[Lucy Moon]

Hope you don’t mind me chipping in when I don’t have the answer, but wanted to add I have similar problems. I have used plural eyes to make lots of long, reference QT’s of sync’ed interviews and reckon that might be part of the reason – but haven’t had time yet to debug the project.

My project takes about 5 minutes to load and is 38MB.

MacBookPro 2.2 GHz intel core duo/ 6 GB RAM / GeForce 8600M GT
Mac Pro 2.8 Quad / Nvidia Quadro 4000 / 12 GB RAM / OSX 10.7
Hackintosh 3.41 i7 / AMD Radeon HD 6870 /16 GB 1 / OSX 10.7

[Lucy Moon]

Aha! The same. Opening an empty project was still causing “looking for…” errors. It was the thumbnail cache for me. Once deleted it pops open as it ought.

MBP 2.2 GHz intel core duo/ 6 GB RAM /GeForce 8600M GT
Mac Pro 2.8 Quad / Nvidia Quadro 4000 / 12 GB RAM / OSX 10.7

[Lucy Moon]

I forgot. Anyone know of a benchmarking tool to test render times? Preferably h264 as I do loads of that.

MBP 2.2 GHz intel core duo
4GB ram
GeForce 8600M GT
10.4.11 + FCP 6.04

[Lucy Moon]

Ah, yes. I had a quick squizz too and I think you need some genuine FCP components.

Someone here may disagree, but perhaps the older “Apple intermediate codec” might be on your system and therefore MPEG streamclip It was a precursor to prores but would give you an easier editing format I think.

Best of luck and let us know your conclusions!

MBP 2.2 GHz intel core duo
4GB ram
GeForce 8600M GT
10.4.11 + FCP 6.04

[Lucy Moon]

Hey Greg,

Off the top of my head, I’d guess that MPEG streamclip might not natively have the Apple prores codec available (perhaps my version picks it up from the install of FCP?). Does anyone else know?

Do you have the latest version of MPEG streamclip and and FCP/Compressor on the same Mac?

Cheers
~Astrid

[Lucy Moon]

Hiya Dean in New York,

Yowser, not sure how that is happening. Worked for me, as they say. 🙂

Another approach is – if you’ve the disk space for a big file export…

– Export your lovely HDV sequence as HDV (if you haven’t already)
– Open Compressor, and add your HDV file
– Use the preset ‘SD 8-bit Uncompressed NTSC’
– Pull this new file into FCP
– Where it is listed in the Browser window, put a tick in the ‘anamorphic’ column
– Make a new empty sequence
– Drag the new file into it, letting FCP set the sequence settings

…. and hopefully a ta-da widescreen SD sequence shows in the canvas?

If so you can print to video, nicely.

HTH!

[Lucy Moon]

Hello.

Not sure I know why you are seeing letterboxing, but I have had success making an PAL SD anamorphic sequence from an HDV sequence.

I assume you’ve a nice native HDV sequence, with no letterboxing showing in the Canvas?

From there, I would create a new sequence with ‘DV PAL 48khz Anamprphic’ (from ‘Load sequence preset’ options) and I nested the HDV sequence inside it.

It takes a lifetime to render before playing out to video, but it looked good once rendered.

BTW, I first tried Compressor to downres the HDV but didn’t like the quality of the file from the Compressor preset.

Does that help?

Cheers
~Astrid

[Lucy Moon]

Great tips all. Thank you.

I’m keen on the internal SATAs now. This was an affordable improvement I hadn’t been aware of.

Also I couldn’t agree more, Don, about the FCP update!

[Lucy Moon]

Hey, thanks Dave, I will try that! Might just be the solution I need!

[Lucy Moon]

Ah – thanks all. Will try the upgrades then.

Cheers