[Dennis Couzin]

OK Stéphane, let’s “connect” over this. (Creative Cow member connection is something I can’t figure out.)
For the record, however, FCP7 works best in the earlier operating systems. And the software it needs to work with works best in the earlier operating systems. For example, FCP7 must communicate with Compressor 3.5 in order to make a Blu-ray. Concerning FCP7 removal, App Cleaner might do a fair job, FCS Remover (from Digital Rebellion) might do a better job, but I’d expect Retroactive to have done a funny installation of FCP7 in High Sierra causing those removals to be incomplete.
DC

[Dennis Couzin]

Hello Stéphane,

I installed FCP7 in a High Sierra volume last week for curiosity’s sake, since I’m happy to still run it in a Mountain Lion volume. I used Retroactive version 2.1(91) and a Final Cut Studio install.dmg. Installation worked, but strangely. Retroactive insisted on downloading its own ProApplicationsUpdate2010-02, from somewhere, although I had the .dmg for that too. I suspect your installation also worked, but you missed some final, strange cue from Retroactive.

It might be difficult to remove all that Retroactive loaded in your High Sierra volume in order to try FCP7 installation again. Wouldn’t it be simpler to set up a volume with an earlier OSX where FCP7 installs nicely? Macs are lovely for multi-boot. Or have you gone all-in with High Sierra, also updating your hard drive to APFS? Or do you need to do High Sierra things while editing?

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

[Dennis Couzin]

Dave,
I have the FCP7 and the time to do it, but perhaps not the knowledge. If your FCP7 project file consists of many sequences I’d suggest exporting a separate .xml for each. In my tiny experience of FCP7–>Resolve (version 14) I’ve only imported .xml’s for single FCP7 sequences into the latter.
Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

[Dennis Couzin]

For the 1955 Einstein letter see M.H. Pirenne, “Optics, Painting and Photography”, pages 99-100.

[Dennis Couzin]

Why substitute? QT Edit is up-to-date OS-wise. It’s a component of Pro Media Tools, the latest version of which requires High Sierra or higher: https://www.digitalrebellion.com/promedia/ . If it’s freeware you seek, there’s JES Extensifier https://macdownload.informer.com/jes-extensifier/ which might serve your needs.

digitalrebellion.com

Pro Media Tools - Digital Rebellion

Media and workflow management for video professionals

[Dennis Couzin]

Are you talking about powerful graphics cards for the Mac Pro 5,1? We here use a flashed AMD Radeon HD 7950 (Sapphire) which has DVI-D, HDMI Standard, and mini DisplayPort outputs. 1080 60p, bah! With Mavericks, we watch 1080 144p with QuickTime via the HDMI port. (Our purpose is not frame rate per se, but emulation of film projector shutterings.)

Sure, if hooked on old software like FCP7, and drawn to newer operating systems and devices, there are compatibility problems to solve.

DC

[Dennis Couzin]

You seem to have two versions of the same 720×576 video (with unsquare pixels), differing only in their metadata. The metadata says what shape the unsquare pixels have, but metadata can easily go wrong as the file passes through programs that “interpret” it idiosyncratically. And metadata is easily corrected. I alter pixel aspect ratio in .mov files by using Jon Chappell’s excellent program QT Edit.

Now to the mess. 59/54 is the correct pixel ratio for DV-PAL. When the DV-PAL camera takes a picture of a circle, it will really cover 59/54 times as many pixels vertically as horizontally. That funny ratio (≈ 1.0926) arose from TV standards. The DV-PAL frame consists of 720×576 pixels; do the arithmetic. 59/54*720 = 786.666… . So when converted to square pixels the DV-PAL should be nearly 787×576 square pixels. Surprise, this is not 4:3! The DV-PAL image is not 4:3, it is about 1.366:1. Programs that make DV-PAL into 768×576 pixels (4:3) distort it a bit. Can you see the difference between 1.366:1 and 1.333:1? Maybe. Everyone’s a little skinnier. Or maybe it’s mentally “corrected”, as watching a movie from a side seat in the theater is. Albert Einstein famously wrote a letter to Maurice Pirenne wondering about this.

So, should you declare 59/54 (or 1.0926) the pixel aspect ratio in the metadata, or should you take it easy and declare a false pixel aspect ratio 16/15 (or 1.0666) which makes the 720×576 pixels come out as 768×576 square pixels, 4:3? I converted my DV-PAL material to 787×576 square pixels, because I want circles to be circular, don’t want to crop off image, and don’t care if 4:3 is someone’s old standard. My 787×576 video will probably be pillarboxed into 1024×576 (HD shape) downstream anyhow. Decide based on the use of your material.

