well...
 

I downloaded and installed it and now I have: crawl, lower 3rd, outline text, scrolling text, text, typwriter, title 3D, and title cawl. Is that all of it? The link was an upgrade, so I wanted to check and see if I got everything.
Thanks,
Mark

I think it was included in the upgrade, but maybe not. Look int the Extras folder and their should be one labeled Boris Calligraphy Docs. If there is, then it is included. Run the installer again and when Easy Install appears choose Custom instead and just check the Calligraphy box. That should allow you to just install the Caligraphy extras.

It might not have been included in the upgrade. In which case check out the Boris site http://www.borisfx.com/ I think they have some end of year deals going on.

Jeff

Upgrade
 

There is a folder call Boris Caligraphy, but it's not the same package as the one on the full install of FCP3.0. It's kind of wierd but it's not the same package as the one Paul Sedillo has installed on his system from FCP 3.0 CD. I'll check the Boris site and maybe if I whine and howl enough they'll take pity on me and float me a full version of Boris :)

Paul, thanks for your suggestion. I had checked out the filters on Joe's website before, but it seems that his mosaic filter doesn't allow you to complete the task using the filter alone; i.e., you have to copy the video clip to a second track, create a mask, apply the filter, and then animate the masked layer. I was wondering if a filter exists that allows you to apply a mosaic shape directly to the video clip and keyframe the motion entirely with the parameters of the filter.

That's correct, because of the pricing difference between the upgrade and the full version. I doubt Boris will do much, maybe give a little extra off one of their products. It never hurts to ask.

Jeff

Mark,
"Title 3D" is BC. Sounds like you have it now.

I just downloaded
 

the patch from Apple it all seems to be working okay now. I can now mangle my text and titles even more than before :)
Thanks,
Mark
FYI: my email account seems to be messed up so if you send me anything make sure it goes to maustin1@houston.rr.com

Rob,
Do you have a hard requirement for a mosiac or can you use a blur spot? If the latter, I know that Joe's Filters can do the job. Use the "Soft Spot" filter. You can easily keyframe its orgin in the footage. It doesn't require all of the monkey business you outlined.

Alternately, are you sure you can't get a signed release from the subject? <g?

Thanks for the tip, Ken. The Soft Spot filter is more along the lines of what I am looking for, although I don't know if this project would allow me to subsitute mosaic with blur. I've been hired to shoot and edit an adult video for the Japnese market, and, as you may already know, in Japan all genitalia must be covered with mosaic. I've seen blur used instead of mosaic in pornographic magazines, but not in video. I'll need to research this.

Do you already own these filters, Ken? Do you know if you can animate the position of the blur by dragging it on the screen instead of entering in numerical values? Can you change the shape of the mask over time, or only the size? I guess I could just download the demo and find out, eh.

Rob,
Well I'd really like to help you reasearch this project but...I'm a married man <g>.

"Do you know if you can animate the position of the blur by dragging it on the screen instead of entering in numerical values? Can you change the shape of the mask over time, or only the size?"

(OK, I'm trying to evaluate your questions clinically rather than imagine how such attributes might be important for your project.)

Yes, you can change blur shapes and sizes over time. No, you must use numerical values to keyframe, as with other FCP.

Indeed, you should just download the demo filter set and experiment. That's what I did before I purchased. It's really a great value, particularly compared with other 1-trick-pony filter plug-ins that charge multiples of Joe's Filters.

Good luck with your project. Let us know if anything else, errr, comes up that we can help with.

Thanks for the advice, Ken. I'll give those filters a try. It's a shame that I need to put in all this extra work just to make the end product less appealing to the audience. ;-(

Final Cut Pro 3 crashes when rendering?
 

I've been lurking here for awhile and I think this is probably the best place to ask this.

I have the Academic version of Final Cut Pro 3.0.2 (I'm a student, shoot me now) and am using it in Mac OS X 10.2.2. I am trying to create a dissolve between a simple live action shot and a simple pre-rendered animated title (no sound). When I go to render the program crashes nearly every time. Sometimes it will even get up to 90% rendered before it crashes. I have been able to do this just fine in Final Cut Pro 2. And yes, my animated title is the same size and speed as my live action shot (720x480, Quicktime DV codec, 29.97fps etc). I switched the sequence to "always render in RGB" but the rendering quality seems lower for some reason when I do that, but it doesn't crash.

Anybody have any suggestions I might be able to try?

Welcome Curtis
 

Glad to have you join us!

Well yours is a difficult question and will be hard to precisely pin-down. Since you only indicated problems when rendering I'm going to assume that all other operations seem to work normally, eh?

My approach to tracking down such problems, in general, is to try to figure out what the program's really doing behind the scenes. In the case of a render operation FCP is reading your footage files and writing "synthetic" footage files that contain facsimiles of the modified footage frames. So the first attribute I'd look at is where those render files are being written to. To do this, open your project and go into Preferences then look at the Scratch Disks tab. Is the disk to which the render files are being written full or nearly full? Do you have access to another internal disk or Firewire disk? If so, try changing the location of the "Video Render" setting to that disk.

