Johnw3d
Forum Replies Created
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If its HDV footage, then the bitrates are fixed. What’s more, it started life being recorded at between 19 and 25 mbits/s, so there’s not much point in archiving it at a higher rate.
If it’s a mix of HDV, HD and generated footage, you might use MJPEG which is much less efficient than MPEG-2 but a common archiving format that is easy to re-use, or if archiving space is an issue, think about very high bitrate H.264. I used 14mb/s H.264 encodings (~ equiv to 60mb/s MPEG-2) to ship HDCAM footage on DVD-ROMs and it worked well.
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What is the original resolution of the importing images? Are you applying any other effects or motion-tab transforms?
I’ve not see this in my historical doco edits – I’ve used up to 4K images and been able to scale them as needed up to 100% and still retained original res quality.
John
https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/ -
Apple’s Shake ( https://www.apple.com/shake/ ) will also produce excellent optical-flow based slo-mo, as well as being a generally powerful compositing and image processing tool, now reasonably priced.
John
https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/ -
1) You’ll need to either uninstall Compressor (see this article: https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93234) or use a force-install utility like Pacifist from CharleSoft( https://www.charlessoft.com/).
2) I highly recommend getting a SATA hot-swap bay (or similar) and just allocating drives permanently to a project, it really is pretty inexpensive and very convenient. Even if you wanted to just use archiving drives, the way to do it is with a hot-swap system rather than FireWire or USB external, much more convenient, expandable and cheaper. I use one from Seritek, reviewed here on Ken Stone’s site: https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/review_seritek_saraceno.html.
John
https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/ -
Shake can do similar slo-mo tricks to Twixtor, and probably just as well as it also uses optical-flow analysis. Certainly, it has been used to do this kind of stuff on big studio films and now that Shake is only $500 from Apple, and given all the other cool things it does, it is certainly a tool to contemplate.
As to the results you might get, it depends on your footage. I’ve seen amazing slow-mo out of Shape & Twixtor, but also heard it can get easily confused when it’s interpolating the extra frames. I think you can get free demos of both products, so if you are up for the learning curves on them, give them a try.
Cheers,
John
https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/ -
If you need more info than the EDL or Batch List exports provide, you can also export as XML and use an editor to extract the stuff you need. If you are up to it, you could try using a scriping language like Python or Perl with XML parsers, which would allow you to produce just about any kind of report or log.
John
https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/ -
If you are importing high-res images with lots of high-frequency content, often the deflicker filters in FCP don’t help as much as you’d like. You should certainly try the small-radius gaussian blur that MAtte recommends. You could also try downsampling to exact frame sizes in Photoshop before importing or applying a pixel or two vertical directional blur in Photoshop.
If you are panning or zooming the illustrations, you can’t really downsample beforehand, as you need enough resolution to avoid zooming past 100% crop. The Pan Zoom Pro plugin I developed might help in this case, as it has an adaptive deflicker filter that often does a better job than the built-in one without over-blurring the image. If you want to try it, you can get a demo copy here: https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/index.htm#pzp. It might also work for you on static images, providing you use fairly hi-res imports (say 2 or 3 x the sequence frame size).
Cheers,
John
Lyric Media -
Basically, any plugin written in a compiled language will need upgrading for the Universal Binary version. This includes any that use the After Effects plugin framework in FCP. However, all the plugins written in FXScript should just work without change. These include Joes Filters, Nattress Effects, CHV, GCM DVE and Lyric Media’s plugins.
Cheers,
John
https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/ -
Bret, there’s also a sub-pixel Stabilizer in my Motion Tracking plugins for FCP. You can download a demo here: https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/index.htm.
As you can see, there are lots of options, and the basic trade-offs are:
1. price – the FCP plugins are around $50, iStabilize $60, the others $500 & up
2. convenience – the FCP plugins work directly in the timeline, have modest learning curves, no need to export/import the troublesome footage. The high-end tools have quite large learning curves.
3. quality – by far, the higher end tools like Shake & Commotion do the best job, probably essential if you’ve got a lot of both pan & roll instability, iStabilize does a very good job also, the FCP plugins are useful if you have relatively minor stabilization issues.Cheers,
John -
If you want to do bulk up-res of DV, which it sounds like you’ll want to for the final HD product, I’d recommend finding a post house with a Teranex box or similar, and just get it all into HD. If money is no object, you could try Lowry in Burbank (https://www.dts.com/digital_images/), they have a proprietary up-resing process that runs on a bank of 100 G5s and produces the most amazing results I’ve ever seen.
John
https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/