[Ben Holmes]

Hi Kai

If you shot on film, why on earth would you use any of these workflows? Having a 4:3 transfer done then cropping in FCP to 16:9 is MADNESS – you are lowering the quality twice.

Have a 16:9 transfer done, or have the footage transferred at a higher quality, preferably HD so you can crop without a loss of quality.

Better still, use a proper film post workflow with DPX files or similar, using Cinema Tools.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

Lasse

FCS comes with an excellent manual – have a good look.

NTSC material is 30 fps (or thereabouts) and PAL material is 25 fps. If you want to make a PAL DVD from NTSC footage the footage will need to be converted to avoid these frame issues. Cinema Tools is NOT a standards converter, nor is compressor. Try Natress’ excellent standards conversion filter or something similar.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

[Karim Daire] “I am looking for the best way of converting PAL 4:3 Material to 16:9 anamorph”

Put it in a 16:9 anamorphic timeline. Scale and move as required.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

On DVDSP, you can set the disk so that if someone has a 4:3 TV, the image is kept letterboxed into the 4:3 frame. On the disk properties, set it to “16:9 letterbox” – that way if it’s a 16:9 TV, it’s a 16:9 image – if it’s a 4:3 TV, its a letterboxed image, not a crop of the 16:9 version.

If you really have a G5 (and not an Intel Mac Pro) you can’t use ProRes to capture – otherwise, use ProRes, it’s great for space and quality. If you DO have a PowerPC G5 machine, capture in 10-Bit Uncompressed 4:3 (you will need an array of internal drives for this, not just one – or an external FW800 drive). Edit in 16:9 as Peter says, adjusting the framing up and down as required to avoid cutting off heads.

You can either create an MPEG-2 QT using compressor, or just import your 16:9 sequence as an uncompressed QT into DVDSP and let it encode it itself – depending on your level of skill with DVDSP.

To answer your other questions, you will need to rent a deck (J series SDI deck is cheapest) and use an SDI capture card like the AJA or decklink. The best thing you can do to improve your final DVD is to capture via SDI in a decent codec – believe me it will make a difference even on crappy ol’ DVD.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

I’m sure someone will mention this:

https://www.sounddogs.com/

I have no personal experience (with access to a broadcaster’s music and effects library…) but it’s pretty widely used – although the user interface is pretty basic.

Kind regards,

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

Hi Lee

Do you have any anti-virus software or anything else running? Are you running RT previews or is this unrendered footage? Does the sequence contain audio or video running off another drive? Is your scratch disk correctly set, or has the footage been incorrectly captured to the system drive?

Any more info you can supply would help.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

Bruce

Each to their own. Let’s hope you never have to do an SDI job ever again. I don’t suppose it’ll catch on anyway.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

To be clear Chadwick, there are many differences between this and the 2000 series, like DT heads, video/audio insert editing, etc. etc. but the J-series is a player only.

If you just want to capture video at full speed in full quality, Sony made the J-30 just for you…

Bden

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[Ben Holmes]

Thomas

Don’t panic – our systems, and the vast majority of other Xeon systems here are very stable. You have an issue with yours, clearly.

Where is your memory from, and how is it installed? These 8-core systems need sufficient memory to share, so we fit 8Gb standard now. Your system SHOULD run absolutely fine on certified and properly installed 4GB RAM however – this should be installed in matching pairs on each riser.

If you have done a clean reinstall of OSX from the recovery disks (which I recommend) then a clean reinstall of FCP and are still having problems, you need to look at each component of your system (especially your storage and any external/internal video cards) to see if they are causing the problem. Remove each from the system and see if it’s still unstable.

Be systematic and methodical – the smallest issue, like other software or drivers you installed could cause the problem.

Hope that helps. If all else fails, get this system to an expert and consider a warrantee claim.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

[Tom Soper] “when I am laying off tapes through firewire to dsr-11 deck, the sound is lost for headphones from headphone jack.”

You need to check the box marked ‘preview’ in the log and capture window clip settings tab – this makes the mac pass the audio through whilst capturing.

[Tom Soper] “While the deck is on and connected to the macbook pro but I am not laying off any tapes, sound will not play to headphones from any clip”

You mean the headphone jack on the Macbook? With the DV deck connected, FC assumes in the DV easy setup that you want to output audio and video via firewire for monitoring, as this is the correct way to view audio and video in sync, properly interlaced and at full quality.

If you only want to view it on the Mac, and monitor audio on the computer, disable external video, or set the audio output at the bottom of the view menu to ‘internal audio’ – ie. NOT to firewire audio.

If you switch the deck off whilst it is connected to the macbook and FCP is running, you will get all sorts of problems – don’t do this without shutting down FCP, and connect the deck before you start FCP.

You can find a lot of useful information about the correct way to use FCP with a deck in the manual.

Kind regards,

Ben

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