[George Mizzell]

Michael

Thanks – I have pondered that but I have done large slideshows from all 2MB jpgs before without problems. i have split this into 2 sequences and the first one – done before the “update” had no problems. When I did the update then tried to reopen the file it has been nothing but disaster.

A little more info – The total of all the jpgs is around 400 MB – about 80 photos are 200-700 K and the rest would be 1.2-2.2 mb each. If I need to resize all photos in Adobe PS i can do that – of course it complete erases the 30+ hours I have already done in animating all the photos and resizing them since some are portrait and some are smaller that others. This is the slide show for my daughter’s wedding and I started in plenty of time to be done now but the past 18 hours of fighting Apple have thrown me way behind and don’t really have time to redo the entire show by 3pm tomorrow. The real problem is the Apple “update” and I am extremely interested in ANY solutions or suggestions that get me to the point I can complete the rendering in any form.

Thanks

George Mizzell
The SupermagnetMan

[George Mizzell]

Actually I have processed hundreds of videos from 2 minutes to 3 hours long on this computer and with the previous version before the deadly update yesterday. All of the rendering drive locations and everything as far as I can tell are still the same. Everything looks OK. I have gotten lots of Apple crashes where FCP dies and asks to send the report to Apple which I have done about 20 times so far and I only send the report about every 10th crash. I changed the Sequence settings for the timeline options – Thumbnail Display to name from Name + Thumbnail and that has stopped the relentless crashes. But now it will not render. Before on the 1 out 15 times that it would stay up it would render transitions while it was up. Then when I changed the thumbnail display option it stopped crashing but now will not render.

I have just selected very small segments – 3 – 10 second clips and it is rendering them to quicktime. I am not sure if that leads to a loss of quality or not. I had always tried to keep things to the highest quality and thought that rendering direct to compressor was the way to do that.

George Mizzell
The SupermagnetMan

[George Mizzell]

I am sooooo sorry – I submitted this from my iphone and got the numbers reversed – it is version 6.0.4.

George Mizzell
The SupermagnetMan

[George Mizzell]

Jeremy

Actually i have not heard of doing it that way. i have always rendered straight to compressor. None of the 5 or 6 books I have on FCP mentioned doing it that way. What do you mean by Reference movie?

Thanks

Oh, BTW sorry for the multiple posts. I submitted from the iphone and got no indication that I had tapped the button until the last one.

George Mizzell
The SupermagnetMan

[George Mizzell]

Certainly it plays DVDs. I use an old Dell Inspiron 5100 with DVD player and a home built dual p4 Xeon workstation with a Plextor 16X DVD reader writer as my pc test computers and 2 different home DVD players. I have probably produced over 300 different DVDs on these macs that all tested on these players and worked fine until now. I have not been able to resolve it even yet and I am in the middle of a final burn direct to ipod format and then copy that mp4 file to a dvd as my final option. Something is still definitely wrong with the setup and there does not appear to be a way to communicate adequately to have anyone help me get any closer to solving it.

George Mizzell
The SupermagnetMan

[George Mizzell]

Zane

Well, still not success. I carried the original captured file to my macbook and created a new FCP project and imported it and rendered it to the basic settings below –

In FCP the Summary settings show everything at DV NTSC. The source video shows as 720×480 – DV/DVCPRO – 29.97fps, NTSC-CCIR 601.

I went into Compressor and chose DVD:Best Quality 90 minutes (the source is about 55 minutes). I chose both the dolby and MPEG-2 6.2MBPS 2-pass. I let it process and then Go to DVD Studio and drop it in the timeline (I am not trying to do anymore than get it to play). Nothing on the menu except the asset as a button – click on it and it plays.

Then created a DVD Studio project and set it up like this:

The DVD Studio Encoding settings are set to SD 4:3 – MEPG-2 SD – 2 pass.

Still works great on macs but not a single pc in sight can even detect there is anything on the disc. i now have 9 dvds burned – each with different settings and still no success.

