[David Bogie]

[Adam Mercado] “I doubt i’ll be wasting any more money on bogus CC training crud. “

Good grief, man. Any DVD can have manufacturing issues. if you’ve been sitting on the thing for a couple of months maybe you scratched it. Most of the content on that DVD is available here on the Cow for download or through iTunes. It’s high class material.

Ron or Tim should be available via email form the main landing page, give ’em a chance to send you a replacement. You may need to send them the original first since you’ve had it for so long.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Dan, mostly folks just call me a crank.

You seem to understand my bitterness is, in part, merely letting off steam and compensation for endless user errors. However, I’ve been waiting for FCP to finally get everything right since v3 and for Motion to even begin to be useful since v1.

I’m not always bitter. I usually enjoy using FCP for our DV stuff, it’s efficient and fun.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

How are hoping to get your HDV to MPEG2 for viewing? Letter box? That’s probably where you’re getting all messed up.
I’d convert the whole mess to a standard def format like plain ol’ DV. I’d also use export the whole thing as self-cntained instead of reference and I’d let DVDSP do the transcode to MPEG2 until you get more experience with Comrpessor.
HDV is not a reasonable editing format so I’m amazed you got as far as you have.

But, yes, the process in FCP is much different than in Avid, whatever that is. (Rhetorical, never used Avid, old M100 guy)
And welcome to the family! If it’s any comfort, converting to FCP from Avid was very difficult for lots of us.

[Brian Semple] “Hello. I’m new here and fairly new to FCP6 coming from Avid and findng it quite confusing. My problem is that I just cannot get a good quality MPEG2 file for making DVD. It’s terrible in fact… washed out, compression artifacts like it’s been done at very low data rate. My workflow is shot in HDV, edited in HDV (but because I’m having a lot of interlacing problems in moving effects, I changed the Timeline settings to ProRes to see if that helped. “

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Dave LaRonde] “After the caffiene jolt, “

A shot of espresso has about half the caffeine content of standard office swill.
Espresso is the concentrated essence of superb coffees.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

and I need to add that the ballistics of Shatter are designed to mimic explosions, not reassemblies. You MUST spend lots of effort playing with the Strength, Gravity, and Viscosity controls to get a realistic set of physics that convey pieces are being drawn together. Simply running Shatter backwards is immediately recognized by even the dumbest audience member as a simple reverse shot. It just looks wrong.

A better result is often obtainable with Card Dance since it has no predisposition toward explosive forces.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Obsolete CC particle filters, Particle Systems and Particlel Systems II could do that. They were really cool and if you have them from CS3 or earlier, they can be used in CS4, umm, I think.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Dave LaRonde] “grab a cup of coffee with you — I understand you know a thing or two about the beverage.”

Coffee? Pfaff. So much brown water.
No, my expertise and passion lies in espresso.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Jim Johnson] “SLI has never been supported on the Mac, unless you count some of the 3Dfx Voodoo cards from the 90s, which had an SLI precursor. Someone at Apple told you you would be getting multi-GPU performance, with 7300s, no less?”

Yar. the machine with the 4-7300 SLI cards was touted as the last word for Motion.
But it really wasn’t MY decision, my IT purchase geeks bought the thing.
The main issue with the marketing scam foisted by Apple was the copy on the site that, IIRC, was something like this: “4x graphics performance,” which, if you want it to, implies the four cards deliver 4 times graphics processing speeds or performance. What it really meant was more direct: “This thing comes with four cards that deliver four sets of monitor outputs.”

it was a week after we took delivery that we found the cards were not only just dumb monitor cards that Motion did not particularly like, SLI was not supported, SLI had never been supported, and SLI would never be supported. In fact, the card’s drivers were dated something like 2003 and nvidia has never updated them.

I am bitter when using Motion.
Bitterness rules my every waking moment.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

the most important thing about charts and graphs is good data. After that, it’s choosing the correct display format for the type of data being presented. then it’s determining whether you are seeking truth in the display or deception.

roughing out the data display in a charting app like Power point creates a decent template. Then you can decide how to make it video legible, video appropriate, vide fun. One of my favorite things is to animate everything in 3D and use interesting line drawing tools like MrMercury.

The definitive resource for designing graphics that communicate rather than confuse or deceive is the volume of work by Edward Tufte. Buy his books or get them from a college library. but if your client is a corporate dweeb, there is no way you will be able to tell him his PP or Excel charts suck.

https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Nice work, LaRonde.

bogiesan