[John Pale]

FCP X is trackless. What you normally put on V1 as the “spine” of your edit is the Primary Storyline in FCPX. (there are exceptions to this, but let’s forget about that now’ for simplicity’s sake)
Any cutaway that you might put on V2 or higher is a connected clip. If you need to do something more sophisticated than a cutaway (from the primary storyline), that needs transitions, you create a secondary storyline.

There is a logic to it, but it’s quite different than what most editors are used to. Now that it’s been released in the wild, the advantages and problems with this approach are now being experienced by a wider user base than in Apples internal testing for the first time. If the product succeeds, and more editors use it, the methodology will evolve…this new feature is the first refinement.

[John Pale]

I usually set it to BETTER for resize and BEST for rate conversion when I need to do this.

If you set everything to BEST, you might end up with an encode time of a month or two 🙂

Best setting for Rate Conversion uses Optical Flow, which is very good, but can cause artifacts on some material. Do a short test and decide.

The other options mentioned by Rafael are much faster than Compressor, so you might want to try them first and see if they do the job to your satisfaction.

[John Pale]

Are you noticing the sync problem in FCP?

CT changes the sample rate of the audio to an odd one (I forget the exact rate). FCP may be trying to deal with it on the fly…and failing, as usual. The sample doesn’t match the sequencevand sync problems occur.

Have you tried doing an item level render on the audio?

[John Pale]

You can’t use the AJA io for that.

When people say “use hardware”, they mean the right kind of hardware. A quality standards converter, such as an Alchemist. Usually this is done at a dubbing house, as such equipment is very expensive.

If you are on a tight budget, you can do it using Compressor (free, but slow) or the Nattress Standards Conversion Plugin ($99, faster). In either case, the results are not of the quality of a good hardware conversion.

[John Pale]

Time Machine restore?

[John Pale]

Neil,

Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5 is very good software. It will seem familiar to most FCP classic users and you can get up to speed on the differences very quickly.

The downside is that until recently, it had few Mac users. The drivers and integration with Blackmagic and AJA on the Mac side are not as mature. There are performance and stability issues in PPro with users of both major card makers on the Mac (I have no personal knowledge of Matrox products with PPro on the Mac). Hopefully that will get ironed out over ther course of the year.

[John Pale]

Two things. You should only have to hit submit once per batch. If you have an item selected, then only that item is submitted..so maybe that’s what you are doing,

If you want to bypass the whole process, save your common conversions as droplets. Then you just drag your source files to the droplet and BAM! You are converting away.

Search Droplets in Comprerssors help.

[John Pale]

QuickTime 10 is next to useless. Use QuickTime Pro (QuickTime Player 7)…or better yet…Bouke’s tool.

[John Pale]

Take a look at the audio spectrum and see if you can identify it. You can erase it if it’s obvious. It’s likely that it shares frequencies with other things you want, so you are probably screwed.

Maybe get the priest to do some ADR?

Soundtrack has some good tools for that.

[John Pale]

You have things set for the Apple Intermediate Codec, not ProRes. You should avoid AIC.