[David Rowan]

In going from Composer/Newscutter to FCP 3 I found that the “Lindy Hop” tutorial (A tutorial thats included with FCP, I believe they have a new one now) was pretty good for getting to know the interface and for a “Where did they hide THAT button” kind of learning experience.

DWR

[David Rowan]

I’ve scanned a lot of slides on my HP scanner with good results. I have not used the scans for video, but they are at a much higher resolution than video.

Here is one tip I picked up. If you can, tell the scanner that the output will be much larger than the original and then use a lower dpi. That is instead of a 1 inch slide getting scanned at 3000 dpi tell the scanner to make the output 10 inches at 300 dpi. The result is still 3000 pixels, but somehow more programs have an easier time dealing with it.

Also, at LAFCPUG-dot-org someone figured out a whole chart of recommended sizes for scanning images depending on how you were planing to use them in a video. Its somewhere in the library there.

DWR

[David Rowan]

Worked around the problem. Here’s what I did (in case anyone finds this in a search)

Instead of using Photoshop’s NTSC 720X480 template I just made my own 4 inches by 3 inches at 300DPI project. Yeah, I know, its more pixels than necissary.

But it worked. Graphics made at this scale did not have the thin line artifacts.

DWR

[David Rowan]

a mild pinkish red and beige. Nothing very saturated.

DWR

[David Rowan]

I have had pretty good luck using Compressor to convert AVI files into DV-NTSC. WMV is another matter.

DWR

[David Rowan]

Thanks. Sorry I wasn’t clear. Its the wired mouse that came with my brand-new G5.

DWR

[David Rowan]

I use the cheapest crappiest DVD’d I can get my hands on and I have not had the Mac turn out a coaster yet. That is to say, I’ve made some pretty crappy disks as I experimented, but the Mac always burned ’em.

One G5 dual 2.5 w/superdrive and one Mac G5 dual 2.7 with the drive that does dual layers

DWR

[David Rowan]

I had a similar problem on FCP 4.5. In my case it was some sort of disk problem.

I discovered I could save the projects to other drives, so I saved it on my media drive, then I ran disk utilities (rebuild permisions) on the primary drive where I save my projects. After that things worked.

DWR

[David Rowan]

Put the effect on one clip and tweak it there until you have it ready to put on all the other clips.

select the effected clip in the timeline and apple+C (copy).
select all the other clips you want to apply the effect to. Hit Option+V. Now it asks you which of the attributes from the one clip you want to apply to all the others. In this case it would be a filter, or if your cropped it to a letterbox shape, then crop.

Voila, all the clips you selected now have the same filter, or motion, or what-have-you. However, you can now double click on any given clip so it opens in the viewer, and you can make any finer adjustments there. I do this frequently with the color corrector, or with motion and cropping, or just to add drop shadows to a bunch of items.

DWR

[David Rowan]

Launch Terminal (Application>Utilities>Terminal) and type this:

sudo /Library/StartupItems/Qmaster/Qmaster

I saved in in a text file so I can cut and paste it.

then the password for your system and enter. When you put in your password you wont see it.

If you reboot the computer you have to do this over again, it doesn’t stay “fixed”.

I can’t take the credit for this, I got it from the Apple Compressor discussion.

DWR