[Donal O kane]

Compressor can have problems starting if something has happened with qmaster.

Check to see if the qmasterd precess is running in the activity monitor. You might need to reinstall qmaster and compressor.

Use pacifist to install just qmaster and compressor (and sometimes motion (not the motion content!)) = much faster

I have had qmaster/compressor stop working several times now, as a result of …. i dunno ghosts or something … bad karma maybe … using these instructions i’ve gotten it working again each time.

These instructions show how to fix most of the problems i’ve come up against.

https://www.scottsimmons.tv/blog/2008/01/11/compressor-hatred-resolved/

https://www.kashum.com/blog/1152611689

https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93234

But one time i just had to bite the bullet and reinstall everything .. i used FCSRemover to properly remove old install and then reinstalled and presto! … i only used this when nothing else worked.

good luck.

[Donal O kane]

Hi,

Yesterday was that day for me … i feel your pain. Well for me it was qmaster and compressor both breaking.

The following has great advice … boils down to using a program called pacifist to just install specific parks for FCS.
https://www.scottsimmons.tv/blog/2008/01/11/compressor-hatred-resolved/

It also give you link which details the list of files must be deleted before a clean compressor install
https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302845

Also good is the following for qmaster problems
https://www.kashum.com/blog/1152611689

Good luck ..
Hopefully you won’t need this one but for a nice clean install of FCS there is a program called FCS Remover

[Donal O kane]

Cool!

One question though .. does rendering in fcp not mean that the conversion is done by software rather than nice fancy hardware?

[Donal O kane]

>Can I cut a hole in a layer of video to see the layer below >it, can I track that hole? (equivelent animatte and tracker >in Avid).

There are garbage mattes that you can use to cut holes in the effects tabs, but they don’t track. They can be keyframed. Motion can do tracking.

>Can I use basic Picture in Picture effects and keyframe their >size position e.t.c.

I’m fairly sure this can be done with video layers and you can keyframe the motion parameters for each clip.

>Can I keyframe motion, zoom etc… can I key frame >everything???

The motion tab in the viewer window lets you keyframe:
scale, rotation, center, anchor point, crop, distort, opacity, drop shadow and time remapping.

Can be a pain if you are doing lots of keyframing, but you can do it.

Donal

[Donal O kane]

After reading all the great advice here about which tablet to get brand/size = wacom/largest you can afford, I bought one last month.

I decided to go for a portable one (read cheaper) and got the wacom bamboo fun medium (8.5×5.5inch active space), just under $200. Name aside it’s been a great introduction to tablets and while not as fancy as the intuos 3 ones I am finding it very usable in a dual monitor setup, and still very customizable, but it has only 2 buttons on the pen and 4 in total on the tablet.

Also the pen buttons (not the tablet ones for some reason) can be mapped to scroll/pan so you can scroll up/down/sideways/slantyways by clicking and holding the pen button you map to scroll/pan and tap-dragging the pen like a mouse on the tablet. Works great for me.