[Henry Truong]

What type of system are you working on? It is possible sometimes that the system may not be able to handle the codec you’re trying to capture to.

-henry

HD Creative Services
http://www.hdcreativeservices.com
323.461.3715

[Henry Truong]

I’m not familiar with the audio editing in FCP as I learned surround mixing in Pro Tools. But to answer your other questions:

The standard configuration for surround sound setup is LRC, Lfe, Ls, Rs setup. To do this you would go to your sequence settings and go to the audio outputs tab. You will want to designate your 6 outputs and set them to dual mono. Then you will go back to your timeline, and you bring in your 5.1 mix as follows:

Left channel on 1
Right channel on 2
Center on 3
Lfe on 4
Left surround on 5
R surround on 6

There is an icon on each track that is to the right of the lock icon. You want to click on that and designate each channel to go to its corresponding output.

As far as 5.1 headphones, the best suggestion is to mix on an appropriate monitor configuration.

-henry

HD Creative Services
http://www.hdcreativeservices.com
323.461.3715

[Henry Truong]

You will need to use a display fit for viewing broadcast. And as far as fitting the original dimensions, it is not possible to do so on a standard definition DVD. Everything is going to be re-encoded into SD. If you want to get maximum quality out of what you have, you can play with the settings in Compressor to achieve maximum bit rate going to the DVD.

-henry

HD Creative Services
http://www.hdcreativeservices.com
323.461.3715

[Henry Truong]

I believe if you are using Quicktime Conversion to export, when you go to the size settings, there is an option to preserve aspect ratio. I did a quick test just right now, and if you check that option, and select letterbox, it should pillarbox the 4×3 file for you. Give that a try, and as noted above, do a small clip to test, and not a full export. Saves you from wasted time if the settings are incorrect.

One thing to note as well, typically it is referred to as 4:3, and not 3:4.

-henry

HD Creative Services
http://www.hdcreativeservices.com
323.461.3715

[Henry Truong]

Just to add to this discussion. I attempted to export a sequence into a QT file for editorial to view. I got that same error message when trying to export out of the master project, even though the first two reels exported with no problems. After coming across this thread, I created an independent project containing only the third reel that was giving me the error. Upon attempting an export out of this new project, I was greeted by the same error message.

This has happened today within the last 20 mins, so I have not yet had a chance to dig into it and see if I can find any ways around it. If anybody has any other ideas, let us hear it. Hopefully somebody has found a resolution, or at least a way to find out what the problem is, because that generic little error message doesn’t do much to help the trouble shooting process.

-henry

HD Creative Services
http://www.hdcreativeservices.com
323.461.3715

[Henry Truong]

Are you saying that sometimes you see it in widescreen and sometimes you see it squeezed?

-henry

HD Creative Services
http://www.hdcreativeservices.com
323.461.3715

[Henry Truong]

The media manager suggestion sounds like the best way to go. But if you’re only linking to a few small files then just a copy/paste of the project file and a reconnect shouldn’t be too difficult. Since you’ll be using a newer version of FCP to work on, you could always go the XML route to be able to bring the changes back to your system.

-henry

HD Creative Services
http://www.hdcreativeservices.com
323.461.3715

[Henry Truong]

I guess it depends what kind of options you have. Outside of work, I run FCP on my Macbook, my only other option is DVCPRO-HD, which I haven’t tested out yet. I can’t imagine the HD video on this little handheld to be so good that it warrants using uncompressed or anything of the sort though.

[Henry Truong]

Depending on what you are using them for, you can encode them into HDV. I have the same camera, and I am assuming you are using it just for personal shooting. If so, HDV is more than good enough.

[Henry Truong]

I believe if you nest the sequence, it will also read the TC as being generated by the sequence, and not your source clips.