FCPs’ DVCPro HD: 1920 or 1280????

[J. Tad newberry]

the solution which has been working 100% consistently for me was discovered by someone earlier in this thread, and it is to simply click “re-compress all frames” before sending your Mac off and running. this delivers a DVCPro HD QT file at 1280 x 1080 everytime, with no additional rendering needed. i’ve now mastered 3 shows to HDCam in this manner and the network is loving it!

thanks again!

mh

[James Reid]

[mortimer heathcliff] “no additional rendering needed”
Are you sure?
I just ran the following test twice using FC 6.0.1 (and QT 7.1.6) with a fully rendered 2 minute DVCPro HD 1080i60 sequence containing 23 clips.

Export to QuickTime movie “current settings”, “self contained”: 38 seconds

Export to QuickTime movie “current settings”, “self contained” and “render all frames”: 2 minutes 33 seconds

So recompression was occurring.
Importing both clips to a new project with a DVCPro 1080i60 easy setup, FCP reports the file that wasn’t recompressed as 1920×1080 and requires rendering.
The file that was recompressed is 1280×1080 and doesn’t require rendering.

[David Coiffier]

Hi guys,

Here in Europe, I’ve experienced such problems.

This spring I had a project in DVCPROHD 1080, on FCP 5.11
I did export the whole sequence in a single file without recompressing, just flattening.

This summer I had another project in same format, and also same kind of export, but this time with FCP 6.01

When reimporting, file is interpreted as square 1920 pixels wide, and FCP asks for rerendering. I tried to reimport my first export (came out of FCP5) and this one is correctly interpreted as a 1440 with a 1.33 aspect ratio. FCP6 just plays it smoothly, and my Kona3 is also able to downconvert it in real time.

So my understanding is that something is going wrong when exporting from FCP6 or with QT 7.2 (where support for non interlaced DVCPROHD has been added)

When opening both files in QT player they strictly look the same, and all info I can get are equivalent. But when importing in AE7 for ex, one is 1440 1.33 aspect, and the other 1920 square aspect. So it seems it’s definitely a pb with tags contained in the quicktime file itself.
As DVCPROHD CANNOT be a 1920 wide file, but only 1440 (at 25FPS) something is badly reported to the QT file, and FCP or any QT compatible application freaks out when using such file…

I guess it should be reported to Apple, as they are the only ones able to fix this…