Jeff Carpenter
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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How long is your video?
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…but with Intel happening early next year the quad doesn’t add up for me.
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It’s likely we won’t get Intel Powermacs until January of 2007. I certainly wouldn’t worry about what’s coming in 14 months when buying a computer. One could get a lot of work done in 14 months with a computer bought now. Not to mention that in 14 months we’ll all be looking forward to what’s coming out in 2008. There will always be something just around the corner, eventually you have to just jump on the train and hope for the best.
(And the 14-month number even assumes one would want to buy an Intel Powermac ASAP. I imagine most Final Cut users will wait for other early adopters to shake out the bugs.)
As you can tell, Michael, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your iedea. If anything, I would suggest going with the dual-2.3 chip instead of the quad. You said you’d be working on short projects, correct? The biggest advantage to getting a faster computer is the render/compression times. Now, I don’t know what you mean by “short,” but if they’re under a certain length the difference in render times might not be worth the money.
In other words, a faster machine might knock 20 minutes off the render of a full-length movie, but it would only save 20 second off the render of a 30 second spot. I don’t know what you’re working on, but it’s possible that having the maximum speed chip isn’t worth the extra price. Put the money into more RAM or something.
Anyway, the short answer is I think your idea is fine. The long answer is: Tell us more about what you do and we can give even better advice as to what you should look at.
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It could be something like a faulty logic board. Or maybe not, but whatever it is I’m betting it will need to be serviced by someone. That usually indicates that a part of the hardware needs to be repaired or replaced and for laptops I always suggest finding proffesional help to open them up.
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That might be just a bit too far. You’ll probably need something like this:
Search B&H for “Firewire Repeater” to get more options…that’s just one example.
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Do you have any version of Photoshop CS?
If so, the simplest way to do this is to go into Photoshop and select “New” from the File menu.
Select the preset: “NTSC DV Widescreen, 720×480 (with guides)”
Open your images and drag them into that new image. Size them however you want them to look and save that as a Photoshop document or TIFF. Then import that into FCP.
There are more direct ways to do this right in Final Cut but this one is nice because it corrects for the pixel changes so what you see in Photoshop is what you’ll get in the final video.
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First, use A.Pack (an application that should be on your machine) to turn those AIFF files into AC3 files. That will save some space.
Then try doing a 2-pass VBR at:
4.5 and 6See if those two things get you closer. If not, adjust the numbers slightly and try again. It’s all trial-and-error with this kind of stuff.
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First, try this:
1) Select all the tracks in the project and go to RENDER ONLY>AUDIO MIXDOWN. (Make sure all video is rendered too.)
That might take care of it, but just to be extra safe we’ll go one more step:
2) Go to EXPORT>QUICKTIME and make certain the settings are all exactly the same as your project. Make it self contained. (Wastes hard drive space but we’ll do it here to be tripple-safe.)
3) Take that QT file and put it into Compressor.
Try all of that and let us know what happens. And don’t worry what the QT file from step #2 looks like. You said an export looked bad before…ignore it and judge the final DVD on an NTSC television ONLY. Let us know what that looks like in the end…not anything on the computer.
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I think what happens is that when you export from Final Cut it knows where your transitions are and flags them for the program to spend more time on. When you put a file into compressor it doesn’t know the difference between a page-peel and a blank wall. It’s all one long video file as far as it’s concerned.
Ive usually found that exporting from FCP directly can look better but it can take a lot longer. Sometimes it’s worth that time, sometimes it’s not.
(This is all guesswork on my part, BTW. I don’t actually KNOW that this is how it works.)
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If you want to get REALLY into it, copy your video layer and paste it in the video track above itself. Blur the top layer until the rainbow starts to go away and then add a garbage matte to the top layer. Crop out everything except the blurred part.
Depending on the shot this could be simple or impossible. Just thought I’d mention it, though.
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I think you just want to use the Easy Setup and pick DV NTSC.
Now, I’m not exactly sure what the GL2 “Frame Mode” is. Is that like a stop-motion thing where it records just a few frames at a time? That doesn’t change my answer, but you should look through the FCP prefrences and make sure that ‘make new clip on timecode break’ (or something similar to that) is not selected as it might cause trouble.