[Ben Insler]

sorry… I thought about the expression again and realized that undesired cropping still could occur… I changed the condition so that rather than choosing the scaling method based on the longer width or height of the image, it compares the image’s width/height ratio to that of your comp. If the ratio is wider than your comp, it scales it down based on the width; if it’s taller it scales it down by the height. The expression is below.

if((width/height)<=((thisComp.width*thisComp.pixelAspect)/thisComp.height)) x=thisComp.height/height*100; else x=thisComp.width/width*(thisComp.pixelAspect*100); [x,x] -Ben

[Ben Insler]

David,

Are you using a lot of stills in your timeline? I’ve run into this problem many times where making changes to the timeline (when deleting, inserting, or moving footage) causes final cut to think for long periods of time when you’re using a lot of stills – my guess is that FCP handles stills differently than .mov files and when you have a lot of them, it takes a long time to re-enque the playback of all the stills in the timeline when you make a change.

I don’t know if that helps…

Best,

Ben

[Ben Insler]

I haven’t shot with squeezed in a long time, but if I remember correctly final cut will understand the difference between your caputred 16×9 footage shot with a 1.2 pixel aspect ratio and your 4×3 0.9 pixel aspect ratio sequence. It should automatically maintain the 16×9 nature of the footage with a letterbox when you place it in your 4×3 sequence, although you may need to render for both previewing for editing purposes and exporting to tape at full quality.

best,

Ben

[Ben Insler]

I agree. I guess my question really is whether or not there’s a difference between the Mac’s version of QT7 and the PC’s, because the Mac’s DV conversion looks just as good as with the animation codec (for DV NTSC editing purposes anyway), but the PC’s looks horrible. are they using different methods?

Thanks again…

[Ben Insler]

Nice expression Mylenium, but here’s a little tweak because yours only works for images that are taller than they are wide (so images that are wider than they are tall will get cropped on the sides). I added a condition to check which is larger, the width or the height, and the expression scales to the larger of the two to fit the whole image. Also, if the scaling is occuring based on the width, it is automatically scaling based on the comp’s pixel aspect ratio. expression is below:

if(height>width) x=thisComp.height/height*100; else x=thisComp.width/width*(thisComp.pixelAspect*100);
[x,x]

Hope that works.
-Ben

[Ben Insler]

Nice expression Mylenium, but here’s a little tweak because yours only works for images that are taller than they are wide (so images that are wider than they are tall will get cropped on the sides). I added a condition to check which is larger, the width or the height, and the expression scales to the larger of the two to fit the whole image. Also, if the scaling is occuring based on the width, it is automatically scaling based on the comp’s pixel aspect ratio. expression is below:

if(height>width) x=thisComp.height/height*100; else x=thisComp.width/width*(thisComp.pixelAspect*100);
[x,x]

Hope that works.
-Ben

[Ben Insler]

To my knowledge, you’d need an expensive piece of conversion hardware to convert from 1080i HDV to DV on the fly. I’m assuming from your post that you want to edit the HDV and the DV footage together and that you want your final format to be DV, so I’d suggest capturing all HDV footage and then exporting it as DV footage (to prevent rendering time once you’re editing, or you could just edit with your HDV footage in your DV timeline, but you’d always be rendering) unless you want to buy yourself a nice gift for the the holidays from AJA or DeckLink.

To get around that you could capture all the HDV footage and then try to media manage it out and convert the footage as it’s being media managed. This is the way I’d do it if everything always worked the way you thought it would in your head, but I have never done it before and I don’t know if the FCP media manager will scale your HDV footage down from 1920×1080 to 720×480… You’d have to test it. If it doesn’t, read on.

To make life easier on yourself (even though this isn’t necessary, but just to be safe) if you’re going to do this (and I’m also assuming your using FCP), make sure that you set the date/time stamp on your Sony HDV camera before you start shooting and make sure that it is being written to the tape (i think it always is on anything DV related, but just saying it to be sure). This will get recoreded beneath your footage and then into your captured HDV clips. Once you’ve captured all your HDV clips, place them all in one DV timeline (resized and everything) that matches the format you’re shooting on the Canon and export them all as one long DV clip in that format – the time/date stamp will get written to this final DV file you export as well (and thus essentially mark the in and out points of each clip whenever the date/time jumps out of sequence from one clip to another. Once you have exported your HDV clips to DV, import the DV clip into your FCP DV project with your Canon footage, select the newly made HDV->DV clip, and choose Mark->DV Start/Stop Detect. This will place a marker at each break in the time/date stamp, or at each break where you stopped stopped or started recording (it should place one at the start of the clip as well, but if it doesn’t place a marker at the first frame of the clip, add one). Then, create a new bin (maybe called HDV clips), select all the newly created marker in your HDV->DV clip, and drag those markers into your new bin – all the markers will become subclips… each subclip being a captured shot that you exported from HDV. Now, rather than exporting all the clips one at a time from the timeline, you can simply rename the new subclips to keep all your footage orgainzed in shorter clips.

Hope that helps… I really can’t remember if you need to set the date/time… I think DV start/stop is recorded regardless, but I’d rather be safe and be sure it would work. Maybe someone else knows if it’s actually necessary. Anway, hope that helps.

-Ben

[Ben Insler]

If you’re using an older version of FCP (like 4.5 HD) but you’ve upgraded to QuickTime 7 but haven’t purchased pro (meaning you can’t export from quicktime anymore), you could just tweak settings in iTunes and export the 48K aiff from your sound file there.

[Ben Insler]

I get errors just like that all the time, except usually mine say “Cannot Parse File” or something like that. The reason it imports fine is because AE doesn’t actually load all the files when you import a sequence, it just looks at the first one and then runs down the sequence to see how many images are in it – so you’ll never get an error on importing a sequence unless your first image is messed up.

Anyway, the error means that AFX can’t read the current file in the sequence that it’s trying to see… I’ve only had this problem when rendering from Maya, and it usually only happens when my render has crashed and I’ve gone back and restarted it from a current point (for example, the image sequence from 1 to 100 will open fine in fcheck and photoshop and looks fine, but realistically the crash at frame 50 prevented the frame’s full alpha from rendering, so AFX flips out on frame 50… and when I restarted my render I should have done frame 50 over again, but instead started on 51 because 50 looked fine).

I would say do a ram preview at 1/4 quality. Whatever frame the ram preview crashes at, re-render that frame of the sequence from Maya, overwriting the original one (hopefully you’re not using particles). There’s no need to re-import your sequence after that (remember from above), just scrub the playhead away and then back over that frame again… hopefully your sequence is fixed. If you have more than one instance of this, you’ll have to re-render all the bad frames obviously, but that should get you through the problem.

I hope that’s what you were asking. Best,

Ben

[Ben Insler]

Does the text rasterize in your main comp if you remove shine from it?