[Ben Insler]

Try trashing your FCP prefrences. Under your user root (NOT your hard drive root!), go to ‘library:prefrences:final cut pro user data’ and trash the final cut pro prefs, obj cache, and prof cache files. Then go up one level to the prefrences folder and trash the file com.apple.FinalCutPro.plist. Once these are all in the trash, try to start final cut again. You can delete these files from the trash anytime.

good luck,
Ben

[Ben Insler]

Walter,

Yeah, the levels are jumping up after render. And I’m not really using the FCP scopes… well I am, but not to gague final levels – this jumping is happening on an external HD scope. It seems that the final luma levels are not being rendered in full when the FCP playhead is paused… I don’t know why this would happen but doing extensive color correction would prove (or is proving…) difficult if this is the case.

Thanks again,

Ben

[Ben Insler]

If you don’t want to front the money for a Kona card, you might just be able to convert all your media through the media manager. I’ve never done this with HD though, so I can’t tell you whether or not this would take an insane amount of time when compared to recapturing.

Ben

[Ben Insler]

Yup. Gotta go with the 7200 RPM. That’s it. This was one of the many reasons that editing on a laptop was difficult (of course, that’s not so much the case anymore, and they make 7200 RPM notebook hard drives now).

[Ben Insler]

I haven’t seen the turorial, but if you didn’t take this idea into account beforehand (as in with using a greenscreen for this purpose) and have a complicated/unkeyable background, you’ll probably have to rotoscope the character out with an animated mask – it’s an unbelievably fun and enjoyable process of making a detailed mask surrounding your character and then animating all the mask points frame-by-frame to make the mask match the characters movements. Clicking the stopwatch next to the mask shape attribute will record changes to the positions of each individual point, but you can’t delet points once they’re in the mask – they’ll get deleted from the entire playback of the mask, not just that frame (I can’t remember if this is true for adding points as well… you’ll have to try it).

Enjoy,

Ben

[Ben Insler]

Does this happen on every tape? Also, how many drives to you have striped together into each RAID, and how much space is avaliable? Sometimes the RAID will slow down if more tham 60-70% of its space is taken up. I don’t know why it would tell you there was a time code break (it should give you a dropped frame error). I’ve never had this problem during capture, but had significant problems on export when the RAID was close to being filled.

Best,

Ben

[Ben Insler]

also, make sure that your scratch disks aren’t full. If they are, set an overflow disk (an additional scratch disk in your scratch disk settings window) and make sure that the render files checkbox(es) to the left are checked. Or, if you only have a little but to render and don’t have any more disks, you could change the minimum disk space quota size (I can’t remember the correct name for this), which prevents FCP from writing files to any disk if writing that file would mean that said disk would end up with less free space than is defined by the quota. You can find this setting in the prefrences window, and it’s probably set by default at 2048 MB (2 gigs).

Good luck,

Ben

[Ben Insler]

Does your capture preview on your Computer monitor freeze up? Sometimes the firewire but gets bogged down and FCP will lose deck control and not stop capturing at the out point of your media, but I’ve never had that happen without the preview freezing up first.

Ben Insler
Editor
Telemark Films

[Ben Insler]

If you have After Effects and Photoshop, create your text in photoshop and animate the scroll in After Effects. The render will be LIGHTINIG fast. In terms of speeding up your render – unfortunately rendering doesn’t have much to do with RAM, but is rather a processor heavy operation. So, as Jeff mentioned, you’d have to get a faster computer like a dual or a quad G5.

Ben Insler
Editor
Telemark Films

[Ben Insler]

Two ideas actualy… As always, trash prefrences. Sometimes that fixes the weirdest problems.

The other idea – make sure that you only have 1 firewire DV device hooked up while you’re using FCP – it does not like two (meaning if you have a Sony DSR-11 DVCAM deck hooked up, like we do here, then unplug your iSight, or your AJA IOla, or whatever else you can think of that would be a DV input device).

If those didn’t fix it, then I’ll keep thinking…

Best,

Ben Insler
Editor
Telemark Films