[John Treffer]

It sounds like interlacing problem.

Apply a deinterlace filter to the image, either in fcp to the clip before export or in photoshop or GIMP after you exported the image.

[John Treffer]

I don’t know. I know I am editing HDV 1080/50 and I have the choise available.

Did you try trashing the prefs?

[John Treffer]

“the only image worse than it to blow up would be DV.”

That’s a bit overstated. For sharpness HDV is actually really good, comparable to 16mm.

There is a lot more than sharpness though. It is not very good on fast movements. (although this doesn’t really disappoint me so far.)

The biggest drawback is colors. Cologradients are not good and the dynamic range is poor. Apart from that it is just 8 bit there are really a lot of artiffects in the shadow parts, and you can’t do much with the air either.

In my opinion it is good within its price range. But if you talk about feature film length 35mm comparable prices you should compare it to DVCPRO HD camera’s. Still if image quality is your focus I’d say 35 mm still rocks best by means of first colors and second sharpness.

[John Treffer]

Japan is NTSC.

I have not worked with japanese, but I have worked with arab caracters that I couldn’t read and the experience might be similar.

The translation was done on a mac in textedit. And the basics were to copy-paste to FCP or livetype. I worked mainly in LiveType and it basically just worked.
In my case timing was quite evident and afterwards the translator checked it.
If timing is not so evident you can have the translator at you side.

It went amasingly fluent in my case.

(To enable Japanese script go to: System Preferences>International>input menu, don’t forget to check”show input in menu bar”)

good luck

[John Treffer]

Yes. Only FCP5 can do HDV.

There is an option though to capture DVCPRO HD via external hardware.

[John Treffer]

First disconnect the camera and than enable HDV>DV conversion in the camera menu. (I don’t have the exact name, but it should be clear)

[John Treffer]

A FAQ section is also good to refer too. Probably you keep getting the same questions now and than. It would also be a good place to refer too in such cases.

(And they can be updated, I have fluently playing video now when my canvas dimension is smaller than the video it is playing.)

[John Treffer]

apple advocates the use of apple cinema desktop, any monitor connected to an AGP-graphics card as reference monitor. They don’t recommend it for interlaced video though.

Still I expect it to generate pretty good quality on the 1080i signal of the Z1, I have not seen it yet though.

[John Treffer]

I’m still a bit confused with composite modes now and than, but doesn’t ‘add’ do the same as ‘normal’ if you apply it to a completely white layer?

[John Treffer]

FCE does only edit in Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC)
FCP edits native HDV and AIC

advantage of native HDV is:
– the datarate is about a third lower, so you need much less disk space
– you preserve better quality because you transcode at most one time (depending on use of effects and transitions) and with AIC you transcode always twice (if you go back to HDV tape).

advantage of AIC is:
– Apple claims it gives better realtime performance because it doesn’t need to put CPU power in decoding the HDV stream everytime it plays.
(I am just starting on HDV now, but in my experience AIC and native HDV can handle about the same amount of realtime effects. Only on cuts the performance of AIC is better, because the MPEG2 codec usually refers to frames before and after the the edit. Also I am playing from the 2nd internal SATA disk of my G5 2GHz DP, if you’re data is on a fast RAID system the performance will probably increase if you use AIC)

Probably it is also possible to work first in AIC and than recapture at the final stage in HDV native codec to get the maximum quality.

To get back to your question. If you look critical you see pretty obvious difference. Than it also depends on the kind of material you edit, busy material wont reveal much of the artifects, though very slowly movinng landscapes will.

And of course FCP is more of a pro app than FCE. So if you’ve got money, go for FCP. If not you can try FCE and consider an update to FCP later. (FCE + FCE>FCP upgrade costs the same as FCP) I am not sure though if you can upgrade your FCE project to an FCP Project.

for FCE FCP comparisson you can also check out: https://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:fsaJPZGP4G8J:www.apple.com.au/finalcut/+compare+final+cut+express&hl=en&client=firefox-a
The old FCE FCP4.5 comparisson (temporarily?) removed from apples site.