[Don Greening]

James,

The “fuzz” you’re seeing will be the edges of the VHS tape. This won’t be seen if you monitor your video with a television hooked up to your deck. This will let you see exactly what the final frame will look like once you’ve burned to a DVD. You mentioned that your video looks fine in FCP’s viewer window but looks pixelated/terrible when viewed “full frame”. Keep in mind that NTSC 4:3 video has a resolution of 720X480 pixels. If you use Quicktime Player to view your video clips make sure you choose to watch at “actual size” which is available in the Quicktime Player’s view menu. Anything larger will cause your clip to become pixelated because you’re blowing it up larger than it was recorded at. Remember that most computer dispays have a resolution of much more than 720X480, so if your video clip is taking up the whole screen it will indeed look terrible. For example, my main Apple display has a maximum resolution of 1920X1200 pixels, so if I expanded a piece of video to fill as much of the screen as possible it would look awful. Televisions have a much lower pixel resolution than a computer display. Their pixels are larger, so you can see a bigger overall picture but the resolution will still be 720×480. Does this make sense?

If you’re planning to use iDVD then you don’t need to use Compressor at all. Just export a Quicktime movie (with audio) out of Final Cut Pro using the same preset as your timline, which is DV NTSC 48Khz. All you have to do then is import that movie into iDVD and it will encode the file for a DVD automatically. Remember too, that a single layer DVD can only hold 4.7 Gbytes of video and audio, so it has to compress your DV movie into a much smaller size, which will then become an MPEG2 file.

A.Pack is an audio compression program that shipped with earlier versions of DVD Studio Pro. If you don’t have DVDSP then you won’t have A.Pack. DVDSP will give you much more control over your final DVD than iMovie does. iMovie is for people that don’t want to know about MPEG2 compression, etc. but just want to create simple DVD’s for viewing home movies and pictures within a simple slide show. The single biggest reason for going to the next level with DVD Studio Pro is the ability to control all aspects of DVD authoring, including compressing the audio so there’s more room for video. Usually, the audio takes up a huge portion of the DVD space, so compressing it will allow you to use a higher bitrate for the video file which translates to better viewing quality.

You can also transfer your native DV files to a data DVD without compressing, but you won’t be able to play them in any DVD player. The idea here is just for storage/archive purposes. Native DV files consume 1 Gbyte of space for every 5 minutes of video, so this will give you an idea of the file size difference between native DV and an MPEG2 DVD file that you can watch with a consumer DVD player. With a program like DVD Studio Pro you can compress up to 2 hours of audio and video onto a single layer DVD with acceptable quality. iMovie will allow you the same 2 hours, but the quality will be lower.

Hopefully this has all made sense to you.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Quicktime is also active when FCP is running, so you might try trashing the QT prefs as well. There are two QT pref files but I don’t know which one will contain your QT Pro serial number, so be prepared to input the number once QT is up and running again afterwards. Drag both files onto the desktop but don’t trash then right away. Start Quicktime and make sure it’s running properly as a stand alone app. If that checks out then start FCP and see if trashing the QT files made a difference. If that solves it then you can safely drag the old QT pref files off your desktop and into the trash.

Macintosh HD/users/your name/library/preferences/com.apple.quicktime.plugin.preferences.plist (and also) com.apple.quicktimeplayer.plist

– Don

[Don Greening]

This link may help if you haven’t seen it yet:

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/24p_in_FCP_nattress.html

– Don

[Don Greening]

The dual link DVI is used to connect Apple’s 30″ display, which won’t run on anything else. You’ll need an ADC to DVI adapter for your second display. This is a pretty common adapter available at any Apple retailer.

– DOn

[Don Greening]

Okay. Some other things to check: Make sure that you have journaling turned OFF for all your media hard drives. File journaling interferes with the capture process and should only be turned on for your startup drive. Also make usre you don’t have any virus protection software activated to run automatically in the background. This will also interfere with capturing. I’m sure you already know that your media drives should be formatted in Mac OS extended, but I’m just tying to cover all the bases I can think of. Your statement about only being able to capture up to 4 gigs was a red flag for me in that the maximum file size for a FAT32 formatted disk is the same. But I’m sure your X-RAID is probably okay in that regard because you said that it’s been working fine up until a few weeks ago.

Get a copy of DiskWarrior and run that on all your drives. This will rebuild the directories on everything in case they’ve become corrupted with long term use. Corrupted HD directories will play havoc with programs trying to access files. It’s also good to use for regular preventive maintenance in the future.

