[Eric Bowman]

Well due to deadlines I went the brute force approach and just keyframed the offset parameter of the Shape layer. Not perfect but it will probably do. I would really like to know if there’s a way to fix the behavior I’m getting in the video I linked to in my first post.

Eric Bowman
assemblycreative.com
ericsbowman.com

[Eric Bowman]

Thanks for doing the benchmark guys. I only wish I would have waited to buy my ATI 5870.

SO this doesn’t help much, but here’s what you guys can expect with a 4,1 model Mac Pro with the following specs:

– 2.4Ghz 8 core Xeon (2009?)
– ATI Radeon HD 5870 (1GB Ram)
– 24GB Ram
– Rendering to a Hitachi 2TB 7200RPM SATA drive

GRAND TOTAL RENDER TIME! 5hours and 45minutes. Ugh. That was using the BGRenderer plugin too.

I just bought the 5870 for Maya and I’m on 10.6.8. Guess it’s time to get a MacVidCards nVidia GTX 570 and Lion. Wondering if it would be better to wait until Mountain Lion ships?

Eric Bowman
assemblycreative.com
ericsbowman.com

[Eric Bowman]

Yeah I’ve been following the rumors. Im not in a position to upgrade the whole machine right now, but I can definitely upgrade the video card to something that works optimally with CS6. I’d love to see some benchmarks for Macs and the tiny selection of supported cards we have available.

Eric Bowman
assemblycreative.com
ericsbowman.com

[Eric Bowman]

I never knew about Compressor Repair until now. That TOTALLY fixed it. Thanks man!

Eric Bowman

[Eric Bowman]

Yeah that’s my latest solution as well. 🙂

Doing a reference movie should work fine, it’s just that extra step ya know.

I think I’m just wishing for something that isn’t there. For example if you dragged the first image of a sequence onto a Droplet from compressor, I wish it popped up a dialog that said something like, “Do you want to use this image sequence?”

For now I’m doing what you have suggested. I might still think about an automater workflow in which I just add a folder that contains the image sequence and have it do all of this stuff at once.

I’ve also wondered if Terminal with some command line magic would do the trick.

Thanks for the suggestions man.

Eric Bowman

[Eric Bowman]

I definitely tried with no success. Just kind of curious if there was something special I needed to do to make it recognize the image sequence. I’m thinking my only option is to add a job in Compressor or think about using an Automater workflow.

Eric Bowman

[Eric Bowman]

Thanks so much Dan!!!

I just learned a ton from you. I need to buy you some beer or something. This was EXACTLY what I needed. You win an AWESOME award for the day. 😉

Eric Bowman

[Eric Bowman]

I respectfully disagree Mr. Barker. If someone has this same issue in the future they might at least stumble upon this post. I did, and it just save me quite a bit of time.

Eric Bowman

[Eric Bowman]

That is EXACTLY what I did too. You didn’t save as RTF either if you were getting the TXT extension. If I save in RTF format it never imports into Final Cut. You are using version 6 too, I truly think that’s why it’s working. I have tried numerous times and it never brings in the line breaks. The funny thing is that the line breaks are there inside the Viewer Window > Controls > Text Parameters area. But in the sequence and the canvas it does not show the line breaks, which is where it matters the most.

This has to be a bug to my knowledge. All I can say is do NOT UPGRADE to 7.0.2. I think version 7.0 and 7.0.1 are fine, it’s just the latest greatest update that broke the XML export/import feature.

If you can get this to work on someone’s machine using 7.0.2 I’ll buy you a case of beer. 🙂

Eric Bowman

[Eric Bowman]

[John Young] “I’m not sure what the problem is –
The file should be in RTF, but must end in XML.
I am suspicious of using dreamweaver too why not just TextEdit?
1. export XML file.
2. Open in TextEdit.
3. Do search and replace.
4. Save as an RTF document but replace .TXT or .RTF with .XML. Ignore any warnings about the file being unusable. You can always export it again, or re-name it…
6. Import XML file into FCP.

I suggest extreme caution in editing don’t add any extra line feeds or characters.
Good luck.”

Thanks for the reply. I got around to trying this again on another project, and your suggestion does not work for me. First of all you can’t convert the FCP created XML document to Rich Text then save it as a XML file again inside of TextEdit. Just tried it and it said you have to use RTF as the extension. So I did that and just renamed the file to XML and when you import it in Final Cut it pops up an error dialog that reads,”XML Translation was aborted due to a critical error”.

I really don’t see how Dreamweaver would muck with the file either as it’s just a text editor like TextEdit with more bells and whistles. But heck, I’m willing to pop this thing open on XP using Notepad (or any text editor for that matter) if it truly remedies the problem.

I ALWAYS get two spaces for line breaks when I export from FCP version 7.0.2. It’s simple to put the line break in the XML document using a simple find and replace, but I can not figure out how to get FCP to read those in as an actual line break. I really thought you were onto something there with the RTF suggestion. 🙂 I’m still thinking it’s just a bug with FCP 7.0.2.

If you have any additional suggestions I’m all ears. I’d love to find a fix for this problem.

Eric Bowman