[Chris Wiggles]

I have never needed to do this, but just quickly googling this came up, I’m sure you can find more as well:

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/encoding_windows_flip4mac_gary.html

As stated, I have no firsthand experience with this at all, but just trying to provide you some resources.

Regards,
Chris

[Chris Wiggles]

Depends entirely what you’re trying to do?

What are you compressing this for?

By the way, I prefer exporting a self-contained Quicktime file of the finished sequence, and then compressing that. I don’t have reliable results in sending the sequence directly to Compressor, plus I like to have a finished full-resolution uncompressed/ProRes original.

I would start with one of the generic settings Apple has, and modify it as needed. You didn’t state what you’re compressing this for, so it’s hard to guess what you’re trying to do. For Youtube/Vimeo at 30p for instance, I would do an h.264 variant at say 720p30 or 1080p30. You’ll want to make sure the frame controls are turned on and deinterlacing settings are activated, and do a couple short tests to make sure they’re to your liking, and tweak the bitrates and whatnot as needed. Both Vimeo and Youtube have recommendations you can pull up for these settings, and there’s some good Compressor-specific guidance if you search on Vimeo.

I don’t really remember whether I modified one of their basic settings or just did a fresh one. But if you set up an h.264 setting at 30fps and turn on frame controls and do an output fields as Progressive that should get you where you want to be. I do Motion Adaptive, which is a lot slower than Fast, but yields good results, and again plenty fine for Youtube/Vimeo. And do whatever resolution you want. IMO 1080p is kind of a waste for Youtube really, I just do 720p30 for both Vimeo and Youtube.

Once you get that figured out, I would also suggest wading into downloading x264 as the h.264 encoder Compressor is using is not that fantastic, and slower as well.

Regards,
Chris

[Chris Wiggles]

I’m not understanding why you don’t just take notes within Final Cut?

You can do this while the footage is playing in the canvas no problem.

I like to use markers and then just label the markers for things, and you can do all this typing while footage is running. And you can take notes in other places as well for much more detail than just the marker titles if you want to, or when you log the footage while transferring it in, etc.

And I’ve never done it, but you can also print all these notes out as well I believe depending where you put them. Just seems like it would make the most sense to take all your notes inside of FCP rather than in a WP that has no relationship with the actual clips.

Just my thoughts…

Regards,
Chris

[Chris Wiggles]

This camera shoots 1080i. You are likely just seeing interlacing when played back on your computer. Log and Transfer doesn’t do any deinterlacing, and leaves the original content untouched. If you want to deinterlace the video then you would do that generally in Compressor or something upon output/compression.

You could also do it in FC if you wanted to, but IMO I wouldn’t do it that way.

But DVD is a 480i format, so you’d want to leave it interlaced when you author it for DVD.

If you want to distribute it via computers, assuming online via youtube or something, then likely you’d want to deinterlace it to 30p since it will end up as 30p anyway and you want to make sure it’s not just being weaved to 30p because you’ll be left with the artifacts that you’re seeing.

But you would want to do this all at the final output step, not when you import the footage at the beginning.

Regards,
Chris

[Chris Wiggles]

You can also right click->chance speed and it brings up the same adjustment window as apple+J. There is a checkbox for frame blending you can turn on and off as you desire, depending on what look you want.

Regards,
Chris

[Chris Wiggles]

[Michael Gissing] ”
I should point out that running digital audio over unbalanced coax is perfectly fine, but the spec for AES/EBU digital audio is for 50 ohm cable and connectors. Over short runs, this difference is not an issue.”

Hmm? Which AES/EBU standard is this? AES3, which is the norm, is 110ohm twisted pair for balanced runs, and 75ohm coax for unbalanced runs. And then there is an optical standard as well. I am not aware of any 50ohm AES/EBU standard. I have never heard of such a thing.

These are some decent overviews:

https://broadcastengineering.com/mag/broadcasting_aesebu_digital_audio/

And:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES/EBU

50ohm connections/cabling are not common(I’m not aware of any at all actually, so perhaps that’s an understatement) for audio or video standards. They’re usually relegated to antennas and radio transmitters and things like that, and some looong defunct coaxial ethernet standards.

Regards,
Chris

[Chris Wiggles]

[Richard Boyd] ”
Actually there is a difference between regular 75 ohm video cable and cable rated for HD-SDI. HD rated cable has a lower inherent capacitance which improves its bandwidth substantially, especially over long distances – say 25 feet or more. Also, BNC connectors rated for HD-SDI are manufactured to higher tolerances and have improved bandwidth specifications.

Huh? Low capacitance is actually more important for digital signals than analog video. And it’s basically inherent to the impedance of the cable, so you can’t really change it anyway. Pretty much all 75ohm coax will have very similar capacitance because of the physical design because Impedance and Capacitance in a cable are inherently linked. You can’t make a 75ohm cables with wildly different capacitances. The only thing that can have an impact on the capacitance outside of the physical structure of the cable which is basically fixed already by the need to have 75ohm cable, is the dielectric. And that has minor impact.

