• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Import from DVCAM tape blocky

  Posted by Dan Haskini on March 9, 2011 at 4:03 am

  At school we have a Sony firewire deck hooked up to a mac for importing DV tapes of our 16mm projects that have been telecined to those tapes. I noticed that the video looked nice on the monitor at the telecine place, and on the monitor of the firewire deck, and on the TV when played back in a DV tape player. But whenever it is on the screen in looks blocky. This is only happening in Final Cut as far as I know. (I did a capture with my Canon HV30 at home with Adobe Premiere that is nice and sharp, the only problem is that since the HV30 isn’t designed for DVCAM the speed is wrong and there are plenty of artifacts.) Anyway I tried changing all sorts of settings, frame size, aspect ratio, etc. Here is a screencap from VLC set to 4:3:

  https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v382/FredTheFat/vlcsnap-2011-03-08-19h35m30s204.png
  https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v382/FredTheFat/vlcsnap-2011-03-08-19h55m08s241.png

  Of all the different things I did to try to capture it, this is the one that looked the best. It shouldn’t be the codec that is the problem, as this is 8 bit uncompressed.

  And here is a VLC snapshot of the footage captured in Premiere with the HV30:
  https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v382/FredTheFat/vlcsnap-2011-03-08-19h56m22s207.png
  https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v382/FredTheFat/vlcsnap-2011-03-08-19h34m30s221.png

  No matter what I did the footage just looked bad on the screen in Final Cut. Does anyone know the proper way to import this footage? As far as I know, the default settings are as bad as my 8 bit uncompressed ones, so everyone in the class is having the potential of their footage squandered.

  Neil Sadwelkar replied 15 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Neil Sadwelkar

  March 9, 2011 at 1:08 pm

  How do the FCP captured Quicktime files look when seen in Quicktime Player? If they are fine, then what’s looking blocky, the picture inside FCP? Check your Sequence quality settings in the RT popup.

  Also, try capturing in FCP over Firewire and set your easy setup to DV-PAL or DV-NTSC as the case may be.

  ———————————–
  Neil Sadwelkar
  neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
  twitter: fcpguru
  FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
  Mumbai India

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