Bill Lee
Forum Replies Created
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In the meantime, after you’ve ordered your copy of Final Cut Studio 2 and are waiting for it to arrive (June?), use iMovie HD to capture and edit your HDV. Since you say it’s a newish Mac, then it should have iMovie HD as part of its standard supplied set of applications.
Once you have exhausted all the options in iMovie, you’ll be more ready for FCP. There’s a lot of stuff broadcast that was first cut with iMovie, so don’t undervalue it – it’s a great place to start. FCP is a daunting place to get into video editing, so I would recommend some of the Apple Pro Training series books which have about 20 lessons and a DVD full of material to learn from.
Bill Lee
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Live Capture Plus 2.0 US$49
https://www.squarebox.co.uk/lcplus.htmlI haven’t used this software myself, but the company has been around a few years. They have a downloadable demo version, limited to five minute captures so you can try-before-buying.
From their website, new in version 2.0:
“New keyboard shortcuts to make it easier to enter log notes and mark events while a capture is in progress”Bill Lee
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The result is probably because of the difference in gamma between the expected output device (TV) and your computer monitor. As a result, never rely on the computer monitor for eyeballing color corrections. Page III-517 of the FCP 5 Help explains this.
If you’ve got a DV tape deck, drop the clip into a DV sequence in FCP, set the output to FireWire and have a TV set (at least, if not a TV reference monitor) plugged into the deck. Judge the clip on what is on the TV screen, not what is on the computer screen. This is useful for not just gamma issues, but interlace issues as well (although if you’ve been emailed the clip, it’s likely not an interlaced clip any more after compression to a smaller frame size). In this case you can add a gamma filter to a clip to bring it closer to that of what you would be seeing. If you’ve calibrated your monitor for a gamma of 1.8, then the filter correction should be 1.222.
There is a miniscule chance that you have been given a Cineon file, which has a non-linear gamma – but if that is the case, then your likely to have access to Shake to view and edit this material anyway.
See also https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/gamma_mac_pc.html for the inverse of the problem – delivering to PCs which have the same gamma (2.2) as television sets, instead of the gamma of 1.8 that Macs have.
Bill Lee
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It depends where your logo came from…
If you have a high resolution image (>720×480 for NTSC, 720×576 for PAL) and import it into FCP, it will be scaled to the above resolutions. If you drop this clip into a sequence, you can edit the motion parameters for this clip to set the scale back to 100% and thus have the image extend off the edges of the frame.
If your logo is smaller, it will be left at 100% of its original size, but if opened in the viewer will be scaled to fit the default sequence resolution (and look ugly). If this clip is dragged into your sequence, it will show at its native size (i.e. small)
Regardless, you may have to deinterlace/flicker filter the logo if you are outputing this work to be displayed on an interlaced display. You won’t have to do this to your logo if the final output is for the web, but then the rest of your video will probably have to be deinterlaced for the web’s progressive scan displays. One pixel high detail (such as in logos) flickers badly when displayed on standard TV sets, which is why it has to be blurred vertically.
I think Apple has fixed the old problem of QuickTime video not having the High Quality playback checkbox automatically on, but it is possible that your playback in QT Player looks bad for this reason. You should check to make sure the setting for the video track in the QT player is set to high quality.
Bill Lee
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Just to add a way of getting a quick “Schindler’s List” color effect in FCP:
1) Add a Color Corrector 3 way to your clip
2) Window>Arrange>Color Correction
3) Open the clip in the viewer and go to the Color Corrector 3 way tab
4) Click on the Secondary Color Correction “Limit Effect” by clicking on the small triangle at the left edge of the window
5) There are three icons on the right edge of the Limit Effect area: Select Color, View Final/Matte/Source, and Invert Select. Select the Select Color icon, so that the cursor turns into an eyedropper. Click on the area that you want to have it color highlighted. The cursor will change back to the previous cursor.
6) Drag the Saturation (Sat) control to the far left. Part (or all) of the area you just clicked on will go gray. This is what we want.
