[David Bogie]

My favorite story for these threads is the guy who showed me his tape of his kids playing soccer. He asked if I could edit out the people standing in front of him since they blocked the view.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

EEC RAM is slightly sower. You don’t need it for video.
For a thorough explanation, just google the RAM numbers. The descriptions are ever so boring.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

There are many online sites devoted to putting video on your Pod. Try google.
But it sounds like you will need to nest the widescreen and place it into a conventional format and export from there, using the letterbox.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

You kids.
Why, Shane and I can remember when CoSA took a weekend to render 10 seconds of a single effect on a single layer.

You heard it here: Do not buy a new Macintosh thinking your FCP performance will skyrocket. It won’t. The improvements are incremental, barely perceptible. going from a dual 2g to a quad 2.7g is not going to cut your render time by 50 or 90%. You will be lucky to see it cut by 10-25%. Is that worth the cost of replacing your memory, your PCI cards and reinstalling everything?

And, don’t forget, the new Intel-based Macs are only a year away, although you wouldn’t necessarily want to buy the first generation, the new machines have much more promise when it comes to huge speed bumps in processor-intensive operations like rendering.

And, if you look carefully at products like Motion, Shake and Aperture, they all suggest we are in for a complete revolution in FCP’s interface and image handling pipeline. Macworld? NAB? Who knows? Just don’t buy a new Mac now if you do not need one. However, if your accountant sees tremendous value by capitalizing 2005 expenses, buy two.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Welcome to the family, Bob. There are lots of things FCP’s designers have presumptuously assumed you know nothing about so they solved these issues for you in truly weird ways. AutoSelect, transition trimming and replacing media or copying and pasting keyframes are going to make you run screaming for your old platform. Media Manager will make you throw up your hands in disgust.

A quick search of these forums will probably reveal hundreds of posts on all of the topics you will bonk your head against. We deal on a daily basis with the (sometimes stupid, lame or ignorant) mistakes FCP’s designers made.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

You should have followed protocols as described in the manual for crating copies of projects. It’s quite clear. It doesn’t work, but it’s clearly explained.

You must now relink your media. Disconnect your external drive and open the manual to relink media. It’s not difficult and most of it is automatic.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

[peterb] “What can I so to stop this? I find it really time consuming.”

To be charitable, I will tell you that your sequence settings must match your clip settings precisely. You can achieve this by looking in the index or online help system for the terms or locate them in the menus. There are presets for all common formats but you have not told us what your format is.
Tip to save you some frustration and another post: You cannot change the settings of a sequence while it’s open so just start with a new one.

Your post indicates a couple of things:
1. You’re new.
2. You bought a product that is unbelievably complicated but you think you can wing it.
3. You installed FCP and fired it up without reading anything of value in the five book set of manuals.
4. You started your first project without doing the tutorials.

Save yourself endless frustration and wasted posts. Stop what you’re doing and take a month or two to learn the application. You cannot imagine how complex FCP is and how difficult it can be to get the simplest things done. Once you understand the basics, you’ll be surprised how quickly and easily you can get the most complicated things done.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[thewanggao] “I have shot my entire movie in dv. now, i would like to give each scene the tint i have planned out in after effects, using a solid w/ overlay and a photo filter.

There is no need to go to AE for this simple effect. Stay in FCP, just learn how to do it.

What would be the best workflow to achieve a final product with such clips? Should I go to AE and tint, etc. first, and THEN go to fcp?

Depends on your editing style. Me, I’d get the thing completely edited before attempting to add overlay effects. But you might want to experiment with a few scenes before committing to the effect.

Also, what codecs do you think I should use to achieve maximum results for my project (which includes motion graphics that I want to still look good), still under dvd size? (4.7 GB)(exporting from AE, and exporting from fcp). My final film willprobably be around 20 minutes total. “

If it’s going to DVD, MPEG2 will mess everything up so just stick with conventional DV. If you shot in DV, there is nothing to be gained by attempting to use a higher bit rate codec.

Setting and getting the highest possible quality in the encode to MPEG2 are covered in several book-length threads. It ain’t easy. If the quality of the release DVD is very important to you, hire an encoding expert.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

First question: Why do your images need to be so large?

You will only see about 1/10th of the frame in video. if you scale them in FCP to fill the frame, you’re wasting processing time, rendering time and throwing away billions of pixels. Save your images as anything you want, FCP will handle them, but don’t make them any larger than they need to be for any moves you plan to make.

Realize that in video there is no DPI or LPI, there are only pixels.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

The loop is not embedded; you have to tell the player to loop it.
Your best bet is to open it in your favorite gif player and export it as a QT. You should be able to designate a number of loops.

There are lots of issues with gifs being used as realworld graphics. I doubt the gif is 720×480 so it will be rescaled to be used full screen and that’s really gonna hurt. I do not believe you’re going to liek the results but please come back and tell us how things worked out.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”