Bret Williams
Forum Replies Created
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Not sure what you mean by an open nest. But to export from anywhere you mark an in and an out and export.
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Not sure why you’re dropping into AE and having AE do nothing with it except make it a quicktime. AE is light years ahead of FCP at scaling and frame rate conversion. Create a comp in AE that is 720×480 29.97fps (fields or no fields) and drop your footage in and render it as a ntsc DV file (fields or no fields). Drop it into FCP and press play and you’re done. No rendering required in FCP, and you’ve used AE to convert frame rate and scaling which it excels at.
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Even better just put a slug above all your tracks and matte that. Or a black ps file with a letterbox hole in the middle. You can easily turn that track on or off to hide the mask. And it’s very easy to just use wireframe mode to move any clip up or down to fit in the mask the way you like. And you can even have titles in the letterbox area as a graphic design if you like by putting them above the slug.
But don’t output as a qt and bring it back in. You’re just adding a step and losing all your timecode information. If you feel the need to consolidate a sequence into one clip simply nest the sequence so that you can still edit the material within the sequence.
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So you’re dealing with nested sequences, each as a “chapter.” Did you render the nests as a nest, or as each individual sequence? In other words, if you created a sequence and rendered it, then placed that sequence into multiple timelines (seqs) as a nested sequence then the render would remain. But if you placed the nested seq into a timeline, then redered it, the render remains with the sequence, not the nest. Render files are attributed to the sequence. Don’t know if that helps. Of course if you’re losing renders check and make sure your nested seq settings match the new sequence. But that’s a given.
But you were wondering about outputting workaround – of course you can just output from the old project. Mark in, mark out, and edit to tape each individual chapter. Not sure why you made a new project instead of a new bin or sequence but it shouldn’t matter.
If you can clarify exactly what you’re doing with seqs, nests, and projects then that’ll help.
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A lot of folks don’t think about it, but FCP was orginally designed to be akin to After Effects, and if you think that way then you will have an easier time compositing. The title crawl with logo for example. I’m not sure just how long your crawl is, so it may not apply, but since you mentioned photoshop, I figure it can’t be that long. Try making a comp that is insanely wide and extremely short. Whatever the limit is. 3000×40 or something like that. Then just use the regular text tool to make a long line of text. Then stick your logo on another layer above where it needs to be. Just like AE or PS. Then drop that comp into your regular comp and animate it.
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Pre HD, TVs were 4:3. A little math tells you that 720×480 is not 4:3. But Televisions only have “pixels” in one dimension. Vertical scan lines. There essentially is no horizontal resolution on the horizontal. So cameras and editing gear can only increase their rez in one direction. Somewhere along the way 720 became the norm. Probably with the first digital gear since an actual pixel number had to be used. You used to hear a lot more claims or “500 lines of resolution” or “600 lines” etc in the analog days. And they meant that you could discern 500 separate lines. To me that meant that you had to have the equivalent of 1000 horizontal resolution because there has to be space inbetween also, right? Seemed like hype.
Did you know that in QT you can turn on “high quality” and you’ll see the DV stream just as clear as in FCP. Sharper actually. You can turn that on and save the file so that it then plays with it on.
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I’m pretty sure my trusty old TV antenna and color tv isn’t receiving Mpeg-2. What do you mean they convert everything to mpeg 2?
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Yeah, I think the big thing is project files and media files should be on separate drives. As far as psd and audio files, I think do whatever works for you, but they’re going to end up on the media drives when they get rendered so you might as well place them there in the first place. The system disk is ok for project file since it really shouldn’t be calling on much else. The application and OS should be loaded into memory without any need to read the disk during playback except to read the project file and I’m not really sure it needs to do that. Make sure you’ve got RAM and lots of it and that will smooth out all kinds of problems.
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Video definitley displays more than hundreds of colors. Just render a codec with thousands of colors and you’ll get horrific banding. The reason film and video look different is latitude of exposure. And the difference can be corrected in video during a shoot with zillions of little lights and nd filtering, bringing every element of the scene into the exposure range of the video ccd. Example, when shooting film, your object of exposure, a face possibly, might be a certain exposure. Film may be able to capture the details up to 5 fstops above and below that exposure, while video may only be able to capture detail up to 2 fstops above and below. Anything above or below that is clipped to pure white or pure black with no details to ever be recovered. But why does film look so good when transferred to video? Because that range is then mashed into the video spectrum. Just like playing with levels in photoshop. So if you really want video to look like film-to-video, you have to bring down all the bright highlights and bring up all the deep shadows to be closer to the medium exposure of your subject during shooting. The end result will be much closer. However, unless you shoot video at a lower frame rate, it will still look unnatural because you still shot it at 1/60th shutter speed instead of 1/24th. The latter creating more natural motion blur.
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I think the answer to your last question is very simple for DV at least. It doesn’t alter anything in any way. It copies the pixels from the DV tape and puts them in a qt shell. Perhaps to add the sq pixel marker it would have to do something that might alter or disrupt capture. Probably not, but it’s a theory.
However, I would suggest you render out your 720×480 files to 640×480 anyway since they would be a much sharper image than an interpolated on the fly 640×480 QT. The sharpest display is always pixel for pixel actual size. Not .9 pixels per pixel.