7) Click on the Select Color icon again, and hold down the Shift key and click in the color that you want also included in the selected region. More of your region should turn gray, allowing you to see areas that you haven’t yet selected. Continue to do this step until either all the region you want is selected, or, if you still have some areas that still won’t turn gray, then proceed to step 8).
8) Click on the View Final/Matte/Source to see the Matte you have created. Manually tweak the Limit Effect Saturation and Luma to expand the Matte to include all of the problematic areas you couldn’t add to the selected color.
9) Click on the Invert Selection icon to desaturation everything but the region you have spent time selecting.
10) You will probably have to keyframe the Limit Effect to get the best results over the duration of a clip.As Tom Meegan said, duplicate a clip on top of itself in a new video track, apply the Color Corrector 3 way to each, select differing areas for non-desaturation, then use garbage mattes or cropping to get them into the canvas frame at the same time.
Bill Lee
Notes: The trick is to desaturate the color you are selecting, thereby allowing you to see which colors you have selected, and which ones you have left to do. If you accidently click on a desaturated area when adding to the set of selected colors, then it’s not going to affect the set of colors that you have selected. For some reason, you may get to a point where it won’t add to the set of selected colors: it’s at this stage you have to manually go in and tweak the controls to get those last few colors in the selected set. -
If it is happening with ALL tapes, then the issue is likely to be with the drives you are capturing to. What sort of storage are you capturing to? How full is it? Is this to a FireWire drive where the camera/tape deck is also plugged into the FireWire?
Are you logging your tapes first, or are you using Capture Now?
The whole of FCP is inherently dependent on timecode, so dropped frames has a huge impact on being able to reliably identify and recapture video. If you’ve got broken timecode (and/or dropped frames) then FCP will have problems in the long term with this video.
Turning off abort on capture won’t make dropped frames magically reappear, it will just not have your capture fail on you. If the problem is with the tape, then you could try capturing the video in iMovie and importing it as DV into FCP (but you’ll need to re-render the audio).
Bill
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Of course there is the ability to view the contents of a Bin as small, medium or large icons and that will give you the ability to organise them in any way that you drag. If you drag them groupings that you want, then this ordering is preserved between switching to column mode and icon mode. If you select a group and drag them to the timeline, then the order they will be put into the timeline is left to right, top to bottom.
Bill Lee
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Have you looked at using Live Capture Plus?
Price is US$49.This can either capture whole tapes, or split it into clips based on timecode or scene changes. It can also try to recapture dropped frames (in the case of a soft read error), as well as allow you to monitor tapes being captured and logging tapes/metadata during the capture.
Once you’ve captured, you can import the video/shot logs into FCP.
I haven’t run this software myself, but they’ve been around a couple of years (I’ve never needed to batch capture tapes like this which is why I haven’t purchased so far). They also have a product called CatDV Professional to allow media management of large numbers of clips, including network-wide databases.
Bill Lee
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Some people think that they want 720p24 literally on the web, and since I didn’t know whether this was going to be for transfer to another computer for playback/editing at the original size, or whether it could be reduced in pixel dimensions I assumed that it might have had to be left at that 720p24. Usually I ask for what purpose they are putting it up on the web, which defines quality/dimensions and then we work from there.
You might say I would be crazy to make this assumption, but I get all sorts of unusual requests. Thus my saying that everything is a tradeoff without getting specific.
Rereading it, I probably should have also said, “Go into Compressor, and pick the most appropriate Web Download canned Setting, and adjust from there.” That would have made most people happy.
Bill Lee
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You do realise that the size of this video is likely to be about 100-300MBytes?
It can be smaller, but you will get consequentially lower quality video.
Processing-Time. Quality. Size.
Each is a trade off against the other two.Compressor will do it these days, but sometimes the answer also depends on the nature of your material. Some software does better with particular types of video. Sometimes the difference is subtle. It may also depend on whether further processing needs to be done with the received video.
Bill Lee