new g5 imac or 15" powerbook ?
 

OK - OK you guys if you've got $2500 to laydown for a new mac , which would you chose , a new decked out 20" imac or a basic 15" pwb- programs are the usual suspects. thanks Kurth

iMac with the G5 processor wins in every category except portability and weight.

This might just be something you can't fix in post. Hopefully you can improve it though.

G5 vs. Imac G5`
 

greetings to all; if you are doing DV, the Imac is a consideration, because you can use an external firewire 800 hard drive and have the power of a G5 and the cost benefits of an Imac. Rocstor has in upcoming product that will make this an even better option for those that are working with a budget
the question is expansion, here there is no contest, the tower G5 has the connections for any format, the Imac has a limit to firewire conversion
One of the great things about the new G5, my clients that are doing DV have a very easy upgrade path to DV/SDI conversion, direct SDI and direct HDI.
thanks, brian
apple pro video

Color-correction and Posterization fixes?
 

Hello, all! I'm working on a MiniDV feature shot with the DVX100 and edited on Final Cut Pro 4. Now I'm getting to the phase of color-correction, and I need your help.

When I do color correction on a clip with large areas of a uniform color, artifacts show up. Big, blocky, posterization artifacts. These do not appear on the original, unmodified footage, only when I change the colors to make it look really dark and cold. I understand that DV has limitations because of the severe compression inherent in the medium. But due to the nature of the scene (shooting day-for-night) I HAVE to do a lot of color correcting on it.

Is there any way to minimize the appearance of these artifacts? Any color-correcting techniques that I could apply to prevent them from showing up, or to at least diffuse them? I know some people here do color correction by up-rezzing the footage to "preserve color space"... Does this help with posterization artifacts? Would adding a grain-type filter be a solution, or would that just muddy up the final image?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

DVX on FCP problems
 

alright guys, i'm having the strangest problems all of a sudden. i have a DVX100A and FCP HD...
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i have 2 problems and my guess is that they are related.
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1) i am shooting in 24PA. i'm guessing that i am not capturing correctly because it always needs to render the sequence file. i know what the settings are, but they don't work. for example, i have the a/v settings set up to capture with firewire NDF at 2:3:3:2 pulldown and to default the sequences to 23.98fps. BUT when i actually CAPTURE the footage, it somehow isnt in 23.98. if i right click, go to properties, and go to Format, it says that the clip is 29.97fps. FCP seems to be confused as well, because under the Tools menu, it usually says Apply Advanced Pulldown or whatever, but instead it says Remove Advanced Pulldown because it thinks it was used, but if i actually click it, it says "Error, no clips found using the advanced pulldown" and whatnot. if i drop the clip into a 23.98 sequence, it won't work without several minutes of rendering. even though it supposdly was captured at 23.98. HELP!
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2) i'm guessing this has something to do with the _frame rate, but maybe not... anything i DO capture with the above problem has the sound way off sync... like a couple seconds off sync, not just a few frames. sometimes i have this problem, sometimes not. its very sporaddic, but probably 25-50% of the time, i have this problem.
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any suggestions? this is so weird.... thanks a lot!

DVD Studio Pro 3: Jacket Pictures won't work
 

I am building a DVDSP project, and had just found out about the ability to add jacket pictures to your DVD projects... and its very easy to do, but its not working. I made my picture in photoshop in the standard DV size, exported it as a TIFF file and brought it into DVDSP. I told DVDSP to use that file as the jacket picture, and it seems to work fine in the simulator. However, once I burned the DVD it does not work in the DVD player.

I have tried it in an APEX TV/DVD combo, an ONKYO DVD changer, and a PS2. all 3 play DVD-R discs flawlessly, but none will display the jacket picture. does anyone know why and how to fix this?

thanks,
Chris

Is your render quality set to high? If it is set any lower you will get this.

Capture settings for 24p an 24pA on the DVX are identical to that of normal NTSC DV - ie you must capture at 29.97fps, then let FCP remove the pulldown. They you can set your timeline to 23.98fps.

Graeme

It might help to set Final Cut into ?high definition rendering? mode. The one that uses 32-bit floating point numbers. This will avoid problems with rounding errors (causes banding).

If your problem is something else (you see 4X4 blocks), try using a color smoothing filter. FCP4 has one (labelled something like 4:1:1 color smoothing or something like that).

2- If that doesn't work, post a picture of your original footage plus one after CC.

i'm aware of that, but it wasn't working. my hunch was that the settings were just messed up somehow... i trashed them and set them up again, just the same, and somehow it worked. whaddaya know?

g5
 

had any one used medea/g-raid drives?

Thanks for the replies.

Shane - I believe everything is set to highest quality. Just to be on the safe side, which setting specifically controls the quality of a render? Is it the one in user preferences? Or System Settings, or something else I'm missing? It doesn't look like when I've applied a filter and it's in preview mode without rendering, where it looks all pixellated. That's not the problem. I'm looking at the footage on a Sony NTSC monitor, and the unmodified footage looks perfect (no artifacts of any kind), but the color correction adds these big blocks anywhere there's a large solid color, like a wall or sky.

Glenn - How do I render in High Definition mode? If that doesn't work, I'll try the color smoothing filter and post the results.

Thanks again.

Quick Start Problem FC4
 

I've started capturing yesterday at school on Final Cut 4.
My short was shot on 24p advance with the DVX100a camera. The setting was set on 24 frames when capturing maybe I need to change that to 23.98?. When I shot the video the shutter speed was on 1/24. But don't see any problems when watching it.

Everything looked fine when the capturing was being made. But when I tooked the captured work from the school's G5 into my laptop. The footage looks bad, there is buzzing of the video, just doens't look good at all. :(

Any of you know what could be wrong, any settings on final cut 4 I should look for when capturing 24pa.

Thanks

Thinking of Apple\'s Cert. FCPHD course???
 

Hi All.

Does anyone have any comments on taking the Final Cut PRO HD certified course? What would be the advantages more then product knowledge?
Will this, can this increase billable work?

Thanks tons in advance.
Tom