If you don't have a 2nd disk, I'd recommend exiting FCP, deleting all of your project's render files from the location (specified on the settings found above), empty your trash, and then try re-rendering your affected sequences. I'm betting that something funky's going on with respect to either your disk space or within a render file. BTW, what type of Mac are you using?

(In general, it's best to keep all of your media and render/scratch files off of your main system drive, using a 2nd internal drive or Firewire drive if possible.)

Let us know if this has any effect on your problem.

p.s. Absolutely nothing wrong with being a student around here, Curtis. In fact it's a great place for students!

Thanks for the reply. My student comment was made to put me out of my misery, not to defend my status. :)

Anyway, I have a dual 1 Ghz "Mirrored Drive Door" Mac with 512 megs of Ram and all that good stuff. It is fairly new and I have not yet had the time to buy another internal drive, but that is definitely on the list. I have quite a bit of remaining space on the drive, 71.51 gigs in fact. I was working on this project a few weeks ago and it crashed doing the same thing. I just wrote it off as one of those things that happens sometimes. Since then I have run Diskwarrior and defragged (optimized?) the drive. Also since then I upgraded from 10.2.1 to 10.2.2.

What is odd is that once it DID complete the render just fine. It also completes rendering between other clips without any problems. It's just when the rendering is involving a Quicktime that I made from Ray Dream Studio (in OS 9). Sometimes the render gets to 90% or so and sometimes it crashes at 10% or even right away. It almost seems like a CPU issue perhaps. And these Ray Dream Quicktimes are handled effortlessly in FCP2 and 1 in OS 9. I would use FCP 2 except I like the color correction in FC3 in OS X.

OK, next question. What codec are you using to produce the QuickTime clip from Ray Dream? I'm imagining that it's some sort of 3D animation, no?

Yes, it is animation. Ray Dream Studio allows me to export in any Quicktime format available. I always render at 720x480 and 29.97fps etc. The codec is Quiktime DV NTSC. Colors=Millions (according to Quicktime).

Upgrade to FCP 3.0.4, it's free. Download it from the Apple site. Is everything on one large partition of your hard drive? Read in the manual about setting up to render in YCrCb. The only difference between it and RGB render should be the color space and not a quality issue. If your project was created in an older version of FCP it may not render in YCrCb or it may need to be updated. Moving to FCP 3.0.4 may solve a lot of your problems. It has for many users.

Jeff

I didn't know 3.0.4 was available, but that seemed to do the trick! In fact, I don't seem to need to even render simple things like dissolves anymore! Thanks for the help guys! You know it's always good when the original poster of a thread ends up using an exclamation point at the end of every sentence! That means he/she is happy!

I guess this just reinforces the apparent rule of thumb for digital editing:

When all logical solution paths fail, reinstall or upgrade!

Delighted to hear all's well now.

Pround new iBook owner
 

I didn't have enough for a powerbook but instead got the new 800 mhz 12 inch iBook. This is my first laptop, I'm still getting used to the keyboard. I"m off in about an hour to use it on a photo shoot and once I get FCP on it then I'll edit on the go in RT Offline mode, can't wait!!!

Good for you, Rik! Let us know how your iBook works out. I'm sure many folks would dive at a cool-looking iBook if they were assured that it would work well for editing with FCP.

Mixing down audio in FCP
 

Can anyone tell me how I'm supposed to mixdown the audio in FCP? There is a command in the menu for mixdown audio...but that isn't doing what I thought it would.

When I'm compressing using Cleaner, my final output file sizes are still way too big...even for high quality settings (85mb for a 6 minute 320x240 movie...black and white no less). Adrian said he figures that it's due to my having multiple audio tracks after adding music, lots of layered foley, and the regular stereo audio from the video footage itself. So, I started looking for a way to mixdown the audio to one track...and don't see how it can be done.

Any other advice on how to knock the file sizes down without losing too much quality?

I assume you are exporting to QuickTime. If so, open the quicktime
file with the quicktime player and check its audio & video properties.
This can tell you:

1. how many tracks you actually have
2. what the datarate for each track is

Then you can see if this is a problem or that you just need
to find a better codec/compression. What codec are you using?

<showing a complete lack of knowledge>

Wouldn't it be better to do the audio work in a program other than FCP? From everything that I have read, FCP is not the best at handling audio. My projects have not required more than 4 tracks, so I am very curious as to the limitations of FCP (ref. audio).

Rob,

Actually, I never export to QuickTime. I export it raw as an FCP file. Then, import that into Cleaner. The quality turns out a lot higher that way. Cleaner lets you set the ouput of the audio, but Adrian said he thinks that if I mixdown my audio prior to exporting to Cleaner that that will drop the file size substantially.

Paul,

I've tweaked certain clips in Peak then imported those into FCP projects, but overall I've used FCP to do almost all my audio. It's got all the "basic" tools and filters. It's just limiting when you want to go beyond the basics. So far, I haven't needed to. I'm sure an audio expert could take my FCP audio and do wonders with it in another program, but I don't know enough about other audio editing programs to do anything over and above what FCP can do (with the exception of some special effects).

