[Jeff Greenberg]

How did you copy the material?

Best,

Jeff G

Apple Master Trainer
Avid Cert. Instructor DS/MC
Avid & Color Videos Vasst.com
Compressor Essentials Lynda.com

[Jeff Greenberg]

Try this:
Set the Canvas (or viewer) to 100%. This is the only way to see the fields in FCP.
Now, step through the footage, looking for areas of high motion.
If the footage looks like the fields are interlaced with the 3:2 pattern of frames (3 good frames, 2 very odd/interlaced frames)…over and over…then it’s truly 24 frames with a telecine field pattern.

Best,

Jeff G

Apple Master Trainer
Avid Cert. Instructor DS/MC
Avid & Color Videos Vasst.com
Compressor Essentials Lynda.com

[Jeff Greenberg]

Sam, no FCP doesn’t compress native dv. You can capture the HDV as ProRes directly from camera….but DV is DV.
(Also, DV is 4:2:0 in Pal, 4:1:1 in NTSC; HDV is 4:2:0 in both.)

I’m always curious about the following: are you making the judgements based on the Canvas? The outboard monitor? If you take it in via component and it’s fine, then yes, it’s likely the footage. If I were to bring it into MC, FCP or PPro, it’d all look the same.

Best,

Jeff G

Apple Master Trainer
Avid Cert. Instructor DS/MC
Avid & Color Videos Vasst.com
Compressor Essentials Lynda.com

[Jeff Greenberg]

Usually the ‘all of a sudden’ moments are damaged preferences.

If this always worked up till now, the first step is to trash your FCP preferences.

I’ll ask the questions that are obvious, but have to be answered:
You take footage that should have audio in the viewer and you put it on the timeline and then you can hear the audio?
When it’s in the viewer, do the audio meters move?
When you have the clip loaded in the viewer, are there patch panel inputs on the timeline?

Best,

Jeff G

Apple Master Trainer
Avid Cert. Instructor DS/MC
Avid & Color Videos Vasst.com
Compressor Essentials Lynda.com

[Jeff Greenberg]

If you export it as a QT reference is it still out of sync?
What if you reimport it?

Best,

Jeff G

Apple Master Trainer
Avid Cert. Instructor DS/MC
Avid & Color Videos Vasst.com
Compressor Essentials Lynda.com

[Jeff Greenberg]

There is a way to get FCP to find ’empty’ gaps. It’s called find gap under the Mark menu

Best,

Jeff G

Apple Master Trainer
Avid Cert. Instructor DS/MC
Avid & Color Videos Vasst.com
Compressor Essentials Lynda.com

[Jeff Greenberg]

Matt,

First, thanks for the kind words! Feel free to ask followups or contact me directly if you like.

Understanding DVDs
All DVDs (in NTSC) are 29.97, interlaced video.

When you give DVDSP a 23.98 asset (progressive, HD or SD), it then adds the appropriate frames (telecine) back to play back correctly on a TV set.

It’s not a compatibility thing. The DVD spec was cemented back in 92 or 93. All DVD players follow this (it’s different for blu-ray)

I’m not sure why you have footage in AIC (Apple’s intermediary Codec.) I usually see that when someone puts HD footage through iMovie. I’d use Compressor to make M2V (mpeg-2) assets – I’d probably turn on the frame controls in Compressor (although the defaults are set to automatically turn on under the right circumstances.) It HAS to be an Mpeg-2 and DVDSP will do that if a video stream isn’t compliant.

The alternative was to capture in a different format – AIC isn’t great. ProRes is really the way to go.

I have no idea about how to set your camera correctly; I could figure it out, but you sound pretty intelligent; It sounds like you’re shooting HD at 23.98 and your camera has the choice to spit out an interlaced feed (24@30i) as well as the true progressive feed (23.98.)

Does HD take up a lot of space?
Depends on how you think. Uncompressed HD takes up about 6 gigs/min where ProRes LT is about 1 gig a minute.

Your last question: Is it common to convert from HD to DVD
Sure – and there are bunches of ways to do it, some hardware based some software based (and almost always, software based takes longer!0

The real thorn is if you’ve shot progressive 30 (which some cameras do) Both fields are temporally captured at the same time, but displayed (on most TVs and blu-ray) field based. It’s almost the same but not as good.

I don’t think compressor has this specific bug – most of these problems are (unfortunately) workflow based. When I do jobs, I specifically test the workflow in advance and think it through. Despite Apple’s general desire, these tools do require reading.

Best,

Jeff G

Apple Master Trainer
Avid Cert. Instructor DS/MC
Avid & Color Videos Vasst.com
Compressor Essentials Lynda.com

[Jeff Greenberg]

You need some sort of SAN – Shared Area Network to share the RAID.
The other possibility is a NAS – Network attached storage.

A SAN is safer as it does quite a bit more protection for data; the link that Walter put up will get your started.

Best,

Jeff G

Apple Master Trainer
Avid Cert. Instructor DS/MC
Avid & Color Videos Vasst.com
Compressor Essentials Lynda.com

[Jeff Greenberg]

Sounds like your external drive is spinning down. Under energy saver, set the drives to never. Putting the project on the internal HD will mean almost the same.

Instead of minimizing the app, try using CMD-H to hide it.

Last, you may find that the drives stills spin down. Cocktail is an excellent (shareware) tool to prevent drive spindown.

Best,

Jeff G

Apple Master Trainer
Avid Cert. Instructor DS/MC
Avid & Color Videos Vasst.com
Compressor Essentials Lynda.com

[Jeff Greenberg]

I’ll admit I’m speculating.

I don’t know it’s ‘bad’ – I know that it’s got to run through FCP and then be processed.
The finder doesn’t have to do any processing at all.

Another area of speculation is Snow Leopard and the finder at 64 bit (I don’t know what version of the OS you’re on) and FCP being only 32 bit.

Best,

Jeff G

Apple Master Trainer
Avid Cert. Instructor DS/MC
Avid & Color Videos Vasst.com
Compressor Essentials Lynda.com