[David Bogie]

It’s not the Learning Curve that’s killing you, it’s the UNlearning Curve. Training your fingers top use a new set of keyboard shorties and using the new interface is tough, absolutely.

Give yourself and your teammates a break and run the tutorials. Yes, they’re going to feel insultingly fundamental but, now that you’ve got some time on the application and you know some basics and you know where the menus are, you will find Apple’s instruction quite helpful and illuminating. Take the manuals to the gym. Buy Apple’s FCP advanced books.

[Once you get over your legacy issues, FCP will keep surprising you in pleasant ways. As a former M100 user myself, I still miss certain things and I will NEVER forgive the FCP designers for AutoSelect.]

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

That’s the hardwired default for MPEG2 in Apple’s world, can’t be changed AFAIK. If you need a different display, you crop it or letterbox it in FCP. Silly, but I think that’s all you can do. Check the specs in the Compressor online help for MPEG2, I’m pretty sure it’s all explained there.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Why do you have the RAID partitioned? That starts to defeat the purposes but never mind.

You’re out of space. Period.
FCP requires a minimum amount of drive space to be left open and you’ve probably hit that ceiling, it’s in the default prefs so tossing them won’t change anying.
Move your scratch drive designation to the other partition.
Post back.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

It’s usually caused by having the Canvas improperly sized. Check to make sure you don’t see any Apple window handles on the edge of the Canvas.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

If you have the luxury of an Ikea store nearby, check the choices carefully. You can do much better than the Jerker but you may pay a bit more for the better finishes, more capacity and adjustability. Be sure to check the scratch and dent area, too. Tremendous bargains on computer tables.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

If you register at lafcpu.org you can view their FCP5 Bug Report forum.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

[Andy Mees] “i’ve tried changing the ‘Alpha’ setting in the Item Properties for the clip …. FCP seems to have recognised that an alpha channel exists and automagically sets the alpha type to ‘Straight’, but none of the settings change the way the clip is interpreted – it only sees a flat fully opaque video layer.i’ve rendered this element twice, using the ‘Animation’ codec, and again using the ‘Avid Meridian’ codec … neither are working for me in FCP (but both are interpreted correctly when reimported into AE). The alpha channel is there, but FCP is just not seeing it ‘correctly’ it seems ….
“

If you’re coming out of AE premultiplied and FCP is seeing it as straight, you won’t get the alpha you’re expecting. Changing the item properties in the Browser will not change the properties of a copy of the clip already in the timeline (well, that’s not entirely true, just too confusing to go into here).

Open the clip in the Browswer Viewer and select the alpha view mode. Now try changing the item properties for the alpha. Post back.

As Gabriel says, alpha works just like it’s supposed to but it might not be set properly. You could also try rendering a short clip out of AE using straight instead of premultiplied and be sure you’re using Millions of colors +.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Try reducing your monitor setting to thousands of colors instead of millions.

Disconnect the monitor, put you old one back online.
Then tell us what happened.

bogiesan

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

[David Bogie]

Make the copies independent.

This is clip family stuff tricky, it just takes lots of practice to decide on the path you wish to follow.

The language Apple decided to use is silly and the relationships are not clear. There is a very useful article on kenstone.net about the new family designations.

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 unerase applications including Norton and a couple built into OS10 on the Unix side. You can access them from Terminal. Sorry, that’s all I can tell you about Unix.

A word of caution, do not expect to recover these files. Prepare now for the worst, locate your original material and plan to recapture. If you cannot do that, prepare your explanations to your clients.

The problem arises in recovering the entire file. Most often part of the file header is simply gone. The file appears to be useful, amy even pass a checksum test, but it will NOT import into FCP or play in QTPlayer.

bogiesan

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