (just 4.1.1 not FCP) so it wouldn't hurt.

idvd error
 

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

Help? Where do Renders go?
 

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.

Color Correction/Adjustment Techniques?
 

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.

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
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage...c_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!

Dvdsp2
 

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 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

Filesystems on OSX
 

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

got a doozie for yall (long)
 

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.

Doubling and smoothing footage
 

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

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.

Stuttering sound problem with my G5 2 dual
 

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.

New HD for a G4
 

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.

static image import problems
 

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.