Francois Stark
Forum Replies Created
-
[MitchJi] “Hi,
Does this setting effect the quality of MPEG2 compression in Compressor or Bitvice?
Does this setting effect the quality when written out to DV tape?
Does this setting effect the quality if the clip is imported back into FCP?
Thanks,
Mitch”
No,No,No. Only affects on-screen quicktime player playback quality. That’s why people think DV quality sucks. They just don’t know about the “high quality” switch!
-
Exported DV movies can look a lot better. Open the movie in quicktime, press apple-J to get the movie properties. Select the video track and go down to quality. Select “high quality enabled”. By default it is off – duhh, apple why???? Switch it on and look in awe and wonder at the new-found quality.
You have to save the file again to save this setting, otherwise QT will remember high quality as off.
Regards
Francois -
Are the projects backward compatible? Can FCP 5’s projects be opened by 4.5? I know 4.5’s projects could not be opened by 4.1.
Thanks
Francois -
[PK] ” be able to run all 3 programs depending on the client.”
Now why on earth would you want to do that? I can’t think of one reason to go back to FCP 4.1 from FCP 4.5. Does you client insist? Or maybe you work on a client’s programme which he must import back into a FCP 4.1 system. Hey, I’ve just though of a reason to use 4.1! Just not a good one – get your client to upgrade as well! It’s long overdue.
FCP 5.0 I can understand, we are all a bit skittish because it is a .0 release – if you risk your business on 5.0 you should have your head examined…
Regards
Francois -
You are confusing the uses of the QT and MPEG 2 files.
QT uncompressed or QT DV is what you would export from FCP. This is a big file and does not have to fit into 4.7GB for the DVD, because compressor or DVDStudio will recompress this file to Mpeg 2 for the DVD format. QT Uncompressed is about 1.2GB per minute, which means a 30 minute video will take up about 36GB!
The compressed MPEG 2 file, together with the audio file(s) must fit into 4.7GB. DVDStudio and Compressor have several settings to trade off the quality versus size of the resultant MPEG 2 file to get it to fit into 4.7GB for the length of video you have.
All cleared up?
Francois
-
I’ve had similar problems with our Cinewave system several times, and most of the times the culprit was the FCP prefs file. Delete and start from scratch.
Disk transfer rates are always the first suspect, but often that is not where the problem is. If FCP’s prefs are scrambled it can act very unpredictable, including dropping frames in the simplest effects.
I must say, most the the times I had this problem was with FCP 4.1 and older Cinewave drivers. The newest stuff seems to corrupt the prefs less often, and out decklink and Kona LS card systems have not had this problem.
If it happens regularly I would suspect the RAM of causing the problem.
Regards
Francois -
Hi Bryan
[Bryan Shelton] “Every problem with Media Manager is doubled when sharing media in FCP. “
This is a scary statement. I’m in the process of getting a SAN for four FCP systems, based on SanMP – so now you have me rattled.
I’m aware of the media manager problems and the related one of reconnecting clips on the same drive in the same project without even going through media manager – if you have a long clip with a speed effect on it, you will need to redo the speed change.
Can you tell me what kind of problems get worse, and what SAN system are you running?
I would assume that when using shared storage, the media reside on the same drives even when seen from different clients, and would thus almost never need to be reconnected. I get similar results by just using network mapping using gigabit ethernet: I almost never need to reconnect. But running media sharing in the background results in dropped frames in the foreground and that is why I’m going to SAN.
Thanks
Francois -
One more thing that impressed me about QT 7 pro: multithreading! Yesterday I played around with the four HD movie previews (in H.264) from Apple’s trailers website. The first one I downloaded (fantasic 4) looks like it’s been uprezzed from SD, the other three’s visual quality is amazing! Runs natively at 1280 x 540.
So I started to convert the first one into DVCPRO HD 60p. Fine – while that was running, I opened the next H.264 HD trailer, and started exporting the second one as well. It tags the second progress bar to the bottom of the first one… And then I opened up another DV PAL quicktime file and played it.
All happening at the same time!
Yep – now we can import and convert multiple files at the same time without waiting for the first export to finish – a crude way of batch processing, but it is effective and will definitely help us here.
Regards
Francois -
Hi
I’m just playing around in QT 7 pro and here’s its capture options for a G4 1.25DP with a AJA Kona LS card installed:
Video source:
choose between automatic (I assume that’s firewire DV Pal or NTSC only) and AJA Kona PAL or NTSC 8 bit or 10 bit. That’s only to get the video in.Microphone:
choose between Automatic (I assume that’s firewire) and Built-in Line in or AJA KonaQuality:
choose between MPEG 4, H264 or Native. The Mpeg 4 and H264 are highly compressed versions for email use only. You can not change quality or compression or size (240 x0 180). Native would be uncompressed (8 or 10) or firewire according to your video source selection.Save files to:
Well, that’s obvious…Now this system only has a SD card. Maybe of you get QT 7 pro on a HD card you can capture natively, but that would be HD uncompressed. Unless you get a live DVPRO HD firewire signal into the firewire port?
Regards
Francois -
Hi
The DL extreme is only PCI, not PCI-Express. Maybe that’s the difference – who knows? We had many problems and tried many solutions – this has been going for more than a year now.
Since the problems always pointed to the DL card, and not the Parhelia, we tried swopping to difference PCI-X slots, always using the newest drivers, even tried the WHQL drivers. Nothing helped until we removed the Parhelia.