[Jeff Coleman]

I think Rafael had it right.
Don’t change the scale and position. Just change the distort parameter alone when you paste the attribute to all the clips.
I don’t think Final Cut is savvy enough to change the distort parameter of all the clips in the sequence when you change the sequence settings to a codec with a different pixel aspect ratio.
Anybody confirm that?

[Jeff Coleman]

Multiple codecs were tried (10bit Uncompressed, DV, Motion JPEG A, JPEG2000, mp4, Animation) on a variety of media drives (SAN capable of HD 10bit Uncompressed, a RAID capable of 130MBs, external SATA drives and internal SATA drives).
I don’t think the codecs could’ve been easier and the drives faster for all practical purposes.
Can you play that Motion project smoothly in any codec on any drive?

[Jeff Coleman]

Just had a friend confirm the above results.
He used AE on a macbook pro and a desktop system both running Leopard and the latest QT. He could not get the movie to play back without jumping on either system.
How about you?

[Jeff Coleman]

I’ve done some further testing and am a bit mystified.
The effect I’m trying is:
One layer.
One still photo scaled to 50%.
Two keyframes so the photo travels from off-screen right to off-screen left in 6 seconds in a standard def (720×486) interlaced frame.
I’ve rendered it to Uncompressed 10bit, Animation and DV.

Motion can’t play it smoothly in a timeline.
Motion can’t render a QT movie that plays in QT Player smoothly.
After Effects yields the same results.

Both macs yield the same results in Motion. Only desktop has AE installed.

[Jeff Coleman]

It wasn’t but setting it to Best on both machines may have made a slight improvement it still renders a somewhat jumpy movie.

[Jeff Coleman]

Did the re-install with permissions repair before and after with the same results. Even in AJA VTR Exchange I’m not getting smooth playback.
I tried booting from a two-week old clone of 10.5.6 made prior to the updates, but same result.

[Jeff Coleman]

Thanks.
One HQ recompressed to ProRes std still provides jumpy QT player playback from either internal HD or external RAID.

[Jeff Coleman]

Thanks for all your input.

So David, I’m fuzzy about your recommendation. Are you suggesting to recompress all the HQ files to standard ProRes and then see if I can play those on my laptop?

Otherwise, I hear others saying I should be able to play these files on my laptop with no problem (even if HQ quality is unnecessary).

And if I should be able to play these files without a hiccup then perhaps Ben is correct in that I should try a fresh erase and install?

BTW I can’t play these files in QT player either without it being a bit jumpy.

[Jeff Coleman]

Hmmmm I spoke to soon.

Connecting the IO (no new software added since previous test) I do notice even with external video turned off that I get jittery playback.

And after playing the clips for about 15 minutes with the IO HD active, now the red render bars are back on my HQ clips and will not play without being rendered.

Strange.

I’ll get back as soon as I know something. If not sooner. 😉

[Jeff Coleman]

Just finished with AppleCare folks.
Problem SOLVED.
Apparently a corrupt preferences file in the user’s Preferences folder.
This was more than just trashing FCP prefs. I took out all the preference files from that folder and relaunched FCP again. This time it played those clips with NO red render bar.

Now I’m off to trying it with the IO HD attached.

Thanks for your help.