If you look through Belden’s catalog for instance, all of their 75ohm coax are all listed for digital and analog video, because you can use them no problem for both. And nearly all of them have capacitance right around 16pf/F as one expects inherent to a 75ohm cable. Some are a little higher depending on the dielectric, but not wildly so.

There are all kinds of different BNC connectors. High-bandwidth BNCs can be just as important for analog video. Just depends what kind of bandwidth you require. But fundamentally, 75ohm coax is 75ohm coax. There’s nothing different in any fundamental way between video and SDI in that sense. There can be application differences, for instance if you’re running very high-bandwidth HD-SDI or whatnot, you’ll need really good coax, particularly over distance. If you’re running analog NTSC or something, then your bandwidth is very low and you can get away with inferior cable. But if you have the best coax possible for your most critical and highest-bandwidth application, with appropriate connectors, etc, you can use that for anything else too that requires 75ohm coax, and some things like unabalanced audio as well that don’t.

There’s nothing magically special about SDI. It just goes over coax. Good coax.

Belden 1694 is a fine choice if you are going to stay analog or Standard Def, at least for video, but it would be completely un-useable for professional balanced audio signals since it has only a single inner conductor.”

Well obviously it couldn’t be used for balanced audio. It’s great for unbalanced analog audio though.

And I don’t know if you are implying here that 1694a is somehow not preferred for digital when you say “stay analog or standard def” since it is the dominant video coax for digital and analog video in professional applications within the confines of planet: earth. It’s the standard. It’s used everywhere for SDI and for analog video. That’s because it’s an exceptional coax and is entirely appropriate for both of these tasks, because they’re really the same task. I don’t understand where you get the idea that different coax is required???

Regards,
Chris

[Chris Wiggles]

Those two ways are probably easier ways.

Another way is to do a multiclip and then cut between the two as needed. If you’re just doing this for a fast back-and-forth do as they suggest above. But in the future if you have multiple cameras or need to go back and forth over a longer period of time using multiclip is another way to go about it easily. But probably a little bit more frustrating to figure out at first, but once you understand how it works, it’s pretty snazzy, especially if you have several simultaneous shots. Just another tool which may be of use to you in the future.

Good luck!

Regards,
Chris

[Chris Wiggles]

Really, there is no such thing as an SDI cable. It’s just a marketing term applied to a particular cable construction.

You need to use high-quality 75ohm solid-copper coaxial cabling for SDI, with high-quality BNC connectors.

There are zillions of types of coaxial cables out there in various sizes and various qualities and various impedances.

What you require quality-wise and gauge-wise will depend on how far you’re going, and the bandwidth of the signals you’re pushing.

Probably the most common RG6-type 75ohm coaxial cable is the Belden 1694a. You can use this for all kinds of tasks that require 75ohm cabling such as analog video, SDI, digital audio, analog audio(which doesn’t require 75ohm, but this is still an excellent cable, overkill really). Raw cable stock is not very expensive, frankly. It adds up if you’re pulling miles of it, but given your question it doesn’t sound like that’s the case here.

And as stated before, BNC is a connector type, not a cable type.

You can purchase raw cable stock and ends and tools to make your own cables. Crimping tools are not particularly cheap, so unless you have several cables to make, it’s more expensive than buying a finished cable. You can buy terminated broadcast-grade 75ohm coax cables such as Belden 1694a or comparable Canare and other excellent cables from places like BlueJeansCable.com or Ram electronics. I’m sure there are other stores that assemble finished cables using these cable stocks as well.

Stick to tried-and-true brands and cable stocks with thorough specifications for critical tasks.

Regards,
Chris

[Chris Wiggles]

[Steve Hudson] “Hi R,

Thanks for that.

Yes I understand this point, however I’m interested in whether or not Compressor will do a superior job exporting a QT (mov) file than going directly from FCP to a QT movie (regardless of which codec I choose as an export).

I imagine it would do, due to this being the main purpose of Compressor. I’m interested in the best settings to get a reasonable size file through Compressor as the export option.

Thanks for your reply, much appreciated.

LS”

Your question is a little nonsensical.

If you do a self-contained Quicktime export, it is simply editing all the footage together as it appears in your timeline as a single standalone movie, using the exact same settings of whatever your content is. If you’re using apple-pro-res for instance it will simply remain the same. This is what you should archive, using the original video quality. And given the cost of storage, this should not at all be prohibitive, given you obviously need WAY more than that for all the raw footage which you have edited together which you now intend to trash, even with HD content.

Then, with this unaltered file, you can use compressor or whatever compression software of your choice to create new, compressed versions as necessary scaled to whatever resolutions and bitrates you require.

You can also compress directly out of final cut, but then you won’t have the full-quality original, you will only have the compressed copy. You do NOT want to use this as your archive unless you just don’t care about the quality and just want to have some copy of it hanging around for kicks and giggles.

So most people will do as I describe, export a full-sized archive of the finished movie. And obviously it would make sense to archive that in more than one place for redundancy. Then compress as necessary from there for whatever distribution format is required as needed. If for some reason you really didn’t want to keep the original file, you could just delete it. But I can’t fathom why you would want to do that.

Regards,
Chris