[Andrew Yoole]

Riot Gear is a compilation of footage and stills which you can use in After Effects and other video projects. When you purchased it you were also given access to various tutorials by Andrew Kramer, demonstrating uses for the material.

They are not effects or presets that will appear in a gallery, as such (although you can view the elements individually from Adobe Bridge).

[Andrew Yoole]

Just to clarify, be sure to use the Return key, not the Enter key on the numeric keypad.

[Andrew Yoole]

The GeForce 7300 should be more than enough for AE. Spend the money on more RAM if you can. Multi-processing in AE will benefit greatly from going to 6 or 8GB.

[Andrew Yoole]

With all due respect to all concerned, the information provided here by pizza role slaughter is not entirely correct, and you are far better advised to follow the prior advice by Dave LaRonde and others.

DVDs have very strict resolution requirements that cannot be changed. Square pixels are not an option on a DVD – the MPEG2 stream MUST be encoded at the standards mentioned above (in your case the NTSC info): 16×9 NTSC DV (either 4:3 or 16:9) 720×480.

You can work with square pixels within AE or other applications if you really want to, but ultimately that material MUST be converted to DV resolution in order to be MPEG2 encoded, whether by AE, your NLE, or even your encoding application. By and large, the standard presets in most NLEs do not use square pixel resolutions anyway.

But it is generally far more efficient and logical to work directly at the resolution you are outputting to, particularly if you are merely compiling previously rendered material into a showreel. Why render more pixels than you need to? And why run the risk that the conversion to the correct resolution will reduce the quality of your final material?

[Andrew Yoole]

Just chiming in with support here. I’ve had this problem for months and have posted my own threads and commented in others here, NEVER receiving a response from anyone at BM.

That the problem is within FCP, or temporarily unsolveable, or whatever, is no excuse for failing to publically recognize the issue within their support notes. Such a long-standing issue deserves clear disclosure.

Really, really disappointing support from a company I used to hold in high esteem. I’ve bought more than a dozen BM products since they started, but I’m forced to research and re-evaluate before my next purchases.

And in the meantime I have to allow double machine time for ETT functions, just in case the first pass is wrong.

[Andrew Yoole]

A lot of the Background Presets in AE use Cycore FX. The Cycore FX plugins use a seperate installer which is included on your AE installation CD.

[Andrew Yoole]

I have posted on this issue numerous times recently – most recent link below – with no practical response from Blackmagic. There are very clearly many customers experiencing this issue, and yet this last thread didn’t even warrant a response from Blackmagic.

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_thread.cgi?forumid=124&postid=865680&univpostid=865680

I’ve now been unable to accurately record to Digi Beta for over 2 months. I have been a loyal user of Blackmagic cards since their very beginning, but this issue has left me with no alternative but to start seeking alternative hardware. It’s all very well to keep releasing new products and new drivers, but failure to address such a fundamental issue with your exisiting products and customer base is an incredible disappointment to me.

[Andrew Yoole]

Sam, your experience is similar to my own on the 3 systems we are running, although I haven’t spotted audio sync issues.

Here’s a post I made recently in a related thread:

_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Not a true solution, but a workaround when recording to tape from a point of black:

Insert a single frame black slug at the sequence in-point.

Set your tape in point back 2 frames.

For example in PAL: to record sequence from TC 00:01:00:00, set your deck in-point to 00:00:59:23.

This will record the black frame across two frames of tape, then the correct program material at 00:01:00:00.

There is no workaround for inserting segments into an existing program on tape. If you have to replace the final shot into a 90 minute program with no breaks in it, you’ll have to record the entire 90 min program to tape, using the workaround above.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Because the standard +4 offset seems the most reliable on our systems, using the workaround above is, at the moment, the only way we are getting reliable records to tape.

[Andrew Yoole]

Shake is governed by the same RAM limits as other applications. So 3.5 GB is as far as it goes. Because Shake has had development discontinued, it will never be recoded in 64bit, so will probably never utilise more RAM either.

[Andrew Yoole]

Kristian, as I clearly stated in the other thread related to this issue:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/124/865277?univpostid=865269&pview=t

This is NOT a frame offset issue. Inserting vision is consistently DUPLICATING the first frame going to tape, pushing the entire insert late by one frame. Adjusting frame offset in FCP doesn’t resolve the problem.

This has occurred several times over the years with Decklink drivers, and has been periodically resolved with a driver update. PLEASE address this urgently. You have 4 customers reporting the issue in the last 5 days on this forum – it is worthy of your attention.