[David Bogie]

I was unaware that speed was part of the OP’s question.

You guys seem to prefer a digital solution for everything and it’s just not necessary. Hooking up a cable is stupid-proof as well as being reliable.
Regardless of the devotion you all have to keeping MPEG2 local, the difference between an analog input to DV and a Streamclip demux of MPEG2 is not discernible to the casual viewer and, if you’re going back to DVD, you’ve accomplished little.

We ran Streamclip on an 8 minute clip from someone’s DVD,built in Premiere on a PC, just last week. For whatever reason, and I don’t care at al what the reason was, more than 20 minutes ticked byand nothing much was going on. Screw that. I put the DVD in a player and captured it in real time. It’s done and we’re moving on.

On a personal note, I ride a recumbent for the same reasons I use Macintosh and play go instead of chess: comfort and uniqueness. I shoot practical fire and water effects instead of trying to simulate them in After Effects because it’s more fun to do it that way. I use a DVD player to ingest DVD material because it works.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Negative. There is no timecode until you apply a filter to recover it and create the pixels that show it.
There’s a new gigantic t/c viewer HUD but it doesn’t go external.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Activate the wireframe + image view option.
See WIREFRAME in the manual for the various ways to get to it.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

There is only one way to do this on the cheap and it’s a tremendous amount of work that you are not going to get paid for so consider it a good learning experience and practice.
The pages are precomposed as 3D comps with page 1 on the top, page 2 on the bottom (one pixel apart in z), then you stack these precomps and rotate the precomps on their y axes in the main book comp.
You will not be able to distort or curl the pages in 3D space without going to another level of difficulty or, of course, purchasing a 3D plug like Zaxwerks.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Apple’s fabulous new codecs only come with the purchase of Final Cut Studio v3.0. You buy it or you convince your clients to use the more conventionally available codec Animation. It’s too bad they regard this as a tedious task, folks in this bidness been using Animation as the least common denominator for a l-o-n-g time because it works, it’s lossless, and it’s totally portable that it is large is a ridiculous quibble.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

What exactly do you mean, “3D track it?”
What are you going to do, or what do you think you are going to do, with the tracking information once it has been tracked?

AE is at its core merely a 2D application that can place flat surfaces into 3D spaces so I’ll be interested in knowing how this gets answered, too.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

While true, it’s just as safe to assume the OP is using video, not film, and merely using the term “film” like you might use the term “dial” to describe pushing the buttons on your cell. The misspelling of “cinima” implies a disconnect from the physical medium.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

We put 4870s in our systems a few weeks ago. I will never buy another nvidia card not ever. And a few days after we ordered our cards, the 5870 was announced. Sigh.

The multiple graphics cards issues for Final Cut have all been resolved in FCP7, AFAICT on my machines. The problem was always with some of the FXPlugs that came with Motion, they’d work in Motion with multiple cards that were running multiple displays but they’d fail in FCP on the same machine. Very poor programming from Apple. Other apple apps like Aperture will break if you are running more than two cards, though.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Yes and no.
Motion will only produce carefully thought out and well designed animated clips that you will use inside Quartz. If you understand how to use quartz Composer, you already understand what Motion can offer you.

This is form the Apple dev site:

Quartz Composer is a groundbreaking graphics development environment that allows you to explore the incredible power of the graphics stack of Mac OS X Tiger. With Quartz Composer, you can easily combine the capabilities of Cocoa, Quartz 2D, Core Image, OpenGL, and QuickTime, all using an approachable visual programming paradigm. Use Quartz Composer to prototype Core Image filters, build engaging screen savers, create custom user-interface widgets, make data-driven visual effects, and even perform live performance animations.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

the easiest way to get DVD content into FCP is to hook the outputs of a DVD player to the inputs of DV camcorder or deck and come in via Firewire. Everything else is a PITA.

bogiesan