[John Ward]

Hello, there –

there are many more elegant ways to take care of this problem but I’m assuming you want / have to stay in Final Cut. We recently had the same problem with someone wearing a green tie to a green-screen shoot. If your subject isn’t moving too much, duplicate the clip above your current one, remove the key on the duplicate and use a garbage matte to keep the ‘interior’ of your subject in. You’ll probably want to download an 8-point matte or something more flexible than the 4-point FCP has and you’ll want to soften the edges a bunch. If your subject is moving around a lot this can be extremely time-consuming as you’ll need to continuously move the points of the matte. If you have access to AfterEffects you can use some other tools to make this go faster. Hate to say it but there’s no easy way out of this type of thing.

John Ward

Editor / Animator,
Synergetic Productions

john@synergeticproductions.com
https://www.synergeticproductions.com
315.437.7533

[John Ward]

Hi, folks –

since all audio material differs, I wouldn’t say this is a formula but we generally use compression / limiting on higher dynamic range material … sometimes even interviews / vox if they’re all over the place. We tend to leave material with a smaller dynamic range alone. The net effect is that the entire mix can then be bumped up a bit if we need it to go web / CD /whatever because most of the aberrant peaks in the high dynamic range tracks are taken care of by the compressor / limiter. It’s a little more targeted than normalizing an already completed mix and is less likely to produce unintended consequences. But we’re always looking for a better so feel free to critique.

Thanks,

John Ward

Editor / Animator,
Synergetic Productions

john@synergeticproductions.com
https://www.synergeticproductions.com
315.437.7533

[John Ward]

Hi, Sloan –

project was for planning a utility route. Timeline was 3 hours of aerial helicopter footage in 1080i showing entire proposed route. In addition the company wanted to be able to hilite particular areas to talk about but be able to come out at a pre-determined place. Thus, the 32 chapters which had to return to the menu when they were done. Menu navigation was labeled by area. Project was designed to be part of an overall presentation which would include lots of other elements.

Hope that helps. Any other questions, let me know.

Thanks,

John Ward

Editor / Animator,
Synergetic Productions

john@synergeticproductions.com
https://www.synergeticproductions.com
315.437.7533

[John Ward]

Hi, Bud –

what we wanted to wind up with was a single timeline with 32 chapters and the ability to either ‘play all’ through the whole thing or to go to an individual chapter but come back to the menu at the end of the chapter. The timeline was close to 3 hours long at 1920×1080.
We set up an SD test with a full-length NTSC version of the timeline and used chapter playlists to get the chapters to play individually and an end action on the chapter playlist to get them to dump back to the menu as soon as the chapter was done playing. Then the ‘play all’ was just a button pointing to chapter 1 of the single timeline with an end action to come back to the menu. 2 menus, 18 buttons each: ‘Play All’, 16 chapter selects, and ‘Next Page’ or ‘Previous Page’ depending on the menu. SD version of the project worked beautifully and elegantly and we thought nothing more of it while we encoded the HD MPG’s. But that’s when we ran into trouble.
The HD project was an exact duplicate of the SD in terms of types of assets, types of navigation, number of menus and buttons … everything. Preview in Encore worked like a charm and the file size was only 22GB so we were stylin’. But in the burned Blu-Ray none of the chapter navigation worked. We tried various flavors of this on 25GB and 50GB and we could never get chapter playlists to work on Blu-Ray disc even though it worked fine in Encore Preview. Simply pointing a button to a chapter and giving the button an end action also doesn’t work because it doesn’t bring us back out at the end of the chapter. In addition to all this we were getting outrageous space requirements from Encore depending on the type of navigation we were trying to use. At one point we tried doing chapter navigation by assigning end actions to the chapter points THEMSELVES. This worked fine for chapter navigation but destroyed the ability to use a single timeline for ‘play all’ funtionality because as soon as the 2nd chapter marker was reached it would dump out to the menu.
Now, here was the weirdest part of Encore on this project: using end actions on individual chapter markers caused the amount of space needed to build the project to balloon out to unearthly proportions. One estimate using this navigation method was at 710 GB. By this time, however, we had already figured out that we could burn an image larger than 25 GB and burn it to a dual-layer using toast so all we had to do was figure out how to keep the project size under 46 GB.
Our final solution was to encode each chapter as a separate MPEG-2 file AND to run the entire timeline as we had originally encoded it. So, effectively, there was almost 6 hours worth of HD footage on the disc. This way, each chapter button pointed to its own timeline whose end action came back to the menu and the ‘play all’ button pointed to the original 3 hour timeline. This method of navigation was so simple Encore couldn’t help but get it right and it stopped exponentially increasing the amount of space we needed. Burned the .iso image, mounted it on the desktop, told Toast to ‘copy disc’ to a blank BD-R dual layer and, 90 minutes later, tested it out on a set-top Samsung Blu-Ray and all was good with the world.

That’s probably a lot more information than you wanted but it may also help.

Good luck burnin’,

John Ward

Editor / Animator,
Synergetic Productions

john@synergeticproductions.com
https://www.synergeticproductions.com
315.437.7533

[John Ward]

Thanks, Bud. I think I will do just that although I may be contacting him about DVDIt Pro HD. Adobe technical support has been only minimally helpful and we’ve already spent the equivalent of 2 days trying to get everything in the right combination to burn correctly with nothing to show for it yet. Thanks for your response.

John Ward

Editor / Animator,
Synergetic Productions

john@synergeticproductions.com
https://www.synergeticproductions.com
315.437.7533

[John Ward]

What will the cost be to current owners of PI3?

John Ward
———
Editor / Animator,
Synergetic Productions

john@synergeticproductions.com
315.437.7533