[Gabriele De simone]

Hi everyone,

This is Gabe from Noise Industries… the problem has two very likely sources. Most (all?) of the Boris installers include a “fourth party” component called AlphaBlendMode, installed at a specific location on your system. Trouble is, the version included with the installer is 1.0, which is not compatible with Lion and may give troubles on Snow Leopard as well.

The first step should therefore be to head over to the following website and download a newer version of this component:

https://kineme.net/release/AlphaBlendMode/11

You need to be very careful in locating “AlphaBlendMode 1.0” and replacing it with version 1.1 above. You will find AlphaBlendMode at the following location on your system:

STARTUP DISC > Library > Graphics > Quartz Composer Patches

You know you have found the correct directory when you see an existing file named “AlphaBlendMode.plugin” in there. That is the version 1.0 you must replace.

The second likely culprit of these artifacts could be the graphics card. It can (and often does) happen with plug-ins from any vendor. The fact that you may be using lots of plug-ins on your timeline simply increases the likelihood of this problem.

In short, this is a known texture-corruption problem that affects mainly the ATI Radeon X1600 that was shipped in the first generation of Intel Mac Book Pros, and in certain iMacs. It is possible that the same corruption also happens on Mac Pros equipped with the ATI Radeon X1900. There is no *real* solution, since Apple would have to fix the graphics drivers and they are unlikely to do so (these graphics cards are very old by now). There are a couple possible workarounds.
The simplest is to open your “Sequence Settings” window, switch to the “Video Processing” tab, and make sure the “Render in 8-bit YUV” option is selected. This reduces the amount of video memory required by your renders, and thus reduces the possibility of running into the problem.

If any of the above is not clear, feel free to contact us on tech support. The best way to do so is by following the instructions on our support page, so that we have a system profile in our hands to speed up the process:

https://www.noiseindustries.com/support

Hope this helps!
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC

[Gabriele De simone]

Hi Chris,

Could you please check the type of graphics card installed on your system? That kind of corruption should only happen on unsupported hardware, such as the old NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 that shipped with Power Mac G5s in 2003 and 2004.

You can determine what graphics card is installed on your system by selecting the “About this Mac” command under the Apple menu. When the system summary appears, click the “More Info…” button, which will launch the System Profiler application. Graphics cards are listed under the “Graphics/Displays” section of your system profile.

Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC

[Gabriele De simone]

The FxFactory “engine” is free, and you can use all freebie plug-ins simply by filling out their registration form:

https://www.noiseindustries.com/fxfactory/free

The trial period only refers to FxFactory Pro, one of the many commercial products whose trial version is included in the installer. Commercial products can be purchased and unlocked as needed. Freebies do not have an expiration date.

Regards,
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC

[Gabriele De simone]

Hi Rafael,

This has indeed become a big problem. Final Cut Pro does not do a good job of managing video memory (Motion can render anything we’ve thrown at it in high-precision, without ever producing an error.)

All FxPlug hardware accelerated plug-ins are affected, and I’m betting that we (developers + Apple) must all be working on solutions to this problem. Apple is in the best position to fix this issue, but hopefully you won’t have to wait much longer to see all vendors come up with a workaround.

Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC
https://www.noiseindustries.com

[Gabriele De simone]

Hi Ian,

That’s an error that will appear for hardware-accelerated FxPlug effects. Final Cut Pro may have determined that your graphics card does not have enough video memory to render the given effect. Final Cut Pro often makes this decision incorrectly, which explains why it’ll sometimes work.

Here’s a couple things to try:

1) Simply save your project, quit and restart FCP. On a fresh start, it’ll often render the sequence without the error.

2) Make sure that you are rendering in 8-bit YUV:
– Open the Sequence Settings window and switch to the Video Processing tab
– Select the “Render in 8-bit YUV” option
– Try rendering the sequence again

Hope this helps,
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC
https://www.noiseindustries.com

[Gabriele De simone]

Our company recently released a free plug-in called Pan and Zoom. It does come with a number of predefined animation curves and hopefully works well enough for what you’re trying to do:

https://www.noiseindustries.com/fxfactory/panandzoom/

Most of the Pan and Zoom plug-ins out there are great time-savers for “classic” photo animations. If you’re looking for a more sophisticated mix of image animation and special effects Motion should become your friend: it has a short learning curve and lets you experiment more quickly than Final Cut Pro.

Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC

[Gabriele De simone]

FxFactory 2.0.3 will work on Tiger systems, and support Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 and Motion 2.1.2 as well:

https://www.noiseindustries.com/support/fxfactoryupdates/files/fxfactory_203.html

As Tapio kindly pointed out, it is relatively easy to create plug-ins if you already have a composition. Although you need Pro to do this, our trial version lasts 15 days so you should be able to create and use something quickly enough, within the free trial.

Regards,
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC

[Gabriele De simone]

I think there is some confusion here between journaling and Spotlight indexing.

Journaling is a feature of the file system (e.g. HFS+, ZFS, NTFS, etc.) A Journaling file system is one that keeps a fail-safe log of all read/write operations, and updates the log according to what operations complete successfully. This “journal” allows the file system to remain in a known state and to be immune to crashes.

I would strongly advise that you turn on journaling for external discs as well. It will likely come in handy if you accidentally unplug the drive while transferring files, for instance. The performance hit that comes from enabling journaling is negligible on modern hardware.

Spotlight indexing is the process of observing all the changes to the file system (so the Spotlight engine sits on top of the file system, whatever that may be) and maintaining an index of metadata for each file on the disc. I am not sure how indexing could interfere with Log and Transfer, but that’s just ignorance on my part: I’m sure there’s plenty of things that can go wrong with it…

Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC

[Gabriele De simone]

I think Motion takes in consideration the graphics card that is connected to the main display. The main display is the one where the menubar appears. You can set the main display via the System Preferences. Have you tried making sure that the main display is connected to the X1900?

Hope this helps,
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC

[Gabriele De simone]

Hi James,

The symptom you describe is apparently caused by a problem in the Software Update process that brought your Final Cut Studio 2 applications up-to-date.

The general symptoms are:
– loss of built-in as well as third-party FxPlug filters in Final Cut Pro (e.g. Apple’s SmoothCam filter)
– loss of Compressor functionality when projects that use FxPlugs are sent to Compressor
– loss of DVD Studio Pro functionality when using Motion projects (e.g. as a background) that use FxPlug plug-ins.
– in most cases, FxPlug plug-ins continue to work inside Motion 3.

The solution is to reinstall Final Cut Studio 2 from the installation discs, and to apply the automatic software updates immediately after that. In rare cases, it is necessary to wipe the system clean (i.e. reinstall Mac OS X) before installing Final Cut Studio 2.

Regards,
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC
https://www.noiseindustries.com