[Jm Knowles]

Jerry thanks so much for replying. I highly value your advice (your book on FCP 4 is still in my library and was the first book i read on the subject). I am going to go with Tiger. Nice to know some of my apps will still run from the new boot disc too.

[Jm Knowles]

Ok I think I have pretty much decided (after further research) that I am going to go the dual boot route – my remaining question is this:
Final Cut Studio 2 – should I be using Tiger or Snow Leopard?

[Jm Knowles]

So I am guessing my shaky pans and occasional dropped frames were based on the extra horsepower that the outmoded compression “none” was taking up and that if I had used DVC50 or ProRes I would have been better off. (Also – would that be ProRes of ProRes HQ?)

And also are you saying that I should not use Quicktime at all as a way of displaying these videos in the future. What if Quicktime is the only option (i.e. they don’t have a dedicated DVD)? And is it ok to export using H.264 if I am in a position where I have to use Quicktime. (I understand this codec is somewhat processor intensive too and it was not playing very smoothly on the laptop PC they were originally going to use.) The version we ended up using was done through Quicktime conversion using H.264, quality set to high, keyframes set to “auto” and quality set to “best”, encoding set to “best” (multipass). I forget what I used for the data rate. It was either “auto” or it might have been limited to 1500 kbits in an attempt to make it more processor friendly. In the end I had a roughly 100MB file for a 5 minute video.

Thanks so much.

[Jm Knowles]

I am using 6.0.2. I produced the video 4×3 ratio to be safe because I wasn’t sure exactly how it was being projected – in retrospect I now see I could have gone 16×9 though.
I am surprised that Quicktime Pro and “Present Movie” isn’t a good option but very glad to learn this now. I know they like to run everything off of a laptop. However, it seems like there would be more potential for cueing problems using a DVD (through a dedicated unit as you pointed out in your follow-up post.)
You said that “progressive display” was right for me – does that mean that setting field dominance to “none” was right or is there another way to achieve this. (I seem to get this idea from the Apple article https://support.apple.com/kb/TA26010?viewlocale=en_US)

David I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your sharing your expertise with me in helping me understand better exactly what led to the problems I encountered. Thank you.

[Jm Knowles]

Thanks for your reply. Ok, I totally understand about how the codec “None” was causing me problems. But to get to first things first.
I was playing using quicktime pro 7. As far as the projector I am not sure exactly what was being used as it was “done for me”. I can tell you that it was attached via a VGA cable (I had to buy an adapter) and it seemed to slow my video performance down a little when it was running.
Thanks again.

[Jm Knowles]

Actually I see as an option DV/DVC-PR0 NTSC — but I see nothing for ProRes by itself (or DV NTSC by itself)
I do see DVC Pro50 though

[Jm Knowles]

Thank you. I am going to try this on a copy of my project.

[Jm Knowles]

Thanks for replying David. Of course I want help doing things the right way. I was just trying to acheive the best quality. I do try to avoid doing anything “willy nilly” so I was basing my choices on previous posts I had read on the net but I guess I misunderstood them (or they were wrong.)

This was for a presentation … we ran it off of my macbook on huge projection screens. Again, it was just still images and psd files of titles and text that I used as stills. I was originally doing this in NTSC DV but was having scan lines issues when exporting so that is why I thought that field dominance none and no compression might be the best way to go.

[Jm Knowles]

FCP 5 Intel Mac OS 10.5 7.4.5 qicktime … i have the sequence set at CCIR 40:27 for frame size and pixel aspect. I am not using compression. The video is D1 NTCS from after effects. Sometimes I open my sequence and they look fine. They seem to decay after awhile. Another note … my Hard Drive is almost full … could this be causing distortions? Thanks so much!

[Jm Knowles]

Sometimes I open and close a sequence and when I open it again there are scanlines where there weren’t before … this is really frustrating!