[J. Tad newberry]

Interesting…and you are talking about the Mac Edition no doubt? I finally looked through my manual last night (i know, i know…) and there is an install picture of a G5 (what i have) with the card with the Y-connector and how to install it. I’ve looked all over, and i don’t have the connector, but there does seem to be a connection tab on the card for the connector if and when i find (or buy) the connector. So did ATI tell you today that your computer doesn’t need the connector, or just the X800 in general does not need it? Also, did they give you a fix for the overheating problem?

I just called them this morning and they are wanting me to send in my card. The guy said he thinks the memory on the card is bad or going bad, so i will ship it in today, and pop in my old card. I never have used Color, but will now be limited (again) in Motion 3, so hopefully they will hurry. Keep me posted if you hear anything different and you do the same. Take care…

thanks again!

mh

[J. Tad newberry]

The reason I was doing that sounds odd, I’m sure. The shots are all BetacamSP, captured in the DV codec, but then put on a DVCPro HD timeline. The reason I am doing this is that I have found that the graphics look much better when created in an HD timeline than in a DV timeline, even when rendered out and watched on an SD DVD and SD NTSC monitor. So when sending a small mpeg-4 to my clients via yousendit (or my iDisk), it was quicker to render a single QT from the timeline if it was an SD timeline rather than an HD timeline. From there, I just drag the QT onto a Compressor droplet and voila! I know it seems like a lot of steps, but it seems to be giving me the best results so far.

Also, I no longer go straight to Compressor from the timeline. It takes Compressor forever to make the mpeg-4 files from the timeline than from an a single QT…and FCP can render out that single QT fairly quickly. The other good thing about rendering out this way is that once you have the single QT file, you can drag it to any one of several droplets for use on a DVD, internet, or whatever (but I’m guessing you already knew all that stuff…) : )

thanks again!

mh

[J. Tad newberry]

Really? Did the good folks at ATI give you any solutions? Is your card connected to the computer’s power supply with that Y-cord? Mine is not, but has not had any problems until a couple weeks ago.

thanks again!

mh

[J. Tad newberry]

Thanks, but i do that already. Are you saying the updater also grabs all applicable drivers for my cards and drives and everything? If so, that is very cool and I had not realized it. I just figured it only updated all my software/applications and OS stuff.

thanks again!

mh

[J. Tad newberry]

It was the “master templates” that i had been using in the project were not being seen by FCP in their proper folder. i took out and put them in again and then they showed up…but without the video clips that i had attached them to. this was the first time i had tried using Motion templates within FCP (accessed by the tab in the lower right corner of the viewer. the templates i made had drop zones in them so i could drop clips into them in FCP. unfortunately, when FCP could not see these templates after my full re-install this past week, putting the templates back in their proper folder made them accessible in FCP, but i had to re-attach/insert the clips into all the drop zones. a rather tedious process, but fortunately i had save a DVD with an earlier version which showed me which clips to use.

this seems like one of those “good news bad news” things. i liked the ease of use of being able to access a Motion template inside of FCP and to be able to drop clips into the drop zones there, but on the other hand, just creating the same thing in Motion, and then rendering out a QT of it, and then using the QT in FCP has its advantages, too.

thanks again!

mh

[J. Tad newberry]

That is a good point, and ended up being part of my problem as well. Do you know if there is a relatively easy way to keep up with all those driver updates? I don’t think the automatic Mac utility (“Software Update”) finds all that stuff.

thanks again!

mh

[J. Tad newberry]

Maybe it’s the season. I did the same a few weeks ago, and was getting the same problems. I had just bought Tech Tool Pro, which showed a few minor problems on the system drive, and i was having a few funny problems anyway, so i figured i would just wipe everything out and do a clean install. I seriously tried more than 10 times to run a clean OS install and would KP’s sometimes, good boots other times, but then the graphic display looked very “chunky” with lots of dropouts. On top of that, my drive would speed up to horrendous speeds. I thought it might start to levitate, and i could smell as well as feel a serious heat problem inside the tower. I found it was my graphics card, which probably accounted for the chunky graphics earlier? Anyway, since i couldn’t do a very reputable clean install, i took it to the Mac Store and they had it for a week and weren’t able to find anything seriously wrong, but they were able to wipe the drive and do a good clean install. Since then, all has been pretty well, but a few times my drive will still speed up and sound a little noisy on restarts. It is three years old, so maybe it is time to get a new drive.

Anyway, in a nutshell, my solution was to have the tech guys do the clean install. Although I still have no idea what they did differently than what I did, so I’m guessing that maybe my original install disc is bad, possessed, or otherwise corrupted.

thanks again!

mh

[J. Tad newberry]

since it is still doing this (loading terribly slowly), i wonder if i should just reinstall FCP? i would hate to have to spend the time doing that…

thanks again!

mh

[J. Tad newberry]

nope, no msn. but after restarting it one more time, it as back to normal. i didn’t do anything different in between. after that, i also did the repair permissions like you had suggested. i had never done that before. is there a recommendation as to how often that should be done, or what it does when you do that? anyway, thanks for the input.

thanks again!

mh

[J. Tad newberry]

i took it to the shop, they ran diagnostics, and all was fine. the culprit was a corrupted file from FCP that i was trying to convert in the Compressor. i re-rendered from FCP, then back to Compressor…all is well…

thanks again!

mh