[Joseph Owens]

[Marcus Moore] “but I don’t see ANY tactile difference between a trackball and a touchpad”

You have used a control surface, right?

My experience as a colorist, having experimented with an iPad-simulator and owning a couple of types of control panels as well as operating several more, is that I find no similarity between a glass surface and let’s say, four trackballs and rings, and yes, I play the thing like a piano… both hands, all my fingers. I forget about the control panel, like a pilot forgets about the stick, rudders and throttle. My eyes are on the target, nowhere else — HUD is a plus. Trackballs and rings have inertia and momentum, which can never be suggested by a non-moving surface.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Nel Shelby] ” I am still getting a general error when rendering.”

Yeah, I am actually sitting here looking at more or less the same thing. I have a ProRes4444 2048×1152 timeline that “renders” okay on the timeline, but as soon as I want to export a QT movie in PR4444, it balks and gives me a General Error, but if I choose PR422HQ, it goes.

Thanks, Apple.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Timo Teravainen] “on a Mac, if you look at file in Finder, the colon in the filename shows as a slash”

OK. This is imperative. At the browser level correct those file names, replacing the (/) slash by either getting rid of it or putting something legal like an (_) underscore or something that is not a path markup or HTML instruction character. Use of a slash in Final Cut as a source name is always forbidden.

Reconnect these files in Final Cut and re-export the XML for Resolve.

This will otherwise result in a corrupt XML roundtrip and at the very least will cause Resolve to abort renders or report bizarre errors like “codec not yet opened” on render.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[David Turner] “- Is there a way to stabilize and scale down to 720p at once? And should I even do this?
– What is the best stabilizer I should be using?
– How can I account for the fact that there are intentional camera moves in the footage (slower pans & tilts)? Is there just a stabilizer that is pretty smart with this distinction?
– Should I try something in FCP7 or CS6? After effects?”

What you are looking for is “Smoothcam”, which doesn’t “lock” onto a particular object, but seeks to take out sudden movements. I don’t use any of the filters supplied in Final Cut, in favour of the tools in “SHAKE” and MochaPro.

Check out MochaPro, there is a free trial, which can export tracking data to Final Cut and a number of other applications.

Image stabilization within an oversampled frame and mapped to a lower resolution is a pretty common strategy and mostly what 4.5K is good for, since the common extraction is 4096, anyway.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Nel Shelby] ” big issue compressor keeps failing while outputting a few of my projects to DVD. It says Quick time error 0 or -50.”

My bet would be that Quicktime has problems with ProRes coded files with synthetic resolutions that are quasi-custom, not standard (square) size. ProRes really wants to be square, but only in orthodox resolutions like 1920×1080 or 720×480, and your 1440 “stretch” may be confusing the decoder. Certainly this happened when I tried some 853×480 ProRes. FCP7 just went crazy.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

Remembering that ac3 is quite lossy, and ripping a surround track back to discrete 5.1 is probably not ideal, agree that mostly just re-balancing the overall sound pressure levels is going to be most of the trick.

When you say TV demos, does that mean that these clips are being configured for point-of-purchase or convention/exposition play? General practice, at least in my experience, is that most of the time, sound is not part of the public presentation. It drives everybody crazy to listen to the same 2 minute blurb 50,000 times a day for one thing, and worse, “volume creep” usually sets in when Booth “A” cranks it up a little, causing Booth “B” to crank it up a little, and so on and so forth until its an AC/DC concert, but the same 2 minutes, 50,000 times a day.

Suggest subtitles.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Mathieu Ghekiere] “Anyone that has it and cares to give a review or opinion?”

Not this particular iteration, but other iPad interfaces that have appeared over the past couple of years, like the Tangent trackballs for COLOR — fun, but in the back of my head, I’m hearing Carol Pope singing “all touch, but no contact”, ie., no “feel”. So your attention is mostly on the control surface, rather than whatever interface or display where your preview image or timeline is. A control surface should be about making itself disappear from your direction of attention, and until there is tactile feedback, that division of attention will be getting in the way, hindering, rather than helping.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

As long as you keep the correct track hierarchy, SMPTE standard is 1.L 2.R 3.C 4.Lfe 5.Ls 6.Rs, for the surround-formatted audio and leave the other tracks blank for the stereo while leaving 1 as Left and 2 as Right, then although the switching will weird out many viewers, it will work. Left and Right will still occupy roughly the same “stage”.

Players that don’t directly support surround should “Mixdown” the multichannels to stereo — but sometimes crudely and one reason why it is imperative to get the “dial norm” correct so that you don’t get glaring differences, which mainly have to do with how the center channel is re-distributed.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

Well, I’m fairly intimately familiar with it, and it is the book that an experienced colorist would want to have written…

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Laco Gaal] “Maybe the consolidated AVID MXF files are all full range inside the Media Files folder? Who knows.”

You should be able to set that in the AVID Export settings….???
And it is sometimes a useful exercise to toggle the scale settings in Resolve, if you are using “Auto”.

It was a bug a couple of versions ago.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.