Nattress not digitizing – not working

[Gary Adcock]

[PaulD] “But… FCP (and Premiere 6/6.5) won’t capture this – capture fails before it gets started.
Happily, using the setup procedure in my initial post, early versions of iMovie capture this fime.”

try the DV PAL easy setup, and you should be able to capture PAL into your FCP setup.
you cannot just changes some of the settings you need to change them all and the DV-PAL easy setup is made for that. I tried on my older 900s camera and did not have an issue.

If it working in imovie something is not set up correctly in FCP.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Sorry to confuse you all so much!
Everything PAL is fine – FCP (PAL setup), TRV-900E PAL for shooting, DSR-20P deck for capture – I’m in the UK.
Deck is PAL only, doesn’t replay NTSC in any form.
So the way I got the NTSC tape digitised with my PAL setup was by using the PAL TRV-900E, but because FCP’s NTSC Easy Setup doesn’t (can’t?) work without a proper NTSC device feeding in the NTSC datastream, I had to use iMovie (which could take the NTSC movie data from a PAL device)….

The original post was about the other way round, how to get a PAL DV tape into an NTSC project, using an NTSV TRV-900.
My method will achieve this, if an early version of iMovie is available.

[Alexander Kallas]

[PaulD] “Hi
Sorry to confuse you all so much!
Everything PAL is fine – FCP (PAL setup), TRV-900E PAL for shooting, DSR-20P deck for capture – I’m in the UK.
Deck is PAL only, doesn’t replay NTSC in any form.
So the way I got the NTSC tape digitised with my PAL setup was by using the PAL TRV-900E, but because FCP’s NTSC Easy Setup doesn’t (can’t?) work without a proper NTSC device feeding in the NTSC datastream, I had to use iMovie (which could take the NTSC movie data from a PAL device)….

The original post was about the other way round, how to get a PAL DV tape into an NTSC project, using an NTSV TRV-900.
My method will achieve this, if an early version of iMovie is available.
“

Hi Paul
Now I’m really missing out.
Before capture you still have to set the format (PAL or NTSC) in iMovie- all/any version, which format did you select?
Are you saying that you can capture NTSC from the PAL camera via the deck? I’ll bet if you can’t do it via fire-wire, there must be a standards conversion happening,
either in the deck or with an FCP render.
After your capture into iMovie, check this raw captured clip NOT in FCP but in the QuickTime Player. What does the raw captured movie clip look like
viz res and frame size, should be 720×480 if it is really NTSC.
Now extract the video only from QT and import into an NTSC FCP sequence,.
Will the video play unrendered, or does it ask for a render (remember, video only, so FCP doesn’t have to split off the audio from iMovie’s DV stream format) and FCP has to do it’s poor quality format conversion.
Please post your result.

Cheers
Alexander

[Paul Dickin]

[Alexander] “Now I’m really missing out.
Before capture you still have to set the format (PAL or NTSC) in iMovie- all/any version, which format did you select?
Are you saying that you can capture NTSC from the PAL camera via the deck? I’ll bet if you can’t do it via fire-wire, there must be a standards conversion happening,
either in the deck or with an FCP render.

In my case – PAL TRV-900E containing an NTSC miniDV tape – trying to capture this with FCP (or Premiere) Capture Now (NTSC capture, uncontrollable device) causes the capture to abort, because although there is a genuine NTSC DV data-stream arriving via FW, there is also some sort of ident signal from the camcorder identifying it as a PAL device, which Capture Now is checking during its initialisation procedure.

So I connected a Canopus ADVC device set up in NTSC mode via FW to the Mac (removing the TRV-900E temporarily) and initialised Log and Capture. Analogue capture worked fine using this, but DV passthrough of the NTSC data from the 900E failed – not suprisingly as two FW video devices never work successfully connected simultaneously.

So. after initialising NTSC Capture Now with the Canopus unit, I removed it and put the 900E on the FW cable, powered up already playing the tape. This didn’t work, as as soon as Capture Now is clicked, FCP still identified it now had a PAL device connected, and aborted the capture.

So I abandoned FCP (and Premiere 6/6.5) and fired up iMovie 2 (probably under OS 9 as this was a while ago, on a dual boot MDD G4). iMovie refused to allow an NTSC project to be set up whilst the 900E was connected, and I had to connect the Canopus ADVC in NTSC mode to get iMovie ready to capture NTSC. Hot switching the FW cable from the Canopus to the powered-up 900E with its NTSC tape playing, then clicking Capture in iMovie resulted in the tape section being captured successfully.
So those early versions of iMovie didn’t have the sophistication to check the identitiy of the FW device attached during capture 🙂

After your capture into iMovie, check this raw captured clip NOT in FCP but in the QuickTime Player. What does the raw captured movie clip look like
viz res and frame size, should be 720×480 if it is really NTSC.
Now extract the video only from QT and import into an NTSC FCP sequence,.
Will the video play unrendered, or does it ask for a render (remember, video only, so FCP doesn’t have to split off the audio from iMovie’s DV stream format) and FCP has to do it’s poor quality format conversion.
Please post your result.”

The resultant DV clip (as seen by QT’s and FCP’s Clip Properties was a standard 720x480x29.97 NTSC DV clip.

Using iMovies scene-detect clip-splitting during capture also worked, but as I was going to use After Effects to standard convert (this was pre the Nattress filter) I wanted one long clip.

I have used this process several times over the years, until I got a DSR-11. The workaround was first described on John Beale’s excellent TRV-900 site – search for Johnson Ching halfway down this long page:
https://www.bealecorner.com/trv900/tips.html

Once converted to 720×576/25fps in an AE comp the resultant clip was fully editable into my PAL FCP project.

(I’ve been editing video on a Mac since 1993 (VideoVisionStudio/Telecast) and DV since 1998 (Fast DV Master), and the one consistent experience over the years is that using an NLE is always about workarounds 🙂 ).

[Alexander Kallas]

Paul, amazing,
I’m blown away,
And the quality? Have you had a chance to compare the result with a film-house hardware conversion, Compressor2’s optical flow technology for conversion, and the Natress G converter (I rate them in that order)
This may be best and most economical way for standards conversion.
I’m fascinated!

Cheers
Alexander

[Harlan Johnson]

WOW. I UNLEASHED A FIRESTORM! [from HARLAN JOHNSON the person who “just asked a question.”

I haven’t been able to read and digest all the posts. And so I haven’t tried out the suggestions yet. I’ll keep you all “posted” once I can get everything figured out and tried out. Isn’t Creative Cow amazing?!

[Harlan Johnson]

But Graeme, I DID import the PAL video from my NTSC Sony DCRTRV-900. It DID work! It did play the PAL video and I imported it from the camcorder into FCP on the Powerbook G4. I imported it, converted it, and played it – and it looked fine on my NTSC TV. Just a couple clips. Then NOTHING. I can’t get FCP to see the image when I play a PAL tape. I”m not sure what settings I used.

So I’m really confused when I hear you say it won’t work to use my NTSC Snony TRV 900 as a source deck.

I haven’t tried anything again yet, but hope to once I can sort out some useful suggestions.

[Graeme Nattress]

Ok – great. That’s not meant to work but often can! I know with the switchable decks like the DSR-25 it’s a pain sometimes to get FCP to acknowledge that playback format has been flipped. I have to restart FCP, restart the deck, and muck around like that until it functions in the right mode again.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
I used an early version of After Effects for the NTSC>PAL conversion, and it did an OK job – its scaling is quite good and the Field Blending gives steady motion, albeit somewhat blurry.
As soon as the Nattress plug-in became available my producer bought it and it is used exclusively – so much so that I haven’t fully test-driven Compressor for the job – one of these days I will get around to it 😉

I also have an Alchemist NTSC conversion of a PAL movie for a DVD job I did a while ago, so I was going to compare a Nattress conversion of the same footage (also Compressor) when I get the aforesaid round tuit 🙂
I’ll post back with the results….

[Paul Dickin]

[Graeme Nattress] “it’s a pain sometimes to get FCP to acknowledge that playback format has been flipped. I have to restart FCP, restart the deck, and muck around like that until it functions in the right mode again.”
Hi
Its not just FCP that has problems, Mac OS X sometimes needs to be initialised to respond to the correct FW mode once the DSR-25 or 11 deck has been switched. Make the change, power up the deck, and restart OS X. Then restarting FCP will correctly initialise Log and Capture.