Try capturing a bit of footage to another media drive or even to your startup drive, just to try and narrow down the problem. If successful, you may have a problem with your X Serve RAID

There’s a few more things you can try but let me know your thoughts on the above recommendations and post back if you’re still having problems.

– Don

[Don Greening]

If you haven’t done so already try trashing your FCP pref. files. Restart FCP and try capturing again.

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/trashing_fcp_prefs.html

– Don

[Don Greening]

[James Vancouver] “Manual “capture now” is working but there seems to be fuzz at the top and bottom of the screen, not unlike poor tracking.”

Are you seeing this “fuzz” when viewing on a television monitor or is it only visible within FCP in either the viewer or canvas windows? There should be no generational loss when digitizing from your VHS analogue source i.e. it won’t look any better than the source but it won’t be any worse, either. Make sure you’re viewing your footage using the high quality video setting within FCP. It’s a preference. To view the final video quality you must use a TV monitor connected to your VTR deck and not judge the quality by what you see on your computer display. Remember that FCP will show an underscanned image in the viewer/canvas windows, so the extreme edges will not be seen on final output. Activate FCP’s “title and action safe” boxes in either the viewer or canvas windows and you’ll see what will and will not be included in final output.

If you’re exporting to Compressor directly from FCP, that method is generally considered to be the most unreliable way of encoding prior to creating your DVD. The fact that you’ve done it this way in the past doesn’t mean that you’ll continue to have good luck with this particular workflow.

May I recommend a more reliable way: export your QT movie from FCP as self-contained, video only. Export your audio separately using the ‘export audio to .aif’ command. Open the Compressor app. and use any of the presets available, just like you did when exporting from within FCP. Convert your .aif audio to AC3 audio using A.Pack and then you can bring all of these elements into DVDSP, if that’s the DVD authoring program you intend to use. I’m assuming you have the first version of Compressor. If you use Compressor 2 then you can convert your .aif audio from within the new version.

Another advantage of this method is that you can still use FCP while Compressor works in the background. Using AC3 file format audio will also prove to be more DVD player ‘friendly’, as the high bit rates of .aif audio tend to make some players choke, not to mention that the smaller file size of AC3 audio leaves you more room on the DVD for video content. Since you haven’t stated which version of FCP or Compressor you’re uing I’m trying to cover all the bases, nor have you said what program you’re going to use for your DVD authoring.

As always, it’s up to you whether or not you choose to export your QT movie as self-contained or as a reference movie. Hard drive space limitations will be your guide in that respect.

I’ve only had one instance where the dialogue: “cannot connect to background process” came up. All I did was trash all the exported FCP files I used , created new ones and the problem went away. Since I’ve never used Compressor within FCP I don’t know if the issue is the same as when Compressor is used as a stand-alone app. This does, however, seem to be an occasional problem and there are many forum threads on the subject. Just do a search here at Creative Cow.

Here’s hoping that all these recommendations are making sense for you.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Martin Vincent] “Is there a link between low light and HDV?”

No. But there is a link between low light and imaging chips that are only 1/3″ in area, of which Sony’s HDV is part of that equation. To get more light into the CCDs in the 1/3″ class you need to make the light gathering pixels on those CCDs bigger. But then you can’t put as many pixels on those CCDs for that same reason, therefore the actual image quality isn’t as good as a CCD that has a high pixel density. This is how the Sony PD170 works. And that’s the tradeoff. High density CCDs make for a better picture but they need more light to do it. The Sony HDV cams like the FX1/Z1U use 1/3″ CCDs with a very high pixel density for a great picture, as long as there’s enough light to make that great picture happen. It’s conceivable that you could have an HDV camera with CCDs larger than 1/3″ that would work fine in low light.

If you make the jump to bigger CCDs, say 1/2″ or 2/3″ then you have much more room to put lots of pixels on the chip AND make them bigger so they can gather more light. This is when you get into true HD cameras that do a great job in low light, but with a corresponding jump in the cost of admission.

Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go? 🙂

– Don

[Don Greening]

Richard,

You read my mind. I’ve never trusted FW to be used in any other fashion other than to treat it just like an electrical connection. To connect, turn everything off first. To disconnect, turn everything off first.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Pat King] “I am really quite poor and ugly.”

BTW, I can’t speak to your financial situation, but you’re certainly not ugly. I’ve seen pictures 😉 You’re a heck of a lot cuter than I, that much I know.

– Don