Johnw3d
Forum Replies Created
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Are you trying to achieve conventional time-lapse so that when you play the video, time speeds up and you see clouds and sunsets whizzing by? If so, what you need to do is conform the footage to your desired output video frame rate. If you shot at 6fps and conform it to 30fps, it will speed up time by a factor of 30/6 = 5, and whiz goes the sun. Unfortunately, FCP doesn’t have a general-purpose conformer (just 25 to 24), but After Effects does in its Interpret Footage dialog, so I recommend using it.
John
https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/ -
There are several methods. FCP has a built-in Stabilize filter which you should at least try out, but it’s a bit primitive. There are 3rd-party sub-pixel stabilizer plugins from Lyric Media (https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/, my company) or CHV (https://www.chv-plugins.com/index1.php), dedicated external apps like iStabilize (https://www.pixlock.com/), and best of all, tools like Apple’s Shake which have amazing optical-flow based stabilization. Take your pick!!
. Cheers,
John. -
Brett, there’s no simple way to go to .m2t files without recompressing. Printing the edit out to HDV tape and digitizing it back in either on the PC or on the Mac (say using DVHSCap) is probably the simplest and will not involve a compression-generation loss.
John
https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/ -
If you are looking for extreme speed reductions or very high-quality slow-mo, I’ve had great success using the optical-flow stuff in Compressor and it does very good of deinterlacing as well. You could point it at all the clips and do them in a batch job, though it could take a *lot* of compute time. If this is of interest, say so, and I’ll post the workflow.
John
https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/ -
The simplest way to do this requires 2 steps: deinterlace down to 25p then use the “Conform 25 to 24” tool in the FCP Tool menu. I’ve done this several times, shooting 1080/50i on a Sony Z1U, in my case downsampling at the same time as the deinterlace to get me to 720/24p. There are a number deinterlacing options, Shake is probably the best, but I use MPEG Streamclip from Squared-5 (https://www.squared5.com/), it has a really very good stochastic downsampler and deinterlacer.
John
https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/ -
2 to 4mbps for 640×480 video is pretty high in WM9, that’s getting up in the 720p range, but if you can afford the bandwidth, it should be just about visually lossless. If performance or download time is an issue, you should be able to get good results at 1.5mbps.
I take it this is video, right? Or is it synthetic?
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It depends on whether you are zooming in on the images or not. If they are static, then you don’t need any more resolution than that of the sequence it’s sitting in and in fact you’ll get a better downsample in Photoshop, not to mention saving system resources in FCP. If you are zooming around, figure the smallest frame you want to see and adjust the image size in Photoshop to make that area have the same resolution as your final FCP sequence. If you do this, you won’t zoom past a 100% crop and cause uprezing pixelation.
John.
https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/ -
Another option is the Pin Blur plugin in my Motion Tracking plugin kit, especially for doing automatic face bluring and such. You can try out a demo download here: https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/index.htm .
John
Lyric Media -
You might also be able to export to XML in the newer FCP and import that in 4.5. Use the earliest verion XML export format available in the newer FCP.
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If you do want to adjust the ins & outs by a fixed amount, instead of re-logging all the tapes you can drag each clip into an open Log & Capture window, adjust the ins & outs by whatever time you want and log again (hit F2) – this might be quicker than running through the tapes again.