[Annaël Beauchemin]

[Harley Michailuck] “That’s what I was afraid of… don’t you find it clunky?”

absolutely not, since you can change the size and the color and the position. And it’s even realtime. You don’t even get this with Avid Xpress pro…

I guess you want to use it in an artistic manner, but it was designed for a technical use where font doesn’t matter. I think both AE and combustion have a TCR with a selectable font. Or there must be a third party plugin to do it in FCP…

[Annaël Beauchemin]

FCP 5 has a better scaling engine which gets rid of that problem.

If you’re trying to get good results with 4.5, then reduce the resolution of your image in photoshop. If you need a very big resolution to do a big zoom, then you need to reduce detail in your picture (use Dust and scratch filter in PS).

If this fails, then you can try a little blur or the filcker filter, but at this point, you’re better going to After effect… in fact, AE is much better than anything else for pan&zoom. Because of the quality and the toolset.

But be sure to always monitor the result on a monitor and don’t judge with the RT preview… it will always look sharper when you render.

[Annaël Beauchemin]

you can’t.

[Annaël Beauchemin]

yes, select all clips and apply a Timecode Reader filter. It will display source TC of the clips

[Annaël Beauchemin]

[Graeme Nattress] “FCP doesn’t allow you the GUI controls to do something like that, which is a shame…..”

I wonder how they made the color corrector. It looks like a FX script, but maybe they “hacked” FCP for the GUI controls?

I’ve found “Super RGB Levels” which is what I want, but it’s a bit clunky… this one is an AE plugin.
Out of curiosity, how hard is it to develop AE plugins?

[Annaël Beauchemin]

[David Chai] “have you tried Color Finesse, expensive, but full curves.”

yes i’ve downloaded their demo… while it has the features I want (and then some more), it’s really counter-productive to have to work in an external application and loose the ability to scroll or change clip. And then the price is really too high…

[Annaël Beauchemin]

[David Roth Weiss] “For example, imagine an extremely high contrast image with only two shades of gray, i.e. black and white. This image would be said to have a contrast ratio of 2:1, and as you can imagine the image would not have an awful lot of definition. Many fine CRT monitors have 5000:1 or 6000:1 contrast ratios, however in the world of LCDs 500:1 and 700:1 is common, as it costs more to create higher contrast models. Dell is claiming 1000:1, but I doubt you would notice the difference.”

By definition, contrast ratio is the luminance of the full black compared to the luminance of the full white. But don’t beleive the numbers… there are always ways for the manufacturer to cheat about specs. There are quite a few monitor reviews out there that test various brands, and some LCDs have black levels comparable to the finest CRTs.

James, in my experience, Apple LCD monitors tend to crush the highs and have a bit of banding, but behave really great othewise. But beware that many ppl experienced a pink cast with the 23″ model…

there was a nice and deep monitor shootout on anandtech: https://www.anandtech.com/displays/showdoc.aspx?i=2400
it compares the 20″ apple to the 20″ dell, but it should give you an idea.

[Annaël Beauchemin]

I downloaded the demo, and yes, it’s quite what I want. But I was searching for something fully graphic with multi-points tuning and maybe an eye dropper with RGB values. A bit like what you have on Avid, combustion, etc.

[Annaël Beauchemin]

and then there is Sapphire’s Softfocus, which blurs chroma and reduce detials in highlights. I think this is the second most hyped plugin after trapcode shine 😉

[Annaël Beauchemin]

[Matte] “The best method is to make a FireWire copy of the tape to another camcorder or deck which will generate a new continuous TC. (You said you can’t do this but did not say why.)

Simply because I do not have another deck. Oh, I do have an canon elura10, but with broken tape mechanism (surprise?).

Another method is to Capture into FCP with the setting for Non-Controllable Device (which IGNORES any TC on the tape).
You can edit from this capture at your own risk, as you will not be able to RE-capture accurately if needed.

ahh, that’s what I should have used… I decided to capture it making new clips nonetheless, since time was running up, but i’ll remember that one. In fact, if I have time i’ll give it a try to see if speed changes are reliable using this method.

thanx