[Kurt Wiley]

I’m doing blu-ray only. I am comparing Compressor to some third party .264 encoding products. Hence the focus on .264 and .h264

DVD STUDIO PRO doesn’t support blu-ray anyway, and apparently won’t for a long time (S. Jobs showed little interest in blu-ray during his last public presentation, suggesting it’s a “world of hurt”).

Any idea why single pass setting breaks the bit encoding rate controller?

2d isn’t dead yet!

[Kurt Wiley]

Here’s what I found in a tutorial at lynda.com : a way to do this:

1. Import your stills (they apparently come in at 29.97 no matter what).
2. Drag the stills to the sequence.
3. Select all of those stills you just dragged into the sequence.
4. CNTL-click on selected stills and choose the “Duration (number)…” item in the contextual menua.
5. You will then see a Duration window appear showing what the stills duration ___for that sequence__ are.
6. Enter the duration you want for all the items (0:00:00:01 being 1 frame).
7. The items will “magically” readjust themselves to your chosen default setting.

The “default” preference is of little help without this “sequence by sequence” trick.

That appears to solve my problem.
I’ve posted this to help others stymied by this FCP wierdness. 🙂

2d isn’t dead yet!

[Kurt Wiley]

thanks for feedback, Chris.
I’ve tried very hard to find this “frame rate preference” for still import but cannot do so. I did find the duration setting.

Is it part of the capture preferences?

If you can tell steps to access / set frame rates for stills, when imported, that would be very helpful.

2d isn’t dead yet!

[Kurt Wiley]

??? Does FCP always import stills into itself at 29.97 fps ??

The problem is FCP is one of the few apps that supports an Uncompressed 8-bit QT codec that is very helpful for making video test content. AE and other apps cannot access that QT codec (it’s another one of these “secret apple things”, I guess).

I suppose we could use our copy of QT Pro to convert the sequence into something FCP can actually work with.

2d isn’t dead yet!

[Kurt Wiley]

Yes, I realize that HDV movies need this,but thanks for clairification.

The clip I am trying to duplicate within FCP is a 1920 x 1080 x 2997 8byuv uncomressed clip of about 4 seconds. I duplicate it 10 times in the sequence timeline and then try to render the result as a reference.

2d isn’t dead yet!

[Kurt Wiley]

removed all previous renders, then told FCO to RENDER ALL (all the checkboxes are selected). FCP “blipped” and rendered nothing. Tried the QT export again making sure current settings, audio and video (no audio in project) or video only are selected, and self contained checkbox is not checked.
FCP still wants to render the whole movie of the repeated interlaced clip sequence instead of a reference movie of that sequence.

SETTINGS appear to match the clip, as far as I can tell.

2d isn’t dead yet!

[Kurt Wiley]

thanks David.
I looked at the render settings and for RENDER ALL every checkbox is turned on, including FULL. I tried RENDER ALL, which “blipped” the app but did no rendering (the timeline parameters appear to be the same as the clip’s).

But when I try to render a QT reference movie with the “recompress” checkbox unchecked, FCP still tries to render a complete movie, not a reference movie.

I also tried using a completely different codec in the settings to convert the timeline to another codec. Trying to render a QT Reference movie of this failed as well – once again, FCP insisted on writing the entire sequence as a .mov instead of just a Reference movie.

[Kurt Wiley]

I assumed dragging footage to the timeline / sequence took care of progressive .vs. interlaced.

Is that true?

Or do I have to handle interlace settings manually on the timeline?
I checked the clip statistics in the clip inspector window and they seem to match the timeline.

The procedure I did was make a project that matched the clip as closely as it could (interlaced, same frame rate, same clip x-y size), then import the footage, then drag it to the sequence timeline and if FCP asked it to change the settings, allow it to do so.

2d isn’t dead yet!