[Joey Burnham]

What you are going to be doing is pricey so if that’s an issue get a business loan or something. And keeping your options for HD open is going to cost you WAY more. I know the COW is awesome but it sounds like you really need to hire an engineer who puts these rooms together for a living and save the aggravation.

Here is our general setup at work:

2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8-core)
2GB (2 x 1GB)
320GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB (Two dual-link DVI)
SATA 1TB internal
DUAL-LINK HD/HD/SD 10-BIT CAPTURE AND OUTPUT PCIe
CARD
Break Out box for AJA Kona 3
APC BACK-UPS RS 1500VA

This of course does not include wiring, monitors, scopes, and decks of course.

Oh and is your source going to be PAL or NTSC? Hopefully PAL, otherwises you need to transfer. And as the person stated before me, high quality converters are expensive.

Joey

[Joey Burnham]

Just ask them for their specs. Oh, and for slate, in the broadcast world 10 secs is standard then 10 black then program.

[Joey Burnham]

Hi.
You lose quality this way but the easiest way to face a 16×9 is to stretch your material 33% on the y axis and pan/scan the footage if needed. That’s your 16×9 anamorphic.
Joey

[Joey Burnham]

Is your source footage 4×3 1.77 Full Frame or 4×3 Letterbox? If it’s a letterbox you can scale up 33% on the vertical and you won’t have to crop much on the top and bottom. If it’s full frame I would do the same thing (33% in your NLE) and pan-scan the footage. Then in compressor set whatever 16×9 size you want. (480 x 270 or whatever they want)
Joey

[Joey Burnham]

from darby

Try creating a PAL composition and dropping your NTSC composition into it, then use Layer > Transform > Fit to Width to resize the NTSC footage.

If there are video elements in your NTSC comp then their frames may be blended, but if it’s all animated/motion graphic elements then they will be re-timed in the PAL comp to have the same duration as they did in the NTSC comp.

[Joey Burnham]

You have it on External LTC / SLAVE yeah?

[Joey Burnham]

[Chris Wright] “I would go 16 bit 4:4:4: uncompressed with no generation loss like PNG or animation.
If you don’t have room for that, use a codec that is 4:2:2 with bitrate of 90 Mbit/s like dvcpro HD 100 Mbit/s.

Use color management so that your colors don’t shift like SDTV or HDTV. If you are unfamiliar with this, use PNG, it encodes color management inside itself so you don’t make mistakes. finally, if you have transparencies, export out RGB+Alpha millions+ colors straight(not premultiplied). If you want to work with changing your brightness a huge amount later on, consider going 32bpc so that you keep your illegal white information. Finally, broadcast spec out a 16-235 levels so that the NTSC won’t get line crawl.”

Don’t you think that is a bit of overkill?
If your original footage was digibeta you should be working in an NTSC / PAL D1 preset or something similar. Just render out to the NLE’s uncompressed codec or animation set at best.
Done.

[Joey Burnham]

I would assume so as there is no PAL in HD.

[Joey Burnham]

Could be tons of things. 1st off is your hard drive fast enough for the footage? Also, with FCP and fast flickering frames sometimes you just need to trash your preferences….

[Joey Burnham]

Regarding the mask. You can add as many points as you want and set keyframes for mask shape. Move at will.
Joey