[Lu Nelson]

Whoah — hold on.

First, yes you can get somewhat better quality by recapturing from tape. If you originally captured your footage with good machine control (using an RS-422 connection and not firewire control), then your timecode is accurate enough that you could consider recapturing your clips to an online sequence (any higher res YUV codec from DV50 up to 10bit uncompressed). You recapture from a high end DVCAM deck (DSR-1800 or 2000) via SDI. These decks have hardware signal control, error control, and chroma upsampling.

If you captured originally with firewire control (i.e. using a firewire cable for both capture and deck control) your timecode may not have the same offset on every clip and if you recapture you’ll find your hundreds (or thousands of edits) are all out by a frame more here, a frame less there, etc. It’s a nightmare and you better not do it. So what then?

As the first response suggested, you should find a post house that can deal with your DV footage files directly from disk. Ideally, they are simply color-correcting on a higher-end FCP workstation, or perhaps using Final Touch HD..something that can handle your FCP timeline and files directly. Explain that going back to tape is not frame-accurate.

I would add: beware of trying to “export” your sequence to a higher res — there are pitfalls. There’s a lot of excitement on this board about going to PhotoJPEG, but this is an RGB codec, and unless you color correct FIRST, that color-space change is going to clip off all the white values in your DV footage (which is YUV based).

LMN

[Lu Nelson]

OK, I’m making a fool of myself. I am wrong again on that. I just saw the way to do this.

If you want to have a glow parameter in there too, and scale it, you must ALSO add the Glow>Offset parameter to your sequence behaviour and modify the vertical offset, to compensate again for the baseline scaling, like you did with baseline above.

[Lu Nelson]

aah — one more caveat…this seems to work well for the scale changes; but if you have a glow on your text that is also scaled, it seems you’re out of luck. It’s probably an order-of-operations thing; but it does not observe your altered baseline parameter. Too bad…but I never used that scaled glow anyway

[Lu Nelson]

Oops — no, the -50 value is not absolute. Martin is right, it depends on your font size. You have to scrub this value until it looks centred. If you change your font and/or font size after, this will probably be thrown off and have to be adjusted again.

thx LMN

[Lu Nelson]

Thanks Martin, — great tip.

Adding a Baseline parameter to any Sequence Text-based behaviour that has scale changes, and scrubbing the baseline value to -50 makes the scaling (zooming) look centred.

You DH guys know your stuff

LMN

[Lu Nelson]

Yep, I’ve tried modifying anchor point, baseline and offset — in any combination of either the properties inspector or the text inspector.

Take a pre-built behaviour like “Behind Camera” in the “Text-Zoom” category of Text Sequence behaviours and you’ll see what I mean.

The characters are being scaled from their baseline and there’s no way around it. It looks really dumb IMHO

LMN

[Lu Nelson]

The best way is to convert your footage to 24p before you start editing; but it depends how much footage you have. It is extremely time intensive.

You can also do it when you finish your cut. In either case you use Compressor — since you are using FCP5 and Motion2, you must also have Compressor 2.

Compressