[Bryce Whiteside]

Tape operators used to “Crash Record” or “Crash into the tape” if timecode or continuous control track wasn’t important.

Now we have the PC term “Print to Tape”.

Inquiring minds…
Bryce

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion

[Bryce Whiteside]

This may not be your issue but the trick to bring in Photoshop layers in registration is as follows:

1. In Photoshop create a new layer at the top of your layers and name it Ref or Reference and make sure it is selected.

2. Create a one pixel selection in the upper left hand corner. Hint-zoom all the way in and try and make the small Marquee Tool selection.

3. Go to the Navigator and move your view window all the way to the lower right and hold the Shift key while making the Marquee Tool in the lower right hand corner-you are adding to your first selection that is still in the upper left hand corner.

4. Fill the selection, the two points in the upper left and lower right hand with Black. Hint-Opt+Delete to fill with the foreground color or Cmd+Delete to fill with the background color.

5. Type 0, 1 to make the layer 99% transperant or 01% opaque.

6. In the layer menu hold the Opt key down and select Merge Down from the upper right hand pull down menu (the little arrowhead pointing to right you see at the very top of the Layers Window) over your layer of rasterize text. Then for each layer of rasterized text place your Ref layer just above it and repeat holding the Opt key down and selecting Merge Down from the upper right hand pull down menu making sure you Ref layer is the one selected. What this does is make each layer of rasterized text have the same canvas size and registering the position of your text or any layer element in the photoshop document. Holding the Opt key while selecting Merge Down prevents the Ref frame from destroying itself when Merging Down. It in essences merges a copy of itself down.

7. As a rule of thumb I then place the Ref layer at the top of the document, select it and type 100 to make my two pixel dots in the upper left hand corner and lower right hand corner visible so I can see them if I zoom in to make sure they are there.

If you work in SD ITU-601 you could alway have a template .PSD file with a canvas size of 720 x 540 with your Ref or Reference frame already in there along with a SafeTitle layer. If you work in DV you want a canvas size of 720 x 534. If you use these numbers, FCP will automatically recognize number and resize to 720 x 486 or 720 x 480 respectively. If you use a larger canvas size make sure it is in the TV 4 x 3 square pixel aspect ratio. Let’s say your .PSD canvas is 1440 x 1080 and FCP doesn’t recognize that aspect ratio, go to Motion>Distort>Aspect Ratio and type in -12.5 to achieve the video pixel aspect ratio of .9. Don’t ask me why the Aspect Ratio of -12.5 works in FCP, but I do know that is the number FCP automatically calculates when you import a 720 x 540 .PSD canvas into FCP.

HTH,
Bryce

PS Apple’s knowledge base has some slightly different canvas sizes for Photoshop: Final Cut Pro: Using square or non-square pixels when creating graphics

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion

[Bryce Whiteside]

The Dell monitors also have additional inputs–DVI, VGA, S-video and composite. I have one that connected to a XP PC via VGA and to my Mac via DVI. I can switch from a button directly on the front bezel of the Dell Monitor.

Enjoy,
Bryce

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion

[Bryce Whiteside]

If I remember correctly, save your project after “Log and Capture”. Quit out of FCP and relaunch with your project.

A pain in the *ss yes, but it should work.

Enjoy,
Bryce

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion

[Bryce Whiteside]

I read where to support the legacy Motorola CPU’s and the new Intel CPU’s Apple would have to detect the hardware of the machine and install the correct FCP code for the CPU hardware and chipset.

If they can’t do it for PCI-X versus PCIe, I hope I am not seeing a slow motion train wreck in process. Does the left hand software development not know what the right hand hardware development is doing? If they do, then they fed the conspiracy theorist on this one.

Can we say “compile”?,
Feeling a froth coming on,
Bryce

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion

[Bryce Whiteside]

Hey Kevin,

I don’t have a PowerPoint presentation to experiment with. Does Keynote try to faithful maintain transitions and animations?

I just heard that sometimes Keynote breaks a few which shouldn’t be to hard to fix.

TIA,
Bryce

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion

[Bryce Whiteside]

Ben,
I was curious. What method do you use to convert them to quicktime?

Andrew,
I have Keynote in Apples iWorks (Pages and Keynote), but understand that some of the PowerPoint animations will get broken importing into Keynote. On the flip side Keynote exports QuickTime natively. One the Apple Mac side importing the PowerPoint presentations will only be a $79 experiment to see which animations get broken.

But, if the issue is absolutely maintain fonts, positioning, and animations, I would go with Camtasia. Camtasia Studio Features Overview – Record has a movie link of its features. You can click on Easier Production Choices to see you can choose QuickTime as an output.

Minimum PC requirements are 1.0 GHz processor (2.5 GHz recommended*), 256 MB RAM (1 GB recommended), Windows 2000 or XP and Microsoft PowerPoint.

One issue you may have is resizing the video footage for 720×486 D1 or 720×480 DV, which you may want to do in Adobe Affect Effects or perhaps Motion.

Some thoughts,
Bryce

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion

[Bryce Whiteside]

Well at a minimum you are going to want the 1.67Ghz 15″ PowerBook with ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics card with 128MB DDR memory. You also want to max to memory out with 2GB which you can obtain 3rd party for places like Crucial.com–note that the brand new PowerBooks use the DDR2 PC2-4200 SDRAM now.

HTH,
Bryce

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion

[Bryce Whiteside]

Older versions of Mac OS X less than or equal to 10.3.9 (10.1.x, 10.2.x, 10.3.x) would have to copy all the files into a disk image before burning to CD or DVD.

I believe Tiger 10.4.x doesn’t use this arcane method anymore so you can burn in a one step method as opposed to the old two step method explained in the previous sentence.

Hope this explains it for you,
Bryce

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion

[Bryce Whiteside]

Here is a listing of my public bookmarks. Select the Sound Libraries and Design public folder.

Sounddogs.com seems to be pretty popular around here.

Enjoy,
Bryce

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion