[Jonathan Capra]

I read an article that said that the lag is solved by putting a 7-frame offset on the canvas window in FCP settings. But is still less than desirable in some way?

[Jonathan Capra]

Well the problem is we recently doubled our number of Mac workstations when we acquired them through a merger with another station.. And I’ve been given the task of getting them all upgraded at least to parity with each other.. Some of them still have FCP 3 on them and Apple doesnt offer FCP 4.x in any form as an upgrade or standalone AFAIK.

So I can either get all of them up and ready for FCP5 or else ‘cheat’ and install some of or FCP4 discs on more than one machine.

[Jonathan Capra]

Yeah that’s what I did. It worked flawlessly. Thanks..

For really short presentations, I like to use a fixed bitrate on the video. I could swear I’ve done 9.8 coupled with 384 audio on a Mac and had it work ok. But it might have been 9.0 now that I think about it.

If I want to use 384 audio, what is the max bitrate I can have on the MPEG-2? When I am filling the disc, I am fine using variable. But for this project, it was 5-6 min total of some really stellar camerawork where I had troubled to keep it at 4:2:2 uncompressed during the post-production process.. So I wanted to compress it as little as possible for delivery.

[Jonathan Capra]

I don’t really understand your context of ‘matted’ or ‘cropping’ in these cases. What I shot is native 16:9 footage. So that means the same resolution as 4:3 NTSC (720×480) but the horizontal pixels are just stretched out to a 1.212 aspect ratio.

I want to make a Quicktime file that shows that 16:9 aspect ratio on the screen when you play it with Quicktime player.. with no extra letterboxed black bars top and bottom, like the movie trailers do.

Finally what I did was had it render with a 1.0 aspect ratio, but gave it a custom size of 436×240 — which, on a square pixel aspect display, will be 16:9 in dimensions. The only thing that sucks, is that this creates extra horizontal pixels that presumably have to take up space in the overall file size.

But is this what the movie trailer people do? Is this what you were suggesting?

[Jonathan Capra]

> On your previous test file, are you using the Photoshop transparency
> values or are you creating a separate alpha? If the latter, what
> does the alpha channel look like in Photoshop? Does it have the
> feathered edges?

I tried it first with just Photoshop transparency. Then I tried again, first making an actual Alpha Channel by going to Load Selection, choosing Transparency, then going into Channels, creating a new channel and then filling the selection with White (ie. 100% opaque). Since the selection was feathered, it created an alpha with a feathered edge best I could see.

[Jonathan Capra]

I did rasterize the text layers and the effects. And I merged everything to one layer before saying. Another test file I tried, I just made a one-layer file, drew a filled rectangle, then took a feathered eraser and made a hand-drawn smooth edge around it. Still I get a white or black glow around it.

I did not try PNG though. I will try that. (I tried PSD’s and TIFFs (with Alpha Channel enabled)) But does PNG allow for 256-levels of alpha? Or is it binary transparency like in a transparent GIF file?

[Jonathan Capra]

Well the only reason I was exporting to DV-AVI’s as a midpoint and then to Quicktime through the Quicktime Player’s export function, was because Sony Vegas seems to exclude MPEG-4 audio as an available audio codec in its Quicktime export.

Can I make uncompressed 23.976 AVIs as a midpoint and likely avoid the comb-effect issue I was experiencing when I finally went to Quicktime?

[Jonathan Capra]

couldnt find that utility there but..

I notice that when I am capturing using Sony VidCap, it pipes the video to the GeForce card’s NTSC out.. But why not in Vegas itself? In the GeForce settings, this is referred to as the ‘overlay feature’.

[Jonathan Capra]

OK very weird.. I just manually brought the DV-encoded MOV files (created by FCP) onto a timeline in Vegas and manually exported a DV-AVI. The result worked fine in SFcapture’s Print-to-Tape function (sound and all).

Just very strange to me that any DV-MOV file converted to DV-AVI (either by FCP on the Mac or BatchConverter on PC) has no sound when played back by SFcapture/P2T, but *does* have sound when played back by any application.

This makes me wonder how many files of projects I have archived on DVD-R now that may have the same issue, since at the time I burned them I was using them for output to a DVD build and never thought to try them with Print-to-Tape.

Is this some sort of header issue in the files that makes SFcapture ignore certain files’ audio?

[Jonathan Capra]

Right on.. We’ve been through this numerous times before.. We ran OS9 forever on this machine.. And the only reason we tried to up from Jag to Panther, is because Cinewave support finally came out for it.

But now the problems we are dealing with can be filed under ‘should have left well enough alone’ because we have basically put everything back exactly the way it was from scratch and now the machine is all messed up.

My friend has since said to go ahead and try formatting the drive with DiskUtility before giving AppleStore $85 because it certainly can’t hurt anything at this point. Does anyone disagree?