The mentioned crop is a “horribility” chosen by some pseudo-purists. They crop off 8 pixels from one side, 9 pixels from the other side of the 720×576 video and then transform that sad 703×576 remainder using the honest 59/54 pixel aspect ratio to 768×576 square pixels. They regard those cropped 17 pixels (8+9 or 9+8?) as non-image, like over-scan in TV or like image invading perforations in film. Nonsense.

DC

[Dennis Couzin]

Rob Gutermuth wrote: “I’m running the last OS that will run [FCP7] on a Mac Pro 5,1”

There are OS that will run FCP7, and there are OS that will run FCP7 well. We here have a volume with OSX Lion that runs FCP7 well on our Mac Pro 5,1. FCP7 has no problem at all with ProRes HQ clips 1920×1080 60p resident on good quality HDDs with eSATA connection.

It’s hard to get FCP7 to run well. The system settings, etc. take some fiddling. It’s naïve to expect FCP7 to run as well after an OS upgrade. When ours didn’t, we reinstalled it, helped by Jon Chappell’s nice Preference Manager. But it still didn’t work as well as on Lion, so we returned to Lion. Certainly try reinstalling FCP7 on whatever OS you’re running, but if this doesn’t resolve your trouble consider setting up a volume with an OS on which you knew it worked well. The greatest pleasure of the Mac is the ease of multiple bootable volumes. Perhaps the greatest displeasure is the ease of OS upgrades which can come with firmware upgrades which can spoil earlier OS volumes.

DC

[Dennis Couzin]

A proper method would entail alpha channels, which I, and probably you, know nothing about. If you can make a clip which is perfectly black where you speak of masking, and perfectly white everywhere else, then that clip can be your “mask”. In an FCP7 sequence, the “mask” will be one track and your movie scan will be the other track. Apply color correction filters to the movie scan track. Combine the tracks using Modify > Composite Mode > Multiply. Export the product.

“perfectly black” and “perfectly white” need comment. FCP7 probably transforms whatever encoding is used to ER’, EG’, EB’ for its multiplication. So you want ER’=EG’=EB’=0 and ER’=EG’=EB’=1 in the mask clip’s black and white, respectively, Your movie scan clip might include values greater than 1. Hopefully FCP7’s multiplication will preserve these if you opt for Super-White in Sequence Settings > Video Processing > Process Maximum White as.

How will you make your mask clip? The perforation protrudes a bit into the picture area and there is colored glow all around the perforation which you presumably wish to preserve intact. Also the perforation and the picture area are not perfectly stable in a scan, unless one or the other has been post-stabilized. Your illustration shows part of the camera’s dirty frameline. Don’t you wish to mask that too, to preserve it intact?

[Dennis Couzin]

So you need a 30p and a 60i, because those are allowed DVD formats.

With any monitor other than a CRT, the 60i DVD gets deinterlaced. Often this is “double deinterlacing” so one sees pseudo 60p video, which looks damned good. With luck, the 30p DVD looks like 30p.

If you shoot 60i and then deinterlace it to make pseudo 30p there will invariably be some deinterlacing artefacts in that. So you would ideally shoot 60p and make both the 30p and the 60i from it. Making the 30p is trivial but making the 60i is some work.

The brutish DIY method requires a mask with clear and black lines that alternates top line black, top line clear from frame to frame. In FCP7, you lay it on the 60p — Modify > Composite Mode > Multiply — and export the thing. Then you add — Modify > Composite Mode > Add — the thing to itself shifted by 1 frame. Then you discard every other frame by doubling the speed. You attended to the field dominance, so finally you dub it the 60i (30 fps) interlaced product using QT Edit or another metadata editor.

I was delighted to discover that Compressor v.3.5.3 can be tricked into doing the interlacing work for you. I fed a 60p clip into Compressor. In Standard Video Compression Settings, Frame Rate was 60 and Interlaced was selected with Bottom field first. In Frame Controls, Output Fields were selected Bottom first and Duration was set to 200%. Compressor worked hard on this and produced a strange 60p giant in which every other frame was interlaced! Since the first frame wasn’t interlaced, I chopped it off in FCP7, and then sped the thing to 400% speed. The result is the desired 60i, and it only needs to be dubbed as such using QT Edit or equivalent.