The audio mixdown creates a non-destructive (means you can undo your mixdown) single audio track for playback only. It reduces your playback load considerably. However, you're not playing back. You want to create a file for export. Do you have DVD Studio Pro. If so, you can create your compressed audio file (AC3) in it.

Are you using Cleaner 6 yet? You can also set the audio compression etc. in it also. I imagine you can do it in 5, but I don't remember. Age is terrrible, the mind is the first thing to go.
Jeff

I wonder if the next version of FCP will adress the audio issues? :)

I'm also hoping for improvements in the audio department. I would guess that they might also bundle it with something better than Peak LE.

Jeff

I have Pro Tools LE (which came with my MBox) and have not even begun to understand how to use it. Plus it only runs in OS 9, which is the only application that needs that OS. From what I understand, Pro Tools is the cats meow when it comes to audio.

John,

I was reffering to the output from Cleaner, not FCP. I assume
Cleaner outputs QuickTime?

FCP Audio
 

I have also had one #$#* of a time with my audio in FCP3.0. I guess I'm a geek-meister but after using real audio tools for years, FCP is worse than pathetic, and Peak LE is much harder to use than nessasary. ProTools is actually a very easy program to use hence the fact that it has become the de facto standard for audio editing. It's no wonder that audio is as neglected and confusing for videographers, the tools are poor and difficult to use. Logic Audio is a very robust program but probably too complex for what we (video folks) do, but a Logic Le designed intoFCP(x) would be the ticket, Apple are you listening???. I have used some of the Sonic Foundry stuff (VV, VA, Sound Forge) and they are awesome, truly professional audio tools that come integrated into the program not some cheesy toss in "LE" bundle. I have mastered dozens of CD's in Sound Forge it's that good. Why, when we spend thousands on video NLE software for the Mac, don't we get a real audio NLE included? Sorry to get on my soap box again, but this is a very sore subject for me.
Mark

Mark, since you like the audio tools in Sonic Foundry stuff so much, how do you feel about the video editing in Vegas Video? My work is in oral history, and getting clean audio (sometimes under less than ideal circumstances) is a real issue. I do my best to get it clean on site, but normalizing levels, and removing the occasional distraction is really critical for me.

Linc Kesler

White Balance Inquiry....
 

Why is it that manuals and refrences suggest we use either a white or 18% grey card for white balancing if their both far off in color (from each other)? Wouldn't using a white card produce a different offset than a grey card- how does the camera achieve seemingly identical perfect white balance if we can use either a white or grey card? Wouldn't it have to be one or the other?

Thanks Jeff. I went and checked out both Reason and Rebirth. Reason looks like it might be the ticket. Reason looks to be much more flexible and expandable than Storm. I did note that it is twice the price, but looks to be worth it.

Aliasing happens when square pixels try to make a diagonal/curved image, so you think they would make some crazy new pixel shape to accomodate.. I wonder how feasible circular pixels would be :)

Good question, Steve. I've used both, with little discernable difference. When setting-up in a theater, the grey card in my Portabrace bag is frequently too small to zoom into, so I've used a larger poster board. I keep thinking I should spray it light grey, but not sure why....?

We'll have to wait for the "big guys" to weigh-in...

Re: jagged edges when rotating wireframe
 

<<<-- Originally posted by Simon Davies :

Is there a way to make those edges sharp again?

-->>>

Simon,

You might just give the opposite a try and soften the edges. If you look through your Effects tab, you will see a Glaussen Blur. Apply it to the clip in small increments and adjust it (settings) to fit your need. When I am having problems with edges not looking good, I usually give this a go. Learned this trick from similar situations in Photoshop.

Not sure if it will fit the bill for you, but thought I might offer a different perspective.

"Aliasing happens when square pixels try to make a diagonal/curved image, so you think they would make some crazy new pixel shape to accomodate.. I wonder how feasible circular pixels would be"

It's pixel size, not shape, that should be blamed for aliasing. Cf. Nyquist's theorem.

I think that in theory anyway, the white and grey cards should have the same color characteristics, but a different brightness level. In still photography, the gray card represents a mid-level value (zone 3? zone 5? I don't remember!), where the white card gives the highlight level. A reflected metering of the gray card should give the same reading as a metering with an incident light meter, so it's the more general basic reading, but since highlights tend to be the critical loss area for slide film, the white card is often used to check contrast. As to which works better for color balance, I don't know. I guess it depends on the "neutrality" of either on the given card. I do know that if I have my exposure set on manual when I'm setting up (my usual), the camera seems to find its white balance better if I adjust the exposure when focusing on a white card, since it is otherwise overexposing significantly.

Linc Kesler

That's pretty much it, Linc. The "color" of both an 18% card and a white card is the same, it's just the brightness/reflected luminance that differs. For purposes of white balance, either will do. I know that for years I only have used white cards (and continue to do so) and that the first time I have heard of using a grey card was here in this forum, and the reason given that the white card can cause overmodulation in the signal (+100% white). The method I have always used with video is to fill the frame as much as possible with the card, then use the momentary automatic iris to allow the camera to find its best exposure, then perform the white balance.

The gray card is intended to be used both as a metering/exposure aid and to be photographed at the head of a scene to allow for more efficient color correction in post-production.