Jonathan Clauson
Forum Replies Created
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I am also going to follow this up with a big no brainer that I did not even think of until a few moments ago after I finished my first cut.
I do video game reviews for a living and as such I also have a Wii U. The Wii U has a built in upscaler to 1080p (HDMI) or 1080i (Component) for the Wii environment. After hitting my head on the side of my desk for a bit, I popped the Wii game I needed footage from in the Wii U, captured some great looking 1080i upscaled footage and it works perfectly in FCPX after using Adobe Media Encoder to turn it into ProRes.
Anyway, hopefully somebody learns from this. Thank you all!
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Bingo! That did it!
However if I may be so bold as to ask one follow up question.
The .mp4 files are causing Final Cut Pro X to crash. I don’t know if that is because I am recording at too high a quality (4MB/s Constant) or if .mp4 is not a good format to edit in FCPX.
In a perfect world, should I converting the .m2ts files into a ProRes format first? Thanks!
– J
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Hi Matt,
I am so sorry for the delay. I was stuck out of town longer than I thought I would be.
There are two options: Print to Video and Edit to Tape. I am not sure which one you are referring to, but I never use Edit to Tape as I have never been able to get that to work. All I use it for is to black the first min or two of tape with TimeCode since the M15U doesn’t have a TimeCode control port and unless you are using an AJA card, you can’t get TC to the deck over FW.
I strictly use Print to Video. I am editing and outputting in SD 4:3 so I can’t speak for HDV output. But my Capture Preset is DV NTSC 48kHz and my Device Control Preset is Firewire NTSC. One other thing worth noting is on the deck itself you have to have it set set to DV and not Auto or HDV. And under Rec Mode you should have that set to DVCAM or DV SP depending on the tape you are using. Finally, under i.Link Set make sure that HDV->DV CONV is off as well as that has caused issues for me as well.
Hopefully this helps and if there is anything I can do for you, please let me know. Good luck!
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Hi Matt!
I will be at my rig later today and will post then. Just wanted to let you know that I will have an answer for you soon. 🙂
– J
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Okay, I found the answer over on another forum and will post it here for those like me who are crawling out of the Final Cut Pro ooze.
Premiere CS5 can’t capture via FW 800. The timing signals it sends to my deck are for FW 400 so it gets messed up. Go figure.
So, since the MacPro 4,1 doesn’t have any FW 400 ports, I am forced to use Final Cut to import and then dropping that footage into Premiere. That being said, now I have to figure out what the best codec to use is between the two since FCP likes Pro Res and Premiere likes H.264 I think….
– J
Wishing everything would just work -
Wow…4 monitors. I am jealous. 🙂
I had the same issue on my HD studio monitor where when I originally had a grey screen where nothing showed up. I had to go into playback settings and change “External Device” to None. I hit ok and closed out the window and then went back into the settings and re-selected the monitor and it came back up just fine.
Right now I am using Premiere only for the Ultra Key as 90% of my work is on a LED lit green screen and Final Cut has a hard time pulling a good key off as it can’t handle the little “halo” you get with LED green screen lighting. The other reason is I am using Motion to create my lower 3rds and when I export them out for Premiere it can’t read the Alpha channel, but that is another thread. 🙂
Hopefully that helps for the monitors and if you not and you just get fed up and you want to get rid of one or two of them, let me know and I will send you my shipping address. 🙂
– Jonathan
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Hi Alex,
I apologize for the delay in my response as I had to go back to working FCP to finish my project, but now I am back to figuring out this issue.
I confirmed that I was able to see the transparency of the file in Final Cut Pro as it worked just fine there though I normally just drop the motion file into the timeline but that is an Apple thing obviously.
Okay, so here are my output settings from Motion:
Kind: Quick Time Movie
Compressor: Apple ProRes 4222
Resolution: 1920×1080
Color: Color + Alpha (Premultiply alpha)I am trying it with a different non-apple compressor to see if that does the trick, but here is the odd thing. When I scrub the playback head over the section with the lower 3rd before I render the work area, it makes the black dissapear and it looks as it should. But once I render it or play it back normally before I render it, the black box still shows up.
I will let you know if I find another codec that works. Thanks!
– Jonathan
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Hey Jon,
It worked fine but then I realized Adobe does things a bit differently.
Here is the master clip I am working on (I am not involved in ANY aspect of the actual shooting) and you can see what happens when I use the scale to feature option. I get the garbage on screen left and the subject doesn’t fill the frame. This is totally fine as I can just enlarge it to where i need it……I thought.
Now here is where the difference comes in. FCP could resize the HDV footage down to 33.3% or thereabout and it would be fine. I would have room to enlarge it back so that the subject fills the frame and the garbage is hidden.
With Premiere I noticed that the scale was at 100% after the scaling option and when I enlarged it to hide the garbage and fill the frame, my subject got all pixilated and it wasn’t good. 🙁
So I guess that is one thing I am going to have to live with is the jittery playback in order to preserve the higher resolution so I can play with size and scale. Now I don’t mind rendering this short 1 min sequences so I can get smooth playback, I just have to figure out how to do that now as well. haha.
– Jonathan
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hey Jon,
Thanks for the tips. I will try them when I get back to my rig and let you know how it works.
My final output is SD so I am not editing in HD, but the client shoots in HD against LED green screen so I key it in HD to take advantage of the extra resolution before I pop it in the timeline. My sequence is 4:3 NTSC as the station I send my DVCAM tape to doesn’t like anamorphic and wants everything 4:3 so if there are black bars it isn’t a big deal.
I also have the GTX 285 card to help offload some of the work from the processor and it has worked great, but I couldn’t figure out why the scaling was giving me such a fit.
I have a 2TB internal Hitachi 7200 drive which is dedicated for FCP/Adobe and the OS is on another internal. If I start editing or get more clients I will look into an external RAID solution, but right now I maxed myself out getting the tower last week and the Adobe suite so it will be a while before I can drop the $ on a RAID rig. I need a new VTR deck and AJA card before I go there as well. So much for paying off student loans. 🙂
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Oh, and I am working ins CS5 Premiere on Mac OSX 10.6.4. Thanks!