Ben Insler
Forum Replies Created
-
Yes, but the method is a little more complicated than that… for example if the point of focus is 3 units (or whatever distance is measured in, we’ll call them units) from the camera, we want the gaussian blur on the layer to be 0, not 3, when the layer is 3 units from the camera. I guess we could just use simple addition/subtraction from the distance to achieve this, but I was thinking that a cap on the blur might be nict too, because as distances increase or decrese to the extremes, we would want the gaussian blur to just completely obliterate the layer (unless you were going for a macro lens effect).
-
Yes, but the method is a little more complicated than that… for example if the point of focus is 3 units (or whatever distance is measured in, we’ll call them units) from the camera, we want the gaussian blur on the layer to be 0, not 3, when the layer is 3 units from the camera. I guess we could just use simple addition/subtraction from the distance to achieve this, but I was thinking that a cap on the blur might be nict too, because as distances increase or decrese to the extremes, we would want the gaussian blur to just completely obliterate the layer (unless you were going for a macro lens effect).
-
My guess, without seeing your timeline, is that FCP has turned your photoshop file into a nested sequence, and you have to jump in to that sequence (double click on you PSD in the timeline) and lengthen the video tracks for the layers there, then lengthen the length of the full PSD nested clip. Or go back into photoshop and exprot a flattened .tif or .tga with transparency, which will probably work better in FCP than a PSD anyway.
Your actor is on V1. I’d animate your tv screen on V3. Then copy (command+c) and paste the basic motion attributes of the tv screen (option+v) on your video clip (which should be below your TV screen on V2). This will will animate the video clip exactly to the animation you’ve arleady done for the tv screen. Finally, tweak the scale of the video clip on V2 so that it fits inside the TV screen the way you want it to. Do this for each “TV” being animated.
-Ben
-
the print to video process should render everything that is either un-rendered or not full quality before printing to tape, including RT playback media. To be safe though, you could check all the “render selection” and “render all” options under the sequence menu, so that when you render it’s rendering everything possible. That’s how I keep FCP set up – I render whenever I want to see something at full quality, whether it can be played back with dynamic RT or not, and I render the entire timeline before outputting to tape. However, to address the last part of your question, FCP will NOT re-render things that you’ve already rendered simply because it’s printing to video. It will use the existing render files.
-Ben
-
I’ve been working with the DVX-100 and now the DVX-100A basically since they came out, and to your timecode/capturing issues, unfortunately all I can say is Welcome to the DVX-100A. It is something that has plagued caputring for me and my co-workers since the first time we shot on the camera… Set up an hour long capture, go grab some lunch, and when you get back it’s lost the TC and only captured one clip. You won’t see any drops in the TC when you’re watching the display as you’re playing back a tape, but if you shuttle frame by frame, you might see a jump from 00:23:45:15 to 00:23:45:22… what happened to the missing frames? I don’t know, but FCP can’t work with that. There are a few logging work-arounds that we have used. First of all, when capturing from the DVX series, go into your user prefs. and uncheck the “abort capture on dropped frames” box and set the “On timecode break:” option to ‘warn after capture.’ That will ensure that if the TC jumps while a clip is capturing, FCP will ignore that and just keep capturing your clip as is with no jumps, jitters, or hang-ups, and it won’t abort because of it. As a result FCP will now only abort the capture if a TC jump is within it’s pre/post roll seek area. To fix this, we have made a bunch of new capture presets with altered pre/post roll settings. If you’re still getting troube (which I wouldn’t doubt) and you’re simply capturing shot by shot, you could try adding handles so that the in/out points of every shot now sit in the previous/next shot, hopefully placing the in/out points in an area where a TC jump is less likely.
