[Bryce Whiteside]

Unless something has changed, I thought it was a WinTEL notebook PC application. I guess you know that, since you tested some clips.

DV Rack would make a great video assist screen, since it has waveform/vector scopes which you don’t see too much in the field.

https://www.seriousmagic.com/dvrcompatibility.cfm

DV is DV is DV so pretty much the optics and CCD on the camera are the variables as far as quality.

If you are running and gunning, being tethered to a notebook might be somewhat limiting as opposed to something like Focus FireStore FS4 & FS-4 Pro that mount to the camera.

Most notebook drives are 40 to 100 GB which would limit the amount recording capacity you would have. I think that you can get 100 GB that are 5400 rpm, but most 7200 rpm notebook drives are 60 GB. The general rule of thumb, if I remember correctly, is 100 GB per 7 hours of DV footage. If you get an external firewire drive, now you have two things tethered to your camera. I would guess, however, you could create a light weight cart or platform for the notebook and external drive.

Some points to ponder,
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]

And the images are positioned on an even horizontal scanline like 240 and not 239.3?

And we have followed all the techniques and suggestions here:

KenStone.net
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/fcp_homepage_index.html
>Graphics – Photoshop
NEWER REVISED: The Basics – Preparing Photoshop files for FCP – Ken Stone
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/basic_ps.html

OLDER: Photoshop Titles – Tom Wolsky
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/basic_photoshop_files.html

LarryJordan.biz
Technique: Prepping Still Images for Video – Larry Jordan
https://larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_image_prep.html

Getting PhotoShop Images to Look Good in Final Cut – Carl Jacobs
https://larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_pixels.html

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]

Final Cut Pro or DVD Studio Pro comes with QuickTime Pro (the official paid version) and I believe QT Pro can import a series of frames and turn them into an uncompressed video QT stream to be edited and composited inside FCP.

I have always used Adobe After Effects to turn image sequences into .MOV files, but like I said, I QuickTime Pro (not the QT Player) will do it also.

As far as standards conversion to maintain your animations timing, you might want to pick up Nattress’s filters.
https://www.nattress.com/standardsConversion.htm
If your animations don’t have to be exactly the same timing for NTSC of PAL then you can just import your image sequence into QuickTime Pro at different frame rates 29.97 fps for NTSC and 25 fps for PAL–obviously your PAL sequence will be longer.

If you are going to deliver digital files to your client, then just find out which codec they would like them in, DVCPRO 50, DVCPro HD, BlackMagic universal uncompressed (found here: https://www.blackmagic-design.net/support/software/ ), .WMV (Flip4Mac https://www.flip4mac.com/ or Compression Master https://www.popwire.com/ ), QuickTime .MOV’s, et al.

If they are going to tape, make you sequence 8-bit or 10-bit uncompressed and encode the sequence files to match and out to tape with them.

This compares Final Cut Pro HD to Avid Xpress Pro HD, but it gives you a quick rundown of important feature sets in FCP HD:
https://www.geniusdv.com/tutorials/avid-vs-finalcutpro.php

Sorry you had to post this question twice,
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 Nattress’s filter. It was under Set 1
https://www.nattress.com/Set1/G_Field.htm

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]

If you have some After Effects Comps, just resize your Comps for the FCP sequence settings and rerender for your FCP machine.

If you absolutely have to use legacy footage digitized on the M100 machine your will need the OS X transcoder for you FCP machine found at:
ftp://ftp.media100.com/pub/software/

I believe you are looking for this one:
M100OSXTranscoder.sit.hqx 1639 KB 3/22/2004 12:00:00 AM

If you are importing from a Vincent 601 system you may have issues with the field order because the 640 x 480 image size prefers upper field dominance and board like the AJA Kona prefers lower field dominance. This is very noticable if you export DV from M100 and load it up in FCP. You will see pronounced jutter in fast moving images. I was abe to fix in After Effects, but no matter how I told FCP to interpet the footage it would not fix it. If you have a P6000 based M100 system, you may not have these issues, but I can’t confirm that.

But that was before Joe’s Filters or Nattress’s Filters for FCP.
https://www.joesfilters.com/joesfieldfixer.php
I can’t find the specific Nattress filter but here is his web site:
https://www.nattress.com/

If you are transferring a large amount of footage, you may want to redigitize. Just export the EDL from M100–CMX 3600 works best–making sure your reel names are 8 characters. Import in FCP and batch digitize. I have imported M100 footage from a Vincent 601 system, but it came in about safe action size which seems to indicate to me that it saw the vertical blanking a part of the image, but that is just an educated guess. Of course you would have to rescale the footage and you might run into some interlace problems and definitely softening of the image.

If you have a bin full of Media 100 clip selects, just drag them all to a program timeline and export as an CMX 3600 EDL and import into FCP as a sequence. Then drag all the clips for the sequence timeline to your clip bins to be digitized.

Below is some field dominance information for you that may or may not apply to your situation:

Upper Field First = Field 1 or Odd
Lower Field First = Field 2 or Even

According to Adobe Knowledge Base
https://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/317681.html

———————————————————

DV is always lower field first

———————————————————

In Final Cut Pro, there are two options for field dominance:

* Upper (Field 2 is dominant, so the second field is drawn first)
* Lower (Field 1 is dominant, so the first field is drawn first)

Generally, Upper is used by 640 x 480 systems, while Lower is most common in professional 720 x 486 and DV 720 x 480 systems. Video capture cards can be either Upper or Lower.

According to Apple’s Final Cut Pro Knowledge Base
https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=36822

———————————————————

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]

One of them is that you are going to get tagged another $29.95. If you are going to upgrade to FCP5, you will be throwing that money away since QT Pro is required and included in the package.

Apple releases QuickTime 7 for Panther – Yahoo! News
https://tinyurl.com/at2dq

Love the planning…
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]

Boomie could tell you more about this.

Key Grip–now Final Cut Pro–was to run on Windows NT as a Media 100 application on the PC side.

Macromedia sold both the Mac and PC assets to Apple in 1998 when Media 100 started getting cold feet because of delays. The delays, according to accounts, caused the inspired appearance of Bruce the Wonder Yak by the coders.

If you want to, do a Google.com search for Randy Ubillos you will find he was the project leader for Key Grip and oddly enough the developer of Adobe Priemere.

Here on the Cow you can do a site wide search for key words “Key Grip” and author “Ron Lindeboom” for some further insight.

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]

From one of my posts in Feb. 2005
https://tinyurl.com/crqkr

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

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]

KenStone.net
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/fcp_homepage_index.html
>Graphics – Photoshop
NEWER REVISED: The Basics – Preparing Photoshop files for FCP – Ken Stone
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/basic_ps.html

OLDER: Photoshop Titles – Tom Wolsky
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/basic_photoshop_files.html

LarryJordan.biz
Technique: Prepping Still Images for Video – Larry Jordan
https://larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_image_prep.html

Getting PhotoShop Images to Look Good in Final Cut – Carl Jacobs
https://larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_pixels.html

If your gradients look bad, I am guessing you are editing in DV or once in FCP you are interpreting your alpha wrong if you want your gradient semi-transparent.

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]

I always understood the Sony DSR11 DVCAM and the firewire drives needed to be on seperate firewire channels requiring an additional firewire adapter since all the firewire ports on G4’s and the G5’s are the same channel no matter how many physical plugs are available.

Just thinking out loud,
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