[Bear Baker]

I’d like to thank you guys for trying. If I don’t respond anymore please forgive me.

Bear

[Bear Baker]

I misunderstood, and thought you were talking about why the image would be full screen while idle and crunch down to 16:9 during playout with regards to the handshake thing. The handshake thing acutually makes more sense with the pillar box in the 1280×768 to dod by dot setting. I have been out and plan on calling Pioneer tomorrow. As far as “scaling to 15:9” we are actually cut a 768 out of a 1080 picture keeping the picture 1:1. If we run into any issues with composition and need to resize (down only then we would use either After Effects or Shake as I was told today that the scaling processing is better in those programs. This whole project has a lot of new territory R&D for those of us working on it. We have been told a lot of stuff that doesn’t jive with what we are finding out on our own. We are testing everything. Thanks for the post I’ll run it by Pioneer.

Bear

[Bear Baker]

The plasma will display 16:9. The plasma native resolution is 1280×768. If you do the math you find that 16:9 would be the normal 1280×720 as in 720p. in other words divide 1280 by 16, then times that number (80) by 9 and you get 720. If you divide 768 by 9 you get 85.3333…. If you divide 1280 by this number you’ll get 15. I have a 30″ sharp aquos at home. It has the same thing. If you play out a 16:9 image at 1:1 you get black filler (too thin really to call a letterbox) in theory this is 24 lines on top and 24 lines on bottom 24+24=48 the number you get when you subtract 720 from 768.

Thanks for asking,
Bear

[Bear Baker]

This is close to what the end distribution/display will be in the gallery and I will pass along the link to the installer. If it’s not exactly what we need maybe it will jog is brain in a direction that would help. The trick is that the monitors we are to use have already been ordered/purchased. Pioneer PDP 505CMX 50″ plasmas. I am following the installers lead for testing our procedure. At this point I don’t think there is a good shot at changing the displays to be used.

Thanks,
Bear Baker

[Bear Baker]

Sean,
I appreciate your input. With or with out the condescending, ineffective analogies. The capture card’s codec is responsible for video output even if the output is through the Macs main DVI port. This surprised me as much as you when I heard it. But I have heard it from 2 people. One with over 20 years experience in Video editing, the other a “professional installer familiar with pro video equipment” you suggested I employ. I have enough (15+ years) experience in the business to believe and understand them. If the image is at rest it is not video… it is simply an image that is being piped through the DVI port. When the image is played out and is now video the computer is instructed to rely on the codecs supplied by FCP/AJA/BMD for formatting the output.

I am aware of the 48 scan line squeeze to force the output to 16:9 issue. My codec’s do not support 15:9. My sequence is 15:9. My monitor is 15:9. If the monitor displays the sequence in 16:9, it is not a 1:1 ratio.

So one of my questions to anyone out there should be:
Is there a codec out there for FCP that allows for 15:9 output/display?

The monitor is not scaling the image, the codecs from AJA and BMD are squeezing the image output during playback. FYI my client had previously purchased a Standard Def iO box, and very recently purchased DeckLink HD card.

The plasma monitor has a Dot By Dot setting that allows for a 1:1 output when connected to a computer via its DVI port. When we set the monitor setting in display preferences to the monitors native resolution 1280×768 we get a pillar box; vertical Gray filler to the left and right of the image–not 24 black lines on top and 24 black lines on the bottom. We get this in any operation of the Mac (i.e. Finder, Safari, etc.) My hope is that if we can get this part of the chain to work properly, that the rest will fall into place. I think the odds are long, but it goes back to the question asked above.

When we set the output to 1280×1024 the computers output it fills the screen. The plasma’s Dot by Dot setting is then not allowed as the signal is too large. So we set it to Partial. Which to me implies cropping. But it is either scaling or cropping.

The reason it is so important to fill the screen completely is that the project we are working on is a gallery of 50″ plasma screens displaying 35-mm filmed scenes. Great care has been taken to make this stuff look as good as possible. The director wants the screen to be filled, without the monitor scaling the image to achieve this. The “professional installer familiar with pro video equipment” that was hired to do the actual install is trying as hard as I am to find the answer. He is playing the image off of PC servers to 9 screens some of the set in 3’s vertically placed side by side to display on huge image. Both of us have some doubts we will be successfully in filling the screen at 1:1, but we still want to try everything we can to do just that. Hence, these posts.

[Bear Baker]

I am having the same problems regarding capturing 10 bit and dropping frames going to the RAID. I am using a blackmagic decklink pro HD with dual link. I also have the dual 2.5 G5 and am running FCP 4.5 on Tiger OS. Have you found a solution yet?

Thanks,
Bear

[Bear Baker]

I’ve noticed FCP won’t render shine on motion projects. I have to export all my projects. But I started doing that a while back because I noticed that layers with opacity settings (transparent media) show up more transparent in imported projects from motion to FCP.