[Bill Kelly]

Regarding the issue with the digital cut, when you’re black and coding the tape, make sure the deck is set to Internal and Preset. When you do the actual Edit To Tape, switch the deck to Internal and Regen. I had that same issue the first time I laid off to an HDCAM deck.

[Bill Kelly]

Edit to above post:

Typo error. It should have read “you shouldn’t go more than 8db above that”.

Whoops.

[Bill Kelly]

Whatever you set your reference tone in FCP to be (some people set tone at -12, others at -20), you really should go more than 8db above that. So, for example, if your reference tone underneath your bars are at -20, then make sure you don’t peak over -12.

Personally, I set tone to -20 in my timeline and peak at -12. It just makes sense to me since the tone gets set to -20 on the deck when I lay off. Just seems better to keep it consistent that way. It’s also easy to watch the volume meter and make sure it doesn’t go above that line at -12.

[Bill Kelly]

After you drop your footage into the 4:3 Sequence, you can adjust the PAR in your Sequence Settings. There are various HD PAR settings.

[Bill Kelly]

Try using the Easy Setup for HDV 1080i. Sometime when you just set the capture settings it doesn’t like to see the camera. Not really sure why. I had that problem the first time I tried to capture from an FX-1. Once I used the Easy Setup, it saw the camera and captured with no problem. Good luck.

[Bill Kelly]

Put one of your clips in the timeline and park your playhead cursor on it. Double click on it to load it into the Viewer. In the Motion Tab, click the Distort option. Adjust the Aspect Ratio until your bars are gone.

[Bill Kelly]

It should be no problem running HDSDI out to the deck and laying off to tape to a HDCAM master. I’ve done it quite a number of times myself with DVCPRO HD to HDCAM master and never had any problems. Video and audio go through the HDSDI. You’ll need a remote cable connected from the Remote Out connection on the back of the HDCAM deck to your capture card. Also, when you black and code your tape, set the deck to Internal and Preset for the blacking, and then to Internal and Regenerate when you lay off to tape. If you don’t, your time code will get messed up. Good luck.

[Bill Kelly]

I’ve had the same thing happen to me, both with HDV footage and DVCPRO HD footage when going down to DV and subsequently to DVD. The picture is slightly squished vertically, so people appear a tiny bit shorter and fatter than they should. Not very much, but enough that having seen the footage so many times that I can notice. I’ve found a workaround for HDV if you’re going to put it on DVD. I think the problem is a square pixel versus rectangular pixel thing.

In your sequence settings, try this:

Frame size – 720×480 NTSC DV (3:2)
Pixel Aspect Ratio – HD 1440×1080 Anamorphic 16:9 checked
Field dominance – Lower
Editing Timebase – 29.97 or 23.98 or whatever your HD project is
Compressor: Uncompressed 8 bit 4:2:2
Click on the Advanced tab under the compressor settings, make sure you’re set to 16:9.
In your timeline, double click on your clip(s) and make sure in the Motion>>Distort setting that the clip aspect ratio is 0.

That SHOULD work to get you the right aspect ratio. Otherwise, the quick and dirty fix is to set the clip aspect ratio for all your clips to be -12.5, which will look stretched vertically in your Canvas, but when it goes to DVD or directly to a TV the aspect ratio will look correct. That’s the solution I’ve had to use for DVCPRO HD when going out to DVD for a 4:3 TV where it will letterbox correctly. Unfortunately, I’ve had to make 2 different DVDs to give out to people depending on the display they’ll be using, 16:9 or 4:3. It doesn’t make any sense, setting to Anamorphic and selecting the correct pixel aspect ratio should work, but you still get that slight vertical squishing.

Not to rattle on too much here, but I spent an entire weekend and pretty much a whole spindle of blank DVDs trying to adjust pixel aspect ratios, frame sizes, clip aspect ratios, DVD Studio Pro settings, DVD player playback settings, and pretty much everything else I could think of trying to get one DVD from a DVCPRO HD source that could look correct on a 16:9 TV, a 4:3 TV, and a computer monitor. Couldn’t get it. If it looked correct on a 16:9 display, it was very slightly squished in 4:3 letterbox displays. If it was right in 4:3, it was stretched very slightly in 16:9. I have paper after paper where I was writing down all the different setting combinations I had tried so I didn’t repeat them.

If anyone does know of a way to get DVCPRO HD to look correct on ALL displays I’d appreciate if they could post it.

Sorry ’bout the long post.

[Bill Kelly]

I’ve captured from an FX-1 at 1080i and converted to 30p in a timeline and don’t really see a quality difference. It does require rendering however. I used the technique of keeping one layer on V1, duplicating the layer, putting that layer on V2 and reducing the opacity to 50%. Then, drag a deinterlace filter on to both clips. Set the field as lower on the V1 clip and upper on the V2 clip. It’s kind of a basic “film look” technique.

Or, if you have the Nattress film look package, you can drop the film look filter on and change the setting from 24p to 30p and render.

We have the Nattress package at work, but on some home projects I used the aformentioned technique and felt the results were very good. If you go for the Nattress filters ($100), you’ll find a lot of use for them other than the deinterlacing. It’s a good set of filters with a lot of different film look presets as well as some good conversion features.

[Bill Kelly]

Check out NASA’s World Wind program. It’s very similar in design to Google Earth and is completely free to use the public domain images. You can zoom, pan, tilt to you find the way you want your image to be, do a PRINT SCR and take a screen shot, put it in FCP and then keyframe movement.

From their FAQ page:

Are images on World Wind copyrighted?

The Landsat Global Mosaic, Blue Marble, and the USGS raster maps and images are all Public Domain.

Can I use images on World Wind for commercial purposes?

Some of the datasets that World Wind has access to are in the ‘Public Domain’ and can be used for commercial purposes (but generally not the actual data servers), however, some datasets, including 3rd-party add-ons/plugins may have their own terms-of-use which could prohibit commercial use of their products and services.

The link is https://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/download.html

Link to Landsat image of Mt. St. Helens: https://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/graphics/screenshots/08.jpg