[Chris Tomberlin]

Hi,

I’ve had some problems with AE rendering out movies with shifted gamma. My problems show up in FCP and Color as well. The best work around I’ve found so far is to check the “use OpenGL renderer” box in the render settings. If you’ve got a decent graphics card it shouldn’t hurt your render times too badly.

-Chris

[Chris Tomberlin]

I understand the iO HD encodes HD to the ProRes codec to get HD over firewire. In the converter mode, will it output uncompressed HD? In other words, if I needed to go from HDMI in to uncompressed HD out, could I do that using the box in converter mode?

Thanks
Chris Tomberlin

[Chris Tomberlin]

Many people who bought it, including myself, have it sitting on the shelf. With a very few exceptions, it is not usable in a production environment.

Chris Tomberlin
Editor/Compositor/Owner
OutPost Pictures

[Chris Tomberlin]

For automated time-tracking and reporting to assist in billing, Job Capture is wonderful! They’ve recently added the ability to do invoicing in the program, and eventually hope to improve Quickbooks integration…

https://captureworks.com/

[Chris Tomberlin]

Aharon,

I’m using version 7. What happens is that if I have clips from a trimmed Final Cut timeline that are named “shot 1”, “shot 1-1” “shot 2”, etc. and I drag “shot 1” to create a new comp it creates a comp named “shot 3”, because it is the next available number, in order to give the comp a discreet name. So with a bunch of clips that might be numbered from 1 to 120, the comp created from clip 1 will have the same name but end with the number 121, which of course, will render a file that Final Cut will not relink to properly because it doesn’t have the exact same name. How about a script or something?

Thanks
Chris

P.S. I enjoy your podcast tutorials !

[Chris Tomberlin]

It “looks” fixed, somewhat. I’ve tried it here and get a linear gamma going from FCP to AE back to FCP and even into DVDSP. I’ve even been able to bring a still image into FCP without a gamma boost. FINALLY. Ramps generated in AE, however, have a gamma boost now, so I presume that graphics generated in AE will have incorrect gamma. This may be on my system only though; I have a Kona2 system, and I know that AJA did some stuff a while back to work around the gamma issues with the 10bit codec. It could be that those work-arounds are now causing this other issue. Please let me know if anyone sees the same thing. Overall though, I think this is a good thing.

Chris Tomberlin
OutPost Pictures

[Chris Tomberlin]

Welcome to the small club that both sees the gamma shifts AND actually cares. Unfortunately, I don’t think Apple is a member of the club. You may be seeing one of two things. There has been for a LONG time a gamma shift when importing a RGB still image into FCP. FCP assumes that your still has the wrong gamma and “fixes” it for you. There is no preference for changing this, it just does it. Does it in DVD Studio Pro too. The other thing you might be seeing is a gamma shift when using 10-bit material rendered from AE to FCP. I did a BUNCH of testing with this in the past and I think my conclusion was that the shift was actually occuring on the way in to AE rather than on the way out. It is a 10-bit bug in quicktime and/or in the BMD codec. One of my machines uses a Kona 2, and they have implemented some work arounds in their system to deal with the flakiness when rendering to 10-bit; I don’t think it helps with the stills. Do a search here on the cow either for my name or for something like “luma shifts” or “gamma” and you will see much discussion on this matter.

Chris Tomberlin
OutPost Pictures

[Chris Tomberlin]

Just looks like a combination of shooting style and good editing. There are a few camera start-stops in the middle of zooms or pans that can give that jerky result in camera, as well as simply cutting out frames and adding slow-mo to play with time. Not so much an AE job as an edit job.

Chris Tomberlin
OutPost Pictures

[Chris Tomberlin]

I”ve been getting a fair number of Open GL crashes too. Not all day, all the time, but usually if there is a crash it is Open GL related. The quick fix is to switch to adaptive resolution. The long fix is to wait for a bug fix 😉

Chris Tomberlin
OutPost Pictures

[Chris Tomberlin]

I use FastChannel (I think they have merged now) but some of the issues would be the same. For what it’s worth, I started trying to use DG Systems and was going through the same trial and error you are and got almost NO help from them in working it out. FastChannel, on the other hand, was very helpful and has had fantastic customer support ever since. They have great quality control as well.

Anyway, you can’t use squeeze because it won’t give you high enough Mpeg2 data rates to satisfy the requirements for either DG or FastChannel. Believe it or not, good ole’ Cleaner from Autodesk/Discreet does the job for me. It is the only package I’ve found that works for this particular task without going with a hardware encoder. It will do Mpeg2 up to 20Mbs – WAY more than the 4-8 Mbs for DVD and enough to satisfy quality specs for DG and FastChannel. If you have or can get Cleaner, email me at the below address and I’ll send you the compression template I use for FastChannel – it may not be exactly the same as DG, but it will be close.

Chris Tomberlin
OutPost Pictures
chris_at_outpostpictures.com