[Christopher Travis]

Ok, yes I know encoding is lossy but I was hoping there might be a way to re-wrap from quicktime to wmv in a virtually lossless way with squeeze.

I know a fair bit about compression but the client does not. I’m no expert but I have been using Compressor for 3 years and only recently started using Sorenson for outputting flash videos for my companies website. Previously all flash encoding was done by the web developer with whom we have parted ways, so we have taken control of uploading the content.

I am aware that different methods of distribution have different requirements but the client has simply asked for a high quality WMV file. They don’t really know what they want to use it for. The video wasn’t made specifically for them, they haven’t paid for it, it just featured them and they want a copy. A high quality wmv file. What they do with it is not my concern I just want to give them as high a quality file as I can muster so that whatever they do choose to do with it, they wont be limited by the resolution. Then I want to get on with the million and one other things I have to do today.

Thanks very much for the Spinal Tap reference. I felt it was completely relevant, highly illuminating, not at all patronizing. All in all it really brightened up my day.

So am I to assume from this that there is no simple way to re-wrap and XDCAM EX clip from QT to WMV? Or a way of creating a high quality WMV file?

[Christopher Travis]

I can sort of imagine a way of doing that which involves two camera angles, both frozen on the same frame, then lined up so the surfer is in the exactly same part of the frame then using a long blurry transition between them with a slight earthquake effect to obscure the cut. Don’t ask me exactly how, just thinking out loud really.

I’m more interested in the effect at about 1:52 where we see four or five delayed versions of the surfer doing the jump, but the rest of the background appears to carry on as normal. I imagine this could be done using rotoscoping but would take ages no?. Does anyone have any idea how they might have done this another way?

Chris

[Christopher Travis]

Hello all,

Just thought I’d chip in to add to see if anyone had any updates on this situation with XDCAM and FCP6.4 crashing all the time.

We have been having the same problem where I work. We are running 2 MacPro 3Ghz 8-Core, with 8Gb Ram and have been tearing our hair out over these constant crashes.
We have been using DW on all of our internal and external HDs as well as our 8TB RAID and things seem to be a bit better but not great. I seem to be able to use the suites without too much bother but when other editors come in they get crashes within five minutes and carry on getting them all day. I think I’ve just learned to be gentle with it.

Now, when I work at home on my iMac, running Tiger, I don’t get any problems at all, nor do any of the other editors running Tiger. So I wondered if, as a temporary measure, it would be worth running the MacPros from a boot disc with Tiger on it (since you can’t install Tiger on a MacPro). Has anyone tried this? If so what were the results?

Anyway, just wanted to keep this thread alive in case someone has recently found a fool-proof fix for this problem and felt like sharing.

Cheers,
Chris

[Christopher Travis]

Hey Bert,

Thanks a lot for your reply. You were right about the Animation codec. I changed the export setting to DVCPRO 1080i50 and the exported file plays just fine in Quicktime.

The spotty rendering is still a problem, but I think that generally rendering the whole project is a bad practice to get into. From now on I’ll just render the small section I NEED to preview. When I do that, it seems able to render that section with no trouble.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply. If you want a free copy of “How To Keep Chickens” or “How To Spey Cast With Mike Daunt” you need only ask.