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~> FCP 5 NIGHTMARES
Wow…what a crappy day. It’s been raining and cold for the past 2 weeks here in Boston. Noah is about to show up with the Ark.
In the not-helping-matters category, I’m having a bitch of a time trying to get FCP 5 to seemlessly work with my system. I’ve got a Dual 2ghz, 3 gb RAM, 1 tb RAID, AJA Io with the lastest firmware and beta video drivers, running Tiger 10.4.1 and FCP 5.
Here is a short list of issues:
— VIdeo quality has been reduced overall.
— Sections of video that have simply “disappeared”
— Text that I created in photoshop and brought into FCP as layers looks like crap – See the links below.
— MPEG 1 media that I imported (640×480) just no longer works. See below.
— No video output, audio out of sync on the Io < FIXED! Thanks Will from AJA. Problems started to emerge when I did the QT 7 and Tiger install a while ago, but I got through them and went on with it. However, the shit hit the fan after I did the FCP 5 install. First: MPEG 1 media. I took some VOB files from a client-provided DVD and was told that if I do something as easy as renaming them with a ".mpg" suffix, they just work. Sure enough, they did and integrated into FCP 4.5 just fine. After a rendering and a slight change in scale, they worked great....no audio though, not that it was needed. They worked up to the point of the upgrade to FCP 5. Once the upgrade happend, the MPEGs would not show up on screen or on my ext. monitor. I just got a freeze frame of the last usable video with a psychedellic effect of purple and pink over it. Before the upgrade, I was able to open these files with both FCP 4.5 and QT 7 Player. Now, nothing. QT 7 Pro player says it can't Understand what kind of file it is and FCP is obviously not working either. So...thats problem #1 Second: HD footage just 'dissapearing.' I have a lot of DVCPro100 material on my drives from a previous edit that I havn't removed yet. There are a few SD projects that I have used the material in and it worked great. But, once I did the upgrade, there are a few clips that have black holes in them now - say 2 - 5 seconds of time that is just black now. What gives? Third: Crappy text from a PSD file AFTER I rendered. Check out these two links: Done with 4.5 (try to look past the spelling mistake): https://dsimon.org/images/good-quality.jpg
And now, FCP 5: https://dsimon.org/images/bad-quality.jpgI have played with the RT menu and futzed with all the settings. Still nothing.
Throughout this whole things, Apple has been somewhat unresponsive. My free 90 days doesn’t include stuff like “Why does my video suddenly look like shit?”
Any help would be greatly appretiated! I’m leaving for SF by the end of the week (for good), so I figured I would have the system in some sort of upgraded state before I left.
Thanks,
Dave -
19 Replies
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How did you upgrade your system? Did you do a clean install?
Dajen Productions
Santa Barbara, CA
G5 Dual 2 Gig – AJA IO
Huge 1.2 Raid
FCP 4.5-OS X 10.3.8-QT 6.5 -
the PS tiles look as if to be reading 2 fields of an interlace, did you try to de-interlace and then re-import them? also, why no drop shadow? they will pop more.
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just for shits and giggles we gave you 2 frames the once over, and to tell ya the ruth the FCP5 QT7 (we are assume) looks like crap overall. you didnt post the same frame for both, wish you would, but the 4.5 still is so much cleaner and has more color and detail over all, this was/is a locked off camera and locked set?
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Dave,
YES, I had the EXACT same type results in FCP 5, on an existing project in 4.5 where the text looked great. nO amount of fiddling with quality settings helped. I also had the no video problem, it kept switching from all frames to none on it’s own. I had to bail on it and re-install Panther and 4.5 to get my livehood back. Bummer.
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So far with FCP 5 my Photoshop graphics have had variable quality from OK to unuseable. I’m not producing them differently than I ever have. On one project I had to change the ‘Motion Filtering Quality’ to fastest to get a PS graphic to not jitter. Something is not quite right herre but I haven’t had time to investigate further.
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Thank you everyone for your responses. I took another crack at it this morning and still no luck. The text still looks terrible and I don’t really want to downgrade back to Panther and FCP 4.5. I’ll try Nick’s suggestion of speeding up the filter, but that really shouldn’t be the problem.
Nick: Do you run an Io?
I spoke to AJA regarding the RT settings. Since the Io runs everything through the firewire as uncompressed material, bringing your RT settings down to Medium or Low and even Dynamic actually makes the CPU work harder to downconvert everything.
Any suggestions??
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What does it look like when you print it to tape?
Dennis Lisonbee
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It still looks bad.
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Dave:
I am running an IO. I get better playback with unlimited RT and high than I do from Dynamic. I’ve only been using 5 for a couple of days. The graphic problem in the pix you posted is exactly what I am seeing. Changing the motion filter to fastest fixed the problem. I don’t see much difference overall in the video. I need to investigate further.
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Dave:
I am running an IO. I get better playback with unlimited RT and high than I do from Dynamic. I’ve only been using 5 for a couple of days. The graphic problem in the pix you posted is exactly what I am seeing. Changing the motion filter to fastest fixed the problem. I don’t see much difference overall in the video. I need to investigate further.
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