[Jordan Copeland]

Dammit Steven that’s so crazy it just might work. Thanks!

[Jordan Copeland]

Again very clever – this will randomise clips in my browser, but I can’t think how to adapt the principle to randomise a sequence, when several clips in the sequence are taken from a single clip in the browser.

Thanks for the brainpower on this – I hope I’m not distracting you from real work.

[Jordan Copeland]

That’s some pretty ingenious lateral thinking you’ve got going there. I’m not well-versed enough in Automator or Excel for it to be worth exploring those options this afternoon, but i’ll remember them if I ever have to randomise on a larger scale. Though surely it would only work seamlessly if I was only taking one shot from each clip – in practice, one clip might be a band’s performance, from which I’m pulling several shots.

It does surprise me that there doesn’t seem to be a way to execute this theoretically pretty simple command within FCP.

[Jordan Copeland]

Hi Darren – thanks a lot for your prompt reply. I’m now concerned that the frame I’ve chosen is misleading – not all the footage looks this bad, only the shots with a lot of movement. It is happening throughout the film, but in shots with only a little movement the problem is barely noticeable – you can tell that something’s a bit odd but you don’t get this very clear separation (as in this freeze-frame) unless there’s a lot of movement. Would a scaling issue limit its symptoms in this way, or would it be more universally applied?

Also – I feel like the fact that Quicktime plays the movie fine must be important. If this is a standards conversion issue or a scaling issue or a pulldown issue, why does it look fine (just plain old interlaced) in QT but not in FCP? Can you think of any particular settings I could tweak or transcoding I could attempt?

Many thanks,

Jordan