[Andy Mees]

It all depends on 1) your personal level of proficiency at such stuff, 2) whether you have access to secondary equipment (other Mac’s etc) and suitable software (DiskWarrior etc), and 3) most importantly, how much time and money you can afford to spend on this?

If you have more time than money and are happy to keep at it for a while longer then I’d suggest there are probably better places to seek a solution to a critical system level issue than the COW’s FCP forum (no disrespect intended lots of systems wonks here too but some places are dedicated to this stuff just as here we’re dedicated to FCP) so you ought to spread your search base. But, if time is money, and especially if you’re already way out of your comfort zone, then yes you’ll likely find it far more practical to send your Mac out and have someone better skilled and equipped to deal with the problem for you.

Good Luck
Andy

[Andy Mees]

Sorry Morgan,

Sounds like your system is hosed. This is where you restore from your cloned system.
There are other steps you can take like booting in Target Disk Mode (or physically removing the disc) and then and accessing and repairing it from another Mac. Also running Disk Warrior to rebuild the directories … but that won’t work until you’ve successfully managed to access the boot volume for repair.

Failing all those avenues then a a full clean reinstall of OS X and FCS. You should then be able to restore your current projects from the Autosave vault or other backup.

Bit of a nightmare I’m afraid, but a darn good lesson you’ll not forget in a hurry I expect!

Keep your fingers crossed tho, someone else may yet pop in with a solution that I haven’t spotted.

Best
Andy

[Andy Mees]

Well, gee Trevor, I guess you didn’t like it huh? Don’t pull any punches mate 😉

The settings are actually pretty flexible, and if you follow the hints on the webpage you can get reasonable results that are (for many) preferable to a fully stretched image. As with the smart anamorphic algorithms used in many widescreen TV’s these days, its always a good idea to start by adding a little stretch even within the protected area. Then you need to remember to keep the elasticity really low (as noted on its webpage, I kept the control unfettered so that folks could have full creative control but I don’t recommend high values)

Try some safer settings maybe eg Protection Width between 25 to 40, Protection Override between 3 to 5 and Elasticity around 1 to 3

Hope that helps you get a bit better mileage out of it .. you can also send me feedback from my webpage or you can find my direct email is in my COW profile. Can’t necessarily promise to actually do anything about it but certainly more likely to happen if I know what folks do or don’t like.

Re your other questions about 16:9 Anamorphic. Yes, you need to create and edit in a 16:9 Anamorphic (SD) timeline, then when you drop 4:3 SD footage into it, it needs to be blown up to 133% to conform to the full frame width and then reframed accordingly.

Hope it helps
Andy

[Andy Mees]

you’re welcome to try my Elastic Aspect plugin
https://web.me.com/andymees

[Andy Mees]

Morgan,
Did you press and hold the mouse button immediately after the startup chime? That should force the cd/dvd tray to open.
Failing that try holding down Cmd-S just after the startup chime which should (hopefully) make the Mac boot into single user mode, a basic command line unix boot of the system … then at the prompt and type “sbin/fsck -fy” (without the quotes) and let it run through some checks and repairs (again, hopefully), and finally when done type “reboot” (without the quotes).
Let us know how you get on
Andy

[Andy Mees]

a little search Anders … the solution comes up often:
Calibrated Q XD Decode

[Andy Mees]

seriously Shane, I think they just slipped your mind maybe (think Twixtor, FieldsKit etc)

[Andy Mees]

Ray you’re looking in the wrong place … its a quicktime component and is installed in the quicktime folder within the the root level library folder
ie /Library/Quicktime/AppleHDVCodec.component

If you are still having trouble then email me (the address is in my profile)

Andy

[Andy Mees]

Absolutely. You may have viewed the proxies but not the Hi Res XDCAM HD / 422 / EX unless you had FCP installed (or XD Decode) … of course if you were on that occasion working in an XDCAM SD format, or more specifically if it was DVCAM, then I dare say you’d have gotten away with it without FCP.

Go ahead and check it out. Look in XDCAM Transfer > Preferences >> General tab >> Codecs … you can choose to import “even if the appropriate codecs are not installed” which of course would never be the case if those codecs were installed along with the app itself. You can also look under the Help menu > Check for Installed Components.. and it will list, amongst other things, what codecs you have installed … select each codec in turn and it will tell you exactly which version of FCP you need to have installed for full support of viewing and editing in that codec.

Hope thats illuminating 🙂
Andy

[Andy Mees]

Hey Stuart, actually it’s a quite commonly held misconception. The Apple Quicktime codecs for XDCAM HD/EX support are only distributed as part of FCP (and are contained within the AppleHDVCodec.component bundle). They are not distributed as part of Sony’s XDCAM Transfer application install (or any of their other apps).

Ray, if you do need playback support for HDV/XDCAM HD/EX quicktime movie’s on a non FCP mac (or on a PC) then you can get away with just buying and installing the Calibrated Q XD Decode codec bundle from Calibrated Software.