[Dan Riley]

Gary, I was hoping that was it but no, the result is the same whether machine is set to ext ref or input video. If you think of anything else let me know.

Thanks,
Dan

[Dan Riley]

Thanks Shane.

[Dan Riley]

Nice tutorial for when I have my hands on FCP7. For now though, I can still use some of the downloaded transitions in FCP6, but with a little more experimenting.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

Actually I got them to work in FCP 6. I put the “lens flare” clip alpha matt version on video 2 centered above the cut below on video 1. Highlight the lens flare clip, go to modify-composite mode-screen, alpha type-none, reverse alpha. It’s a little fast for my tastes, the clip only lasts 30 frames, so I slowed it down 50%. Still looks pretty good. There is also a colorized version that I didn’t care for that effect but some may. For “Leaves” you need both the clip alpha on video2 (modify composite-screen, alpha-none) and the clip on video3 (modify composite-travel matte luma, alpha-straight). Looks nice. Did this on a 720p60 DVCPRO HD timeline.

[Dan Riley]

Russell,
Are you at NAB? If so, ask AJA how much that box costs and when it will be available.

Thanks,
Dan

[Dan Riley]

Walter, the AVID interface isn’t really the same as in 1992, is it?
Version 3 of AVID isn’t the same as version 7 (or is it 8) of AVID now.
But FCP is the same since 2000, isn’t it? The look I mean.
And the FCP database is the same too.
You need to uprez, forget about it. Still a big pain.

As I’ve said before, you should be able to “select all” your timeline,
then pop up a dialog box, ask it to change all the shi….. stuff to
whatever format you want, hit go, and it does.
If you need to ingest new tapes for a new format, that’s fine. It should
tell you to do that. Why not?

Software is supposed to work for us, not the other way around. No?

[Dan Riley]

I’m going off of email ads (newsletters) you are sending me. I looked all over them
and there isn’t anything that says these are part of the software
I already have. If I go to your web site, then yes, the opening paragraph explains it.

Thanks,
Dan

[Dan Riley]

So the Blackmagic HD extreme card can’t do realtime conversion of HD to SD
like the AJA KONA 3 can? I looked at the marketing info on their site
and it’s not really spelled out that it does this.

As far as the KONA 3 card goes, I use this feature regularly to output my
HD shows to DigiBeta centercut.

Thanks,
Dan

[Dan Riley]

Well, your results are not what I see.
As for a 3 minute segment taking 2 hours, seems long to me.
My 2 minute segments, DVCPRO HD 720p 23.98, to H264 best quality, 640×360
take about 5 minutes. With Compressor they take under a minute, but using the
exact same settings and the same data rate output, the resulting file does not
look as good from Compressor, to me anyway. Graphics and titles are not as smooth.
But hey, if you have it working for you, go for it. Just passing along what I see. Maybe I’ve got something set wrong in Compressor.
Perhaps we can post our droplets somewhere and see if you guys
are setting something different.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

In my experience, you can get a much better looking picture with H.264 if you
export and encode directly within FCP, don’t use compressor. For a 3min piece,
you aren’t talking about a large amount of time to encode. Compressor is best
when you need to save time, not when you need to make a great picture.

Select sequence, export using quicktime conversion.
Select quicktime movie, options, h264, high quality will be a
large file and you will not see much difference from the original.
Best quality is great too at less file size. Try them to see what you like.
key frames automatic, data rate automatic,
size, 640×360 is a nice size for computer monitors,
but if you want to use 720p size, use 1280×720.
Audio AAC, 48k and 128kbps will be nice.

Presets and Compressor are nice and all, but not the best quality.
You gotta play around on your own. Do multiple encodes to see
what you like. That’s the only way. Compressor is the bees knees
if you have an 8 core Mac Pro and it takes you 5 minutes where it
used to take you 30 to encode. But for small jobs like you mention,
export directly from FCP. You will definitely see the difference in
quality of artifacts.

You also need to worry about what data-rate the computer that’s
playing back this data DVD will be able to process. Some can’t follow
high data rate DVDs. You need to experiment, in my opinion.

Dan