[Bret Williams]

I wouldn’t make a bootable carbon copy clone. Just do an archive, which is essentially the entire drive in it’s own directory. You can look at all your files and make sure they’re there. Just a backup really. After all, you can reinstall the OS and apps. It’s your project files that are irreplaceable. A simple software update shouldn’t risk anything. In fact, just updating to 5.1 shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but backups are always a good idea.

[Bret Williams]

As an old Mac guy, the simpler thing might be to “carbon copy cloner” (a free app) your system drive to another drive where you have space. Now you have a backup of your system drive exactly.

Now just run the update. If everything runs swimmingly for a few weeks or a month, delete the carbon copy when you need space.

[Bret Williams]

Bars should look fine if it’s a chip problem. IE the red chip was shot. If there’s at least a little red in there, then it can be boosted and color corrected – but it’s always gonna look odd.

[Bret Williams]

Aren’t those to set the contrast and gamma?

[Bret Williams]

No it’s not. It’s a teeny tiny difference, but you can do the algebra. 720×486 is to 720×540 as 720×480 is to 720×533.33333333 (534).

If you want someone like Adobe to back me up, just look at the new file preferences in Photoshop…

720×540 Std. NTSC 601
720×534 Std. NTSC DV/DVD

Basically, it comes down to this –

SD (720×486) is a non square equivalent of a 4:3 image. 4/3=1.333
Other numbers that get the same math result are 648/486=1.333 and 720/540=1.333

So since 720×486 is a non sq version of 648×486, then 720×480 is a non square version of 648×480 since the only thing different is that there are 6 less horizontal lines. 648/480=1.35 as does 720/534. The 6 missing scan lines are added upon analog output as black to regain the 4:3 ratio required for a NTSC signal.

[Bret Williams]

Good try Gary but it’s only going to jump to 30 megs if you have “resample image” turned on. Which will also turn the image into a 4000×2667 image. Of course it’s going to be 30megs!

If you just want to change the dpi, you’ve got to have “resample image” turned off. Resampling the image is pretty much the same effect as FCP blowing up the image past 100%. It’s just being interpolated. Although Adobe does a much better job at it in PS or AE.

[Bret Williams]

Sorry, didn’t mean to be so dogmatic with the wrong comment. My experience has been DV and SD. I know you do a lot of HD so perhaps somethere is awry in FCP that imports it differently with an hd still. But there’s no magic. It’s still just a set number of pixels at any DPI. Kind of a physical impossibility to create a better image just because it’s tagged with a different dpi.

Unless you have one of those cool “enhance” features that they have on CSI. OMG that drives me nuts. “Well we have this fuzzy phone image of the perp.” “Can you zoom in and enhance?” “Sure.” (Fuzzy image becomes crystal clear hd image of perps face.)

Where do we buy the csi zoom plugin?

[Bret Williams]

I can’t beleive nobody answered this. I found this problem right after FCP 5 came out. The new high end rendering is bugged. At least in some configs. We found the culprit to simply be the new motion rendering. Just go to seqeunce settings and then the video processing tab. Go to the motion filtering pull down (which is new to 5.x) and choose either normal or fastest. I can’t remember which fixes it. I think it’s fastest. I’ve yet to have anything but cruddy results with the best setting. Perhaps in SD or HD. But in DV it’s always looked like it’s not field rendered or the fields are reversed or something.

Hope that works.

Oh, and btw, you should be working at 720×534 (not 540) and then converting to 720×480 if you want to keep the dimensions right.

[Bret Williams]

psd imports as a layered sequence. That’s pretty friendly. No reason to use jpeg if you have uncompressed tifs available. Jpeg, even at 100% is still compressed.

[Bret Williams]

Ok. So I did and you are absolutely wrong. I don’t know what you’re doing or think you’re doing, but importing a 720×480 72dpi image and a 720×480 400dpi image into FCP yields EXACTLY the same results. Pixel for pixel as others have said. It always has for the last 5 years. You can even zoom into both images 400% if you like in the timeline and flip between them or do a split screen and you won’t see even a micropixel of change. The dpi data is completely irrelevant.