[Andy Gallagher]

Thanks for the reply. FYI, in the end it was a reliable 1 frame out so we fixed it by slipping; I’m still curious to know exactly what was going on though (and to avoid the 4am finishes as much as possible!).

We digitised it via HD-SDI at 1080/24psf with RS-422 deck control from the deck – it was a standard player/recorder, not sure of the exact model.

[Andy Gallagher]

Hi Lynne,

It’s been a while since I’ve been near a Media100i, but if I remember correctly it stores the picture and sound in seperate files. On our old iFinish the audio files are .m1qa but should import as MOVs if you change the file extension. Check in the media folder on your selected audio disk (can’t remember where the selector is I’m afraid…) for the files then import them in – there are most likely two, one for each channel.

Hope that’s of some help.

[Andy Gallagher]

Update: – now the burn-in is exhibiting the problem as well! Suspecting a hardware problem we’re restarting the entire facility.

[Andy Gallagher]

OSX 10.4.9, Quad PPC G5

[Andy Gallagher]

If your Meridien is on a Mac your best bet would be Apple DV in a quicktime if you’ve got it. Personally I’d de-interlace in the export as the progressive is (more likely) to work.

If your FCP guy is comfortable with modifying the settings he could change the field dominances and such in his FCP timeline – but would then have to re-render in a correctly set up timeline to roll back to tape.

Good luck!

[Andy Gallagher]

Now that’s probably the most useful utility apart from a Mac software-based bread slicer, or maybe FCPRescue… 🙂

[Andy Gallagher]

Is it possible to easily keyframe the effects across the sequence, e.g. an opacity fade or a cross-fade from one render to another?

[Andy Gallagher]

think that that worked before. However, I’m using Photo-jpeg because it actually looks better than the DV that the sequences are.

The FLV compression we have to use is pretty harsh, and we had the previous lot (exported as DV) effectively sent back.

I’ve found that exporting as Apple DV tends to increase the black level of the footage, and we also have to manually set the ‘high quality’ flag on the files in QT pro – not much fun for 100+.

I’ve just about got it going, doing them 7 at a time, which is better than one at a time! Think it just crashed again though >:-[

[Andy Gallagher]

Yeah I’ve often seen this in FCP. Usually it also seems to play back a bit lighter as well – and I’ve seen this on Kona and Blackmagic outputs too.

One thing to try is to set your canvas window to play back at ‘100%’ and size the window so that you can see the whole frame. FCP’s scaler seems to be preview-quality only, and will hide a lot of things that appear on the output. I’ve also had problems where it was hiding scaling artefacts on an animation series that we were delivering, so that they ONLY showed up on the export, not even the canvas at 100%.

Another thing you can try though, is going into the sequence settings (apple-zero) and changing the Render Settings. Try setting it to High-Precision YUV and re-rendering, see if that helps. Or try all the options (my usual thing when I can’t figure out what’s going on!)

[Andy Gallagher]

Sounds like you need to adjust your sequence settings (Apple-zero) to use the Animation codec. My company does this all the time – no serious problems, really. Though make sure that your disks are fast enough to lift the data, if they can handle uncompressed then it should be ok.

FYI, as I understand it Animation is ‘lossless’ compression, i.e. it’ll looks as good as uncompressed. It does this by ‘run-length’ encoding, i.e. if you’ve got a load of black pixels, instead of repeatedly having ‘black pixel’ listed in the frame it’ll effectively say ‘black pixel, repeat x times’. Hence it’s good for animation, where you tend to have large blocks of colour, but not so good for ‘real’ footage with a lot of subtle tones.

Correct me if I’m wrong too, but I think that ‘None’ is a straight uncompressed RGB data (think not supporting alpha channels but am not sure) which can look wrong if you’re using camera footage which tends to be shot in YUV because the colours have been converted. ‘8-bit uncompressed’ and ’10-bit uncompressed’ are uncompressed YUV, which should keep your colours looking the same. But the default FCP ‘x-bit uncompressed’ codecs aren’t PC-compatible so we usually use Animation.

Personally, I find image sequences ungainly to use in FCP, unless anyone can tell me a good way of combining all of the frames into one video clip short of exporting it and then importing the MOV.

Good luck!