Andy Gallagher
Forum Replies Created
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Not so sure about iDVD, but when I do 16:9 stuff in DVD Studio Pro I always use anamorphic media, i.e. when you play it back in QuickTime or whatever it looks stretched. In DVDSP, you tell the system that the media is anamorphic and it will letterbox for you. The advantage to this is that if the user has a 16:9 TV, it will actually play back at the original 16:9 size as opposed to 4:3 scaled up bt 133% to lose the letterbox.
However if there’s no 16:9 option in iDVD then I’d probably letterbox it first in FCP and put out a 4:3 quicktime. The way I’d do it would be to create a new, blank sequence called ‘Letterboxed dump for DVD’ or whatever, and set it NOT anamorphic. Then drag in your anamorphic sequence, and it should automatically letterbox for you. You can then export that as Current Settings (or even as a reference MOV I think, if you’re low on disk space) and hey presto, it should work.
Any changes in your original sequence should automatically show up in the ‘Letterbox dump’ sequence, you don’t have to re-insert it every time. -
[Rich Rubasch] “Not sure how that makes FCP any stronger”
Well apart from the terrible media management in fcp at the moment…
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Afraid that I’ve had a lot of issues with CMX3600 export in FCP – one version I used it barely worked at all (and once I ended up playing a GV track through a DV bridge into the online system then resyncing and manually cutting out the blacks!).
Have you checked if the clip that it barfs on is a freeze-frame? Don’t know about EDLs but I’ve been using an XML-based workflow on a large project recently and we found that Apple XML v2 doesn’t seem to like them very much, the export breaks silently so you only realise when you try to re-import it (think that it has an issue if the clip appears to be zero-length). We ended up manually replacing the freeze-frames with text clips giving the timecode, then manually conforming, freeze-framing and inserting them.
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Slightly tangiental – had some issues with XMLs in Final Cut (randomly breaking, mislinking media, etc.) – most recent one was that the XMLs appeared to work up to the point where there was a freeze-frame, then broke, splitting the sequence into about 3 parts and spraying media everywhere. I’m on v 5.1, do you have any ideas to make it less hit-and-miss?
Cheers
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If you’re watching it from QuickTime player, you need to set the player to High Quality to make it look not offline. No idea why…
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[walter biscardi] “1080i/50 is 25fps so it should match your DV PAL TC exactly”
Yeah thats what I thought – the strange thing is that the timecodes do match, but the picture and sound seem to have gone out of sync in the offline digitise. And even then it matches fine on most of the tapes, its just the odd one or two where weve had this problem which confuses me even more…
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‘Fraid not – we’re in the UK, and have used 50i all through. I’ve had those kind of issues with DVCPro, but we’ve stayed fully Sony on this project 🙁 Thanks anyway…
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If they can’t guarantee to get the data back off it then you can (probably) do it yourself – it will obviously void any the warranty on the drive though so it’s worth checking first.
The LaCie disks are really just a standard IDE disk in a metal case with a bit of circuitry to connect to the firewire and power the disk. If anything’s fried it’s almost certainly this circuitry and the disks are fine.
So you can take a screwdriver and a deep breath, take the back off the drive (there’s a screw hidden under the ‘Warranty void if removed’ sticker), take the disk drive out and put it into your Mac. Then copy the information off it onto another FW disk, or buy another disk chassis and put it in there.
The only fly in the ointment is that the BigDisk Extremes have two disks in them, configured as a RAID (any LaCie disk that’s twice the length of the old ones is like this). I’ve never done it with one of those – in theory it should work ok but has anyone else had practical experience of it? I think that you should just be able to get hold of another two-disk IDE chassis (G-raid do them) and put the disks in there.
Make sure that you keep them the same way around (one is primary and one is secondary) when you do it though, or get a techie friend to do it for you (then you can blame them if it goes wrong -only joking! :-p)
Good luck!
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Hi Bob,
I think what you’re seeing is a colourspace conversion. Given the codec your original footage was using, AE is working in an 8-bit YUV colourspace. So you don’t see any shift when you render that out.
On the other hand, Animation (as far as I know) is a lossless RGB codec. So you should get the same quality of image as using an uncompressed codec but a (slightly) smaller file. The key though is that it’s storing the image data as RGB, not YUV – so the program is converting between the two spaces. As they don’t line up properly you see colour and/or brightness shifts in the final picture.FYI, I think that Animation uses ‘Run-length’ compression – i.e. imagine you’ve got someone on a black background. An uncompressed codec would write seperate data for each black pixel of the background wheras Animation would just write ‘Black, repeated (x) times’. So it’s really dependant on the shot composition how much smaller the file would be.
Hope that’s of some help!
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How much disk space do you have on the capture disk? Maybe it’s become too fragmented to sustain the data rate coming in – just a thought?