I have about an hour left or I will just give him the Ipod version which works great.

George Mizzell
The SupermagnetMan

[George Mizzell]

Walter

Thanks but unfortunately that is not working correctly for some reason. I am on the same timeline but I am not exporting as QT -I am going directly to compressor and choosing the DVD 90 minute basic settings. Then to DVD pro and dropping it back in to the same timeline i had in previously in DVD pro and burning. Naturally it works great on my macs but the guy who needs it has a pc notebook and he leaves a little later today and needs to take a working copy with him.

Thanks
George

George Mizzell
The SupermagnetMan

[George Mizzell]

Once again – forget the HD term completely. I am not trying to turn this project into HD. I do not have 2 completely separate computer systems with 2 different installations of FCP on it and so I use it to do both SD and HD projects. Until now SD has always worked great. When I got the HDV camera a few weeks ago i started exploring the HD editing and authoring. I am learning it and that is not the problem. However when I had a urgent need to burn an SD project that (once again) I shot about a year ago with the GL1 as SD. I simply did a File Open from the FCP menu and it opens up. FCP did not have the foresight to make it easy to switch from HD to SD and there are many little settings throughout the program that have to be changed to work in SD or HDV. I would strongly suggest the next version have a one step pull down that switches everything to SD 4:3 / SD 16:9 or HD 4:3 / HD 16:9.

Now the problem – Once I reopened the original SD project and rendered through Compressor to the basic SD 720×480 4:3 option and went on to DVD Pro, it will not work on standard DVD players anymore. Obviously one of the many settings that I changed while playing with the HD project has not yet been rediscovered by me so i can return to normal SD mode. I sure wish you could comprehend this problem. I would like to have had this rendering while I slept. Now I guess I will move all the 12GB of content over to the macbook pro and try to render from there – maybe it still works.

George Mizzell
The SupermagnetMan

[George Mizzell]

Zane

Thanks for some input. I don’t think i am any closer to a solution but i think it is more due to my inept attempt to state the situation accurately. Naturally i was not importing from an HD DVD, but from an HDV camcorder. That is still not the problem I was seeking help with. I was giving that as background as to why my previous SD DVDs worked but does not work now.

The problem at hand is that a previous made SD DVD project that started with SD 720×480 video captured from the GL1 last year has worked fine and play s in other DVD players and PCs without any problems – now it does not work because i have been exploring setting to try and convert the HDV project into a 720x 480 SD file. Forget that endeavor for the moment and let me recap the SD project settings.

In FCP the Summary settings show everything at DV NTSC. The source video shows as 720×480 – DV/DVCPRO – 29.97fps, NTSC-CCIR 601.

I went into Compressor and chose DVD:Best Quality 90 minutes (the source is about 55 minutes). I chose both the dolby and MPEG-2 6.2MBPS 2-pass. I let it process and then Go to DVD Studio and drop it in the timeline (I am not trying to do anymore than get it to play). Nothing on the menu except the asset as a button – click on it and it plays.

The DVD Studio Encoding settings are set to SD 4:3 – MEPG-2 SD – 2 pass.

This is the problem I need solved and this is the one that I want to get to work tonight.

Thanks
George

George Mizzell
The SupermagnetMan

[George Mizzell]

Actually I want to do both but DV is the main interest at this time because all I am doing is compressing the final clips to 320×240. The subject is just a single person explaining things. I am developing an online training site that will be all video but everything will be a series of lots of 2-10 minute videos. Ultimately I have a lot of other projects I will be doing in HDV. It seems as if my problem might be related to the cameras auto focus feature and since I am teaching and using a white board the focal length might be varying that 1 foot distance back and forth and it is not enough to really look out of focus but not good enough to look sharp. The camera is on a tripod and really is not moved during any of the filming.

Hope this helps. I just tried 30fps – DV and it seems to look a little better than the 60i did. I improved the color by using a piece of bright white paper and doing a manual white balance every time.

Thanks
George

George Mizzell
The SupermagnetMan