[Chris Borjis]

those 3 programs don’t let you have complete control as far as I know so its no wonder your seeing that.

pc encoders that can do pro quality: Tsunami, Procoder and Cinemacraft.

Cinemacraft software encoder has been used to encode some of the hollywood produced DVDs.

Of the 3 though, procoder gets my vote. You can change every single aspect of the encoding with it. while the others allow you to change only those aspects that matter for picture quality. (gop structures and quantization etc..)

[Chris Borjis]

We did a long-form tv pilot last year with the same exact problem.

They shot with timecode UB set for time of day.

The client ended up going through and re-logging all the tapes (15 of them i think) he didn’t want us to do it as the budget was already over a little.

What irritates me the most is editors or rather people who call themselves editors that have no technical experience. These editors have caused more stress for me than anything else when dealing with them. They create roadblocks to success simply because they don’t know any better or don’t follow instructions on how to keep things beautiful to the end with the final product.

[Chris Borjis]

We just had to deal with this last week.

The solution was to make sure the pictures were as close to D1
resolution as possible.

We ended up putting all the pictures scaled (with photoshop) into
a 720×540 photoshop file then exporting them .tga then re-laying them
back into final cut.

The really lame part is, without the cross disolve it actually looks fine.

I REALLY wish apple would fix these bogus f/x plugins that come with final cut. A lot of them are pretty useless and these are basic things that ANY other editing software can handle with ease.

[Chris Borjis]

one key thing is to make sure your “motion” settings in the preferences are set to high quality.

It defaults to low quality for some stupid reason.
This can make a huge difference.

[Chris Borjis]

use the boris 3D text generator.

It acts kinda like a word processor.

[Chris Borjis]

[Lee Burrows] “DVD quality then you have to hardware compressors/encoders at a nice chunk of money or live with the fact knowing that the compression programs for the most part are not going to cut it.”

There are a number of software encoders that when properly tweaked produce equal results to any of the hardware encoders out there. The only real advantage is speed.

The encoders that don’t allow you to change every setting on every aspect of the encode do produce inferior results though.

[Chris Borjis]

I’ve noticed the blackmagic cards can run without genlock though your picture will move vertically while monitoring, but on playback its stable.

You might want to look into the configuration of your tape decks and the settings in final cut and see if your in non-drop or drop mode.

[Chris Borjis]

The footage that is jittery with motion has the wrong field order defined.
(upper, lower etc..)

if its in a final cut timeline and not separate clips, you will have to re-interpret the footage and compress again to get it to work.

You have to preview on an NTSC monitor as a computer monitor or lcd won’t show the problem.

[Chris Borjis]

import your still frames to quicktime, or after effects
then export as a 10-bit quicktime video.

FCP doesn’t handle image sequences like every other editing system out there.

[Chris Borjis]

open them in quicktime and export a 10-bit quicktime.

import that into final cut.

It’s best to import it as a quicktime, not frames in fcp.

This is something apple needs to fix. Every other editing system on the planet can import a sequence as video.

Get with it Apple!