In terms of your playback problems, the first thing that jumps into my mind (although I don’t know why you would be able to have flawless playback in iMovie) are your Hard Drive specs. Is it a 7200 RPM with at least an 8Mb cache and is it connected in such a way that provides enough throughput for DV playback (if it’s internal, than this question might be rediculous, but I just thought I’d ask). If all of that is good to go, my next question is does your budget allow for another HDD, because maybe this one has some problems (you said you just purchased it, right? Sometimes, though rarely, drives are bad…) and you might want to purchase another one and ultimately return your current one for a refund or replacement. We have a drive that I’ve been working with that has a few bad sectors, and while it seems to write data fine, there are certain things it won’t play back and freezes up on. Here’s what I would do. You said that playback seems to occur randomly, but once it hangs up in a spot, it always hangs up at that spot (consistency always sets off a media problem in my mind, in this case the HDD). Shut down and restart your system and see if hangs up on that same frame again. If it does I would say it’s a HDD problem… if it doesn’t, then I’m not sure what it is but I’d guess it’s something to do with the interface between your HDD and your mac, like once the mac has trouble in a spot it continues to have that trouble until you reboot… I don’t know but stranger things have happened. Anyway, if the system hung up in the same spot after restart, I’d then re-capture the current clip that it is hanging up on to a different location on your hard drive (and you may want to do this step again on a different drive, maybe your external if you have enough space for one clip and havne’t had any playback trouble with it). Temporarily set a new capture scratch for that clip and recapture it, preserving the original capture. Then alter the clip linkage between the two captures. If it continues to hang up in the same spots when linked to the original capture location but not hang up at those spots when linked to the new location, then it’s definately a HDD problem. If it does hang up in the same spots, maybe it’s the strange mac-HDD interface problem I randomly came up with before, or mabye your HDD seek, read, and/or transfer rates aren’t fast enough for FCP to play back your video (depending on how much you’re doing there effect wise), or at that point it could also be a media problem coming from the DVX-100A, in which case I’d definately test it on another HDD that you’ve had success with before.
I apologize for the way lenghty post. I hope this helps in some way, or at least makes you feel a little better to know that you’re not alone.
Best,
Ben
-
With compressor, I don’t know. But in final cut you can go to Video Filters->Video->Timecode Generator and add this TCG to a clip (if you need it on an edited sequence, nest the sequence and drop the filter on the nest). Two things… (1) you’ll have to re-render everything unless your boss if fine with getting a low res proof copy simply for the sake of giving you timecode. (2) The TCG assumes that your timeline starts at 00:00:00:00 rather than reading your timeline start time from your timeline settings, so you have to put in the number of hours and frames (don’t forget to factor in DF to your calculation if you’re using it) that the start time is ofset from 00:00:00:00. Then you can encode that to an .m2v
Hope that helps,
Ben
-
Yeah, that’s what i figured would be the case. I’ve had trouble with the camera DOF blur too, and the only way I could fix it was with gaussian blur. Fortunately you don’t need too much blur on the images, just enough to cover up the bad areas in the DOF… I’d experiment on a layer to see how much gaussian blur you need and then write an expression relative to the camera for that layer’s gaussian blur so that the blur intensifies (to the maximum necessary) as the layer moves out of the focal plane (in either direction) and is zero when that layer should be in focus. Then copy the gaussian blur with the expression and put it on all the layers, essentially doing exactly what the camera’s DOF is doing but correcting it with the gaussian blur. I guess you could even just do this and turn the camera’s DOF blur off… that might even turn out better.
Best,
Ben
-
Yeah, that’s what i figured would be the case. I’ve had trouble with the camera DOF blur too, and the only way I could fix it was with gaussian blur. Fortunately you don’t need too much blur on the images, just enough to cover up the bad areas in the DOF… I’d experiment on a layer to see how much gaussian blur you need and then write an expression relative to the camera for that layer’s gaussian blur so that the blur intensifies (to the maximum necessary) as the layer moves out of the focal plane (in either direction) and is zero when that layer should be in focus. Then copy the gaussian blur with the expression and put it on all the layers, essentially doing exactly what the camera’s DOF is doing but correcting it with the gaussian blur. I guess you could even just do this and turn the camera’s DOF blur off… that might even turn out better.
Best,
Ben
-
There’s no need to change the pixel ration if you’re importing your image into an HD sequence in FCP (because HD works with square pixels). Make sure your FCP sequence and pixel aspect ratios are set to HD and not DV (click on your sequence and press command+0).
-Ben
-
I’ve never had the clone stamp “smearing” (as in a similar effect to the smudge tool in photoshop?). You’ve probably already thought of this, but press command+9 to bring up your brush tip pallete and make sure that you’re using a brush that applies to your application.
Hope that helps a little.
Ben