Don Greening
Forum Replies Created
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IF your ‘film-look’ experimentaion with the XL1 footage doesn’t turn out the way you want you could try the Nattress Film Effects plugins for FCP. I think Graeme’s G Film Pack is still around 100 dollars USD and it’s exellent. It was made for the purpose you have in mind.
– Don
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The auto-focus control on the XL1S is actually too sensitve in low light conditions i.e. it is easily confused when presented with two objects of similar size, but at different focus depths (distances). The XL2 is much, much better in the regard, more like the GL2. But better than the GL2. If you have a chance to compare, you’ll notice that if you deliberately pan the GL2/XL2 so that the object is no longer centred in the viewfinder it will take much longer for these cameras to automatically refocus on something else. This is a good thing, because it means they hold focus longer.
The XL1S on the other hand will instantly lose auto-focus and look for something else to focus on. Too sensitive. The work around for me was to always make sure the object of interest took up a large portion of the viewfinder and to always keep that object centred. The best case scenario for the XL1S is to use a lot of light with auto-focus, then it will work just fine. If you can’t control the lighting and you cannot afford to have any focus hunting issues whatsoever, then you need to use manual focus with a broadcast quality monitor plugged into the camera, because the stock viewfinder really isn’t good enough on its own for critical focus.
Hope this helps you to better understand the XL1S.
– Don
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Hi Betsy,
Thanks for posting back. That’s exellent news! Glad it worked for you.
Happy hollidays.
– Don
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The problem might very well be a corrupt render file in FCP. Corrupt render files often don’t rear there ugly little heads until you try to do a DVD burn. Uneless someone has another suggestion you might try navigating to your project render folder and dragging the contents to the trash. Start FCP and tell it it render everything again, even the audio if you did anything there too. It may be only one render file that’s causing trouble, but by the time you figured out which one it was it would probably be faster just to render everything again. Then make a new self-contained QT movie and encode/burn that with iDVD.
A classic example of a bad render file is when the DVD build process stops cold at a certain place every time. Like at a certain percentage point of the encoding process. This is what happens in DVD Studio Pro, but iDVD may react differently. You have stated however, that you were able to complete the build and it wasn’t unill you tried to burn the DVD that nothing happened. This is a new one on me, but then again, this may be what iDVD does when it encounters problems. When you moved the project over to your iMac did you use that computer’s version of iDVD or was it the same one you used before? i.e. if you have the 2 Macs connected through ethernet and were able to use the same copy of iDVD. Trying to determine if two copies of iDVD had the same issues with the one bad project.
Anyway, I have to go and will be out of the office for most of the day, so you’re on your own unless someone else reads this and offers thier insight.
Good luck.
– Don
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If you’re not interested in having OS9 on your startup disk then the fastest and easiest would be to reformat the disk in Mac OS Extended (journaling on) and then do a fresh OS X install from the system disks. Partitioning will accomplish nothing for you other than to eat up more valuable storage space on your drive due to the extra formatting required.
Remember that reformatting will erase everything on your drive. Transfer what you want to keep to another drive such as a firewire drive and then do the reformatting with Apple’s Disk Utility which you’ll find on your system disks.
If I had just bought a used Mac, now’s the time I would do this before I put a bunch of programming and other files on it.
– Don
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To oversimplify the explanation, journaling keeps a running tab on everything that gets written to and deleted from a hard disk. Journaling turned on for a media drive will interfere with the capture process and cause various problems, including dropped frames during capture. Journaling should only be used with the startup disk. Some users even want to disable the new ‘Spotlight’ feature in OS X Tiger because they feel that program interferes with FCP as well. I personally have not run into the “Spotlight” issue yet, probably because my media/transfer rate needs are minimal, in that I work with MiniDV only.
– Don
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I’m sure that someone will advise you with regard to your DVD query soon. In the meantime, FYI I had the good fortune to talk to a long time employee from Technicolor
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You definitely need a second drive dedicated to media only. You can buy another SATA drive for the empty bay inside the G5. Find the biggest size available, something like 500Gbytes. You’ll need the space if this is the only drive you’re buying for a while. When you get it installed, immediately use Apple’s Disk Utility to initialize the disk in Mac OS Extended, journaling OFF.
FW drives are OK if you’re working with straight DV, but get something like a G Raid or LaCie Big Disk Extreme with a minimum of 500 Gbyte in capacity.
Using your startup drive to capture and edit media is generaly considered to be very unreliable. Your dropped frames problems will attest to that.
– Don
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Thanks Mike. Now I don’t have to look it up 🙂 And you’re right. Social interaction is a good thing. Oh well, back to my Motion 2 tutorials. Nothing much social in there (sigh).
– Don
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It downloaded just fine for me. Clicked on the link you provided and the dowload started automatically.
– Don