[Geoff Walton]

You’re absolutely right – it’s just a whole load of clips in 50 – 60 bins and the lazy part of me was trying to get out of doing some donkey work.

Thanks again for the sage advice and the timely response.

Geoff

[Geoff Walton]

Hi Jeremy,

Wow, thanks for responding so quickly! Um yeah, that works – I tried changing the field dominance in Sequence Settings to None earlier, and it fixed the flickering transitions/fades, but I experienced the same jaggy artifacting of my clips that the other person described. So, I changed the clip setting’s field dominance to None as well – still artifacting – I didn’t realize that on my machine at least, I’d have to wait a moment for FCP to update, so this time I waited and voila, presto fixo. Also, it seems some clips like to have the transition removed, get rendered as None, and then have the transition re-applied – believe me, no big deal compared with my workaround.

Mucho Thanko!

Two more questions for you related to this change:

1) Are there any issues outputting this new sequence to PAL D-Beta? I thought PAL and Upper Field Dominance went together like peanut butter and jelly – there’s probably some kind of military/dominatrix pun in there somewhere, but I’ll leave well enough alone.

2)Are there any negative consequences to just going hog-wild and deleting my clips from the browser? (Consequences other than potential organizational head-aches) Actually, now that I write the word head-aches out, I’ll probably just change ’em to None in the browser…
Still, I am curious.

1000 thanks!

Geoff

[Geoff Walton]

Howdy Steve,

Did you ever sort out your PAL timeline effects problem? I’m having exactly the same problems in the project I’m working on as you’ve described. I have pretty much determined that FCP effects are biased towards 23.98 or 29.97 timelines, and seem to be read as such by clips that are 25 fps.

I work on a fairly new 2 X 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Mac with 16 GB of 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM ram, and I have a HUGE systems 1.8 TB RAID that is pretty much rock-solid. I have FCP version 6.0.3, and I output to both PAL and NTSC Digi-Beta decks.

My work around is to copy the clips on either side of the transition in the finder (I use a MAC) and put them in their own folder. Then I batch conform them to 23.98 in Cinema Tools, import them into a 23.98 timeline in FCP that’s sized to PAL sD (720X576). Next I build my transition, render it, export the frames as an FCP Movie with the transition or fade in them (with a couple extra frames on either side for handles), then re batch conform the finished fixed clip back to 25 fps in Cinema Tools, and finally cut it back into my PAL timeline. There may be a tiny amount of quality loss but as I’m working in Uncompressed 10-bit it’s negligible, especially compared with the broadcast reject levels of ringing and interlace errors I get it I don’t use this work around. Also, I’m working on an animated series so I have a little wiggle room to cheat the frame difference I get using this method, but it’s incredibly time consuming. There’s lots of transitions in this series – so this is turning into a real nightmare!

The other thing I’ve noticed is that the problem has been somewhat intermittent! Some of my timelines seem to behave fine, and others do not! I’m using exactly the same settings in each timeline I work in – which are PAL 720X576,Aspect ratio is Anamorphic, CCIR 601/DV PAL (5:4), Pixel Aspect Ratio is PAL – CCIR 601 (720X576), Field dominance is Upper (Odd), Frame rate is 25 fps, and the compression is Uncompressed 10-bit.

If you or anyone else has a more elegant workaround, or any information on updates from FCP, or can direct me to a third party effects plug-in set designed specifically for FCP PAL timelines, I’d be much obliged!

Thanks for your time,
Geoff