[Harry Powell]

Thanks for your responses. I’ve cancelled the order.

Looking back I’m not surprised that I missed the fact that the HC38 was NTSC, considering it was from a UK site selling (virtually) all PAL equipment. Hopefully you can see what I mean: http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/127420

And if indeed the (PAL) HC37 firewire input is disabled, is there not a way of ‘abling’ it? (i.e. a bit like region restricted DVD players can often be easily made multiregional). And is this just a Sony ‘quirk’?

I suppose an analogue video input is completely asking too much LOL. Am I mistaken in recalling from years ago that this was a common feature of Sony camcorders so that you could convert your old vhs tapes to DV?

It’s all a bit frustrating, but might still go for the Sony HC37 unless anyone has any alternative suggestions for the budget (i.e. in order of importance: ext mic input, FW in, analogue video in..)

Thanks
DH

[Harry Powell]

Hi again Jerry

If I understand correctly, you are saying that I have to get to the color I want to ‘manually’, i.e. by eye?

The color I want to switch to though doesn’t exist on this clip. By that I mean, I can’t select it with the ‘color picker’ or see it ‘in situ’ to match by eye.

The color I want to switch to is the background color I created in a Photoshop document, to be used as a background menu in DVD Studio Pro.

The clip is effectively a scaled down ‘animation-type graphic’ which nests within that Photoshop document without showing it’s edges (hence the importance of exactly matching the color).

I combine the two in QT pro and it has worked well in the past when I did the ‘color replace’ in Premiere.. but I thought it best to ‘decomission’ Premiere, and learn how to do these kind of things in FCP.. especially since Premiere now frequently crashes on launch, since upgrading my system.

Hope that’s not too much information!

Thanks for the quick response
DH

[Harry Powell]

Hi Jerry

Thanks for the tip. I also found instructions in the FCP pdf manual after all. I’m still baffled however.

I’ve got a plain white area, which I want to change to a very specific color for which I have an RGB value (taken in Photoshop), in this case R-255, G-161, B-72.

I can select the color to be changed and can see how to change it but not how to change it to a specific color using an RGB value.

I’m looking at the 3 Way Color Corrector, and I’ve also had a look at the ‘Numeric’ option, but I’m completely lost. I guess I’m just looking for 3 little boxes where I can type in 255-161-72.. or am I asking too much?

DH

[Harry Powell]

Hi again Steve

I did try DVCPRO50PAL and file sizes were a little on the large side for me. I’ve search for DVCPRO25PAL in QT but can’t see it, unless perhaps it is the one listed as ‘Apple DVDPRO-PAL’.

I’ll try and find a site that lists the differences between all these codecs in QT. There must be one out there.

Thanks again for your time.

DH

[Harry Powell]

Hi Steve

Just did a short test with ‘FCP uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2’ (if that’s what you meant?)and the resulting file size is enormous, ie nearly 30x the original, ie. not really practical for me.

With ‘DV50’ not sure if you meant ‘DVCPRO50 PAL’ or ‘Apple DV PAL’ or one of the others. File sizes are more managable for these, particularly ‘Apple DV’, but still much bigger than what I tried previously, ie. Motion JPEG A.

Would these be a definite improvement over JPEG, as I’m finding it hard to judge much difference with the short tests I have done (it’s been a long day.. sigh).

many thanks
DH

[Harry Powell]

Apologies Ben. I just realized that, by ‘MPEG SC’ you meant MPEG Streamclip!

Not sure what you mean by ‘I’d bring it all into FCP to edit via MPEG SC’ though?

[Harry Powell]

Hi Ben

I’m curious about ‘MPEG SC’ but can’t seem to find it in FCP3 or Quicktime.

Of course you are right about quality issues in recompressing MPEG2.

However doing it within MPEG Streamclip is lossless because there is no re-compression needed. VOB’s are demuxed to m2v’s/AIF’s. The m2v can be edited to the nearest half second and the AIF’s frame-accurately, elsewhere, and ‘re-combined’. These can then be used ‘as is’ to burn with DSP (AFAIK at least).

It’s only a small fraction of the clips where I need to find a ‘frame-accurate’ editing solution.

Thanks
DH

[Harry Powell]

I agree the processor swap is the cause and that it was never approved by Media 100. But then neither was putting the Vincent 601 in any G4 and that worked for me. And I have tried the card with the original G4 processor back-in and it still works.

One solution is to dig out the original machine which the Vincent came with, i.e. a PowerMac 8600/250, just so I can still capture analogue video at exceptional quality, and then firewire that material over to the G4 and edit on that. I need the upgraded G4 because I’m learning DSP and FCP, with the aim of setting up a DVD showreel authoring service (perhaps some teaching).

The main thing I would lack though (which I didn’t before) is the ability to have a video output from my G4 Sawtooth to a TV monitor while I’m editing/authoring. On a shoestring budget, I’m considering a used ATI Radeon 8500 or a 7000 (for the S-Video output). I’m confused though whether they’ll work as required (i.e. as good as the Vincent did) and whether to go with an AGP version (replacing the G4’s original one) or a PCI version? And I need it to work in both 9.2.2 and 10.3.9, i.e. Premiere 4.2.1 and FCP if possible.

Also, in the G4 (minus the Vincent card but with the Media 100 transcoder), how do I retain the quality of my archive of Premiere/Media 100 compressed files, which I still need to edit/manipulate occasionally? I did some tests in Premiere 4.2.1 (OS 9), and it seems sometimes I could use the media 100 compression and sometimes I couldn’t. Is it best to re-compress with the Motion JPEG B codec if I can’t with Media 100? Incidentally FCP (version 3 at least) seems to works with Media 100 transcoders in OS 10, i.e. for compressing too (and used to work in OS9 with the Vincent card before the processor upgrade).

But I’m really reluctant to give up completely on getting the Vincent to work in the upgraded G4. Can I not ‘borrow’ the later Media 100 drivers/library/extensions from somewhere (but without the actual editing software) and at least try them? Will it definitely not work? Just for peace of mind if nothing else..

thanks for the responses
DH

p.s. Again apologies for the long post. Please someone tell me if I’m giving too much information, or if some questions are better suited to another thread or group.