[Alan Langdon]

Rich, did you get any sort of idea about AVC versus MPEG2 encoding? I am using Toast 11.02 here and not sure which is the safest/best quality encoding approach…

[Alan Langdon]

Thanks a bunch for the reply.
I agree about the USB drive, I recomended Firewire but here in Brazil people are used to using USB drives, for better or worse, and FW is more scarse / expensive, so they went with USB. I have been editing on and off with USB drives for some years, so I know it is possible, although not ideal. I myself use only LAcie FW800 drives, personally.

You have a point about the non-NTSF formated drive: it was not formated with the plugin… but so how did I manage to even capture footage on the drive? This is what baffles me, and why I made the mistake: I opened the USB drive box, tried to copy a file to it, saw that it worked ok, so I didn’t think twice about it: I assumed it was MAc formated. My bad. But then why am I able to capture to this drive? Usually it’s not possible to write PC drives, only read.

I have discovered that if I export the clips ou of compressor, using DV NTSC codec (assuming it is NOT re-encoding… is there a way to safely pass-through image and sound in compressor?), the timecode is maintained (essencial) and the resultant file is single, roughly 2.2 GB. So I can re-export the footage out to another HD and back to this one, formated for Mac OS Extended. Any throughts on this? I know USB is not the best way, but let’s assume I have no choice, which is the case.

[Alan Langdon]

Thanks for the quick response!
So… it turns out to be a simple case of an old FW 4pin-6pin cable…
I switched the cable and all is working fine now, using the DV PAL codec, not the DVCPRO by the way. Thanks!

[Alan Langdon]

Thanks for the reply, Rafael.
But when I print to tape and monitor via a tube-TV (4:3), what should I be seeing? A stretched image or an image with letterbox? IS this just a matter of setting the print to tape viewing experience?

And more importantly, will the festival’s deck on the other end know what to do with the signal, and de-anamorphize it for a true 16:9 screening?

[Alan Langdon]

I have noticed the same thing, and it drove me to purchase BITVICE 2.9.7… I am testing it still, but it is pretty nice. Although I still want to see it beat the basic compression that Toast does. Toast encodes pretty darn well, although it makes everything 29.97 even if you feed it 23.98 footage.

[Alan Langdon]

Thanks for the reply. What does this mean, exactly? No menus? Lesser image quality? I have Toast with BlueRay Video encoding (plugin), shouldn’t that generate an image file of a Blue Ray disk which I can record onto a DVD-R disk and play on a BlueRay player?

Cheers from Brazil!

[Alan Langdon]

OK, I think I got it: I turned on POST EFFECTS in the render settings… was that it?

[Alan Langdon]

Thank you very much, Brian. This helps a lot. I must have left the Autokeying on.
Now, I am able to add a glow to the Material, and I see the changes in the material editor. BUT, when I render the view (camera), I don’t see the effect (Glow, in this case). I just want a simple sphere to glow and iluminate the nearest objects around it… is this some render setting?

any help much appreciated!

[Alan Langdon]

An added observation: there are red small circles next to several of the atributes I am trying to change in the material editor: glow, etc… something appears to be inhibiting these features…!
When I start a new project, I create materails with these setting no problem, but in this particular project, I can’t, although initially I could…

[Alan Langdon]

Steve, thanks for the reply.

Answering your question, I don’t have an I/O card… I would monitor via the MacMini’s 2nd video output as well as watch the DVDs I encode, and of course use Final Cut’s Firewire output.