[David Bogie]

Since FCPv1 I’ve wanted a control-click inside any single audio clip: Show Waveform.
It’s silly to change modes to a prefs or a settings panel just to get a few audio hits pinpointed.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Check the apple.com forums, too.

This is an all-too-common issue with DVDSP2 and 3. Bit budgeting should be automated, or at least user-configurable, but it’s not. It’s a stupid and manual process and requires the user to make esoteric choices none of us understand till we’ve screwed them up dozens of times. This has nothing to do with file size. It’s all about playing back the file and you are limited not to a computer performance but to the DVD Spec written 20 years ago.

The problem is that audio and video combined are your total bandwidth and you have no control over audio. You must set your video bit rate not to exceed about 6.5. That leaves you about 2.5 for your audio bandwidth. You must use the APack encoder (itself a marvel of stupid non-Macintosh interface design) to process your audio separately from the video. Then bring the new audio track into your DVDSP project and replace the original audio with the new track. APack creates a full fidelity compressed file that is remarkably compact and requires only about 1/10th the bandwdith of conventional MPEG2 audio.

DVDSP4 rocks, upgrade if you plan to try to make money with DVDs.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

the audio track display has to be a certain height. I forget what it is but drag one of them (or use the size thingy) till it’s a bit larger and the waveform will pop into view.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Before you jump to any weird conclusions, try searching the various FCP forums for your camera. We’ve been dealing with lots of weird Canon issues for several years but, no, the the GL2, all by itself, presents to compatibility issues with FCP5.

Canon issues are almost always directly traced to oddball user configurations and bad cables. No way to know from here where I sit.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Nest the project and apply the timecode filter to the nest.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

[Chi-Ho Lee] “Can you check this? Apply a basic border on a still. The right edge of the still does not have a border. I’ve tried this on two different machine. (G5 dual 1.8, 3 gigs RAM, 10.4.2, FCP 5.0.2, QT 7.0.1 and iMac 2 ghz, 1 gig RAM, everything else is the same) Pain in the butt cuz now I have to take the still in Photoshop to make a border. << I don't see this on my systems, sorry. But I usually nest and then apply borders since the Borider filter does not respect any other effects. Bad programming. >> Also keyframing a slow rotation from about -6 to 2 value produces a wicked “swimming” jaggy edge. Don’t recall 4.5 doing this. Tried render in Best and Fastest motion quality – same result in both. Final result was add a feather edge under crop. << This has been an issue for most of us since v1. FCP's rendering engine stinks. The claims from Apple were for vast improvements in the native DV rendering but I see absolutely no difference in how edges are handled. Cheap programming shortcuts since other solutions exist. >> Good News is that FCP and Motion round tripping works great. Sigh….growing pains….and Copy and Paste attributes is still broken with regards to copying keyframes from Filters! “

The filter keyframes thing seems to be a design decision since Apple deliberately broke it. Bad design, bad programming, bad customer support, lousy decision.

I’m fundamentally pissed off about FCP5 these days. Nothing got fixed and tons of junky-clunky stuff I don’t give a rat’s asset about got layered on top of an already overly complex and pseudo sophisticated application. I really miss my old Media 100 today.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

I’m not following you at all but that’s the trouble with posts like this.

There only three basic things that will give you a flashing ?: 1. Corrupted or otherwise damaged System files or a bad directory that points to them. 2. Damaged or otherwise unusable data or power cable to or from the drive. 3. Conflicts with drive slave/master settings, a messed up jumper or software that governs that setting.

You can install your OS on any drive that has the room but you know that running the OS and media form the same drive is asking for trouble during capture and playback.

You should run Disk Utility and repair your System from the installer; you haven’t indicated you’ve done that.

Like to offer more help but I need less detail.

bogiean

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

[David Bogie]

Best way to do this is to apply the fade to the movie, not to the layer. Not always possible, I realize, but that’s why nesting is so valuable. Or why it’s often beneficial to export independently a finished layer’s effects and reimport the movie.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

[Jared Kirshenbaum] “I have created a HD720 layout in motion and exported as an uncompressed 10 bit quicktime. This was all created on a G5 Dual 2 g. Running quicktime pro 7.1 on all systems. I am showing this quicktime on a mini mac. Here is the problem. When I open the quicktime on the mini mac that is hooked up to our 55′ plasma, I get a white screen, no movie, however, when I hook it up to my G5 it works. It also does not play on my power mac g4.I am directed to apples 3rd party plug in page for quicktime. I am not sure if i need these to play the video since I did not install any of them on the G5′”

Uncompressed 10-bit will hardly play on a dualie G5, I doubt the drive in the mini can even read the file fast enough to feed it into the CPU. Without direct GPU support, which the mini does not have, you probably cannot play the uncompressed file. It will need to be compressed somehow to fall within the specs of the mini’s CPU and GPU.

You’ll need to investigate the 10 bit system you’re using to determine the minimum specs for real time playback. There are many ways to view a reasonably accurate version of your movie.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

There is no need to use the Animation codec. Your clips will be fine. All you’re doing is moving pointers that refer to the original files.

Rendering out of Motion or other effects systems is a different situation. You should work from your desired end result backwards. That is, if your delivery is DV or worse, there is no reason to use Animation for anything unless you must preserve alpha information between passes or applications. Animation requires tremendous processing and rendering time and create freakin’ huge files. The choice of codecs for your intermediate steps is based on need, not necessarily on the often mistaken assumption that quality preservation is the only or primary goal.

The whole codec scene is very confusing at first. You can google codecs and find tons of helpful reading.

bogiesan

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