[Alan Okey]

[Greg Ball] “How do you transcode the footage to 8 bit?”

Use Compressor to do batch transcoding. You can tweak the encoding specs in the inspector tab to match your FCP sequence.

[Alan Okey]

Try using FCP’s 3-way CC. Limit the effect to the range of the green spill, then desaturate to taste.

[Alan Okey]

You might find this crazy, but the iPhone doesn’t support playback of any video formats that use the native dimensions of its screen. Make sure your client understands this, and that it’s an Apple restriction, not an inability on your part to give them what they want.

[Alan Okey]

Try transcoding your XDCAM EX footage to uncompressed 8-bit prior to importing it into your FCP project. The slowdown might be FCP working behind the scenes to deal with the long GOP structure of the XDCAM footage.

[Alan Okey]

[Bob Zelin] “I have a TV Logic HD LCD monitor that was $6000 – how can I see 2K video on this ? “

Oh Bob, 2K is so last year. It’s all about 4K now, haven’t you been sucked in by the RED hype? But even that’s passe. Real men know it’s all about Super Hi-Vision:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Hi-Vision

You can’t make this stuff up…

[Alan Okey]

It sounds to me like your DVD player or your monitor is not set up correctly.

First, check your DVD player setup menu to make sure that 16:9 TV/monitor is selected and not 4:3 TV/monitor. If the player is set up properly, I would next look at your monitor settings to make sure that the monitor is set to the proper aspect ratio mode for the respective content that is being played back. Make sure the monitor is set to “full” or “16:9” when you play back a 16:9 DVD, and make sure it’s set to 4:3 when a 4:3 DVD is played back*.

*UNLESS you have a newer DVD player that automatically pillarboxes (vertical black bars on each side of the image) 4:3 content when a 4:3 DVD is played back on a 16:9 monitor.

[Alan Okey]

Does bit depth apply in the case of analog CRTs?

[Alan Okey]

Welcome to the joys of Quicktime gamma issues. You’re not going to like the workaround.

You’ll have to export your XDCAM footage as a .tif image sequence and have the compositor export his rendered comps as a .tif sequence, not a Quicktime movie.

When you get the rendered shots back as image sequences, you’ll need to open them in Quicktime and then export them as self-contained Quicktime movies. If you’re editing in an XDCAM EX sequence, export the image sequences as self-contained Quicktime movies with the XDCAM EX codec.

This is an ongoing issue that makes compositors and editors alike want to tear their hair out. Search the After Effects forum for “Quicktime gamma” and enjoy.

The only potential good news is that Apple has changed the default system gamma to 2.2 in Snow Leopard and Quicktime X. No news yet as to whether or not this will fix the issues.

[Alan Okey]

[Fernando Honesko] “My case is a bit different. I shoot concerts for some bands and my final delivery is internet. I work with a HDcamcorder, quite cheap but it does the job. It’s a Canon Vixia HV30.
Actually, I can set it to 3 different HD framerates.

HDV Standard (which is what I have been using – 29.97 fps)
HDV30 (30 fps)
HDV24 (24fps)

Which should be the best for my final delivery plataform? (internet) “

In your particular case, I would go with HDV30. I assume that the HDV24 mode is shooting 24p over 29.97i, which means that the camera adds 3:2 pulldown when recording. That means your source footage will contain 2 “split” interlaced frames followed by 3 progressive frames, in a repeating cadence. Since you’re delivering to the web, you don’t want any kind of interlacing in your footage. If you shoot in 24p mode on your camera, in order to get a true 24p end result (not 24p over 29.97i with 3:2 pulldown) you would have to use Cinema Tools to remove the 3:2 pulldown on every clip you capture. This is very time consuming, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.

It’s probably easiest for you to shoot 30p, edit in 30p and then compress your videos for the web as 30p – no deinterlacing or pulldown removal required.

[Alan Okey]

[Joseph Tyndall] “It’s another case that Apple is artificially locking out systems – one can only assume so users have to upgrade.”

Yes, one must assume that it’s a sinister plot by big, bad Apple to bilk unsuspecting customers out of their hard-earned cash. There can be no other explanation.