Bill Kelly
Forum Replies Created
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I forgot to add, do the Control-Click thing on the audio panel down at the locations of both Ch. 3 & Ch. 4. You’ll have to change the setting for both tracks.
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Control-Click on the audio panel on the left side of the timeline. Hover your mouse over where it says “Audio Outputs” and make sure Ch. 1 & 2 are selected, not 3 & 4. It sounds like you have it set 4 audio outputs in your Sequence Settings when you only really want 2.
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Look up the “Fit to Fill” function in the manual. I’m not sure this is exactly what you are looking for, but it’s a valuable function to know nevertheless.
Basically set an In and Out point for your clip in the Viewer, and set an In and Out point in your timeline where you want the clip to go. Drag the clip from your Viewer window to your Canvas window and drop it into the Fit to Fill box
Final Cut will automatically adjust the speed of the clip to fit between the In and Out points you selected in the timeline.
For example if you had a 5 sec clip and an 8 sec gap in your timeline to fill, Final Cut adjusts the speed of your source clip so that it fits perfectly in your timeline. It also doesn’t move anything else in your timeline. Make sure your audio tabs (A1, A2, etc) aren’t selected.
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At this point, since you’re only going to have the camera for a couple days and don’t have an HD capture card, your best option might be to use a downconvert mode of the camera to get your footage into your system, with timecode of course. Then, while you’re doing your postproduction on the project in SD you’ll have more time to investigate various HD capture cards and workflows and everything won’t be so rushed. After you’re done cutting the project you can by the Kona or whatever you decide on, rent an HDCAM deck an online your project in HD.
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1. Yes, Constant Bit Rate is the same as One Pass. The video is encoded at a constant bit rate during the one pass. One Pass VBR is NOT a constant bit rate. VBR stands for Variable Bit Rate.
2. The general rule of thumb is that if your project is an hour or less, encode at a constant bit rate of about 6.5 or 6.7. Some older DVD players start to act funky when the bit rate is 7 or more, so it pays to err on the side of caution. You don’t really notice much of a difference, if any, between something encoded at 6.7 and something encoded higher.
If your project is more than an hour, encode with Two Pass VBR. One the first pass, Compressor analyzes your movie and determines when it can best use a low bit rate (for example when you fade to black, it doesn’t require as much information to be encoded as when you have a scene with a lot of colors and motion.) and when it needs to use a high bit rate. On the second pass, it encodes based on the information it gathered on the first pass, making best use of it. Make sure to set your maximum bit rate at about 6.7 when you encode using VBR, or the aformentioned playback problem may occur if the bit rate goes over 7. -
The easiest, no fuss method is to export your timeline into one clip on to your hard drive. Open IMovie and import it into there. Drag it down to the IMovie timeline. Then go to File>>Export and it will give you a bunch of options (email, web, etc) where it will show you the size of the movie after it is compressed (320×240, 160×120, etc.) as well as the file size (8MB, 4.2 MB, and so on. This way you don’t have to worry about the compression settings when exporting from Final Cut because Final Cut doesn’t give you an expected size of the file.
I don’t know how well an almost 5 minute clip will look at 320×240 at under 10MB, but this method is worth a shot. Good luck.
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Go to your Sequence Setting>>Audio Outputs and set it to 4 channels rather than two. As long as you have 4 channel out from your deck/camera and capture card (Kona LH has this), you should be all set.
Make sure in your log & capture window, in Clip Settings, that you enable all 4 channels to capture. -
From the menu: Modify>>Link Uncheck where it says link. If they still both highlight after you’ve done this when you click on them, then uncheck Modify>>Stereo Pair as well.
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Use the 108060i Easy Setup, unless you’ve shot PAL not NTSC. I’ve brought in video from an FX1 using the 108060i Easy Setup and never had rendering problems. Also, check which red bar is asking for render, the top or bottom. FCP might be wanting to render your audio, not video.
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I generally just export the still image as-is from the timeline, then deinterlace in photoshop (filters>>video>>deinterlace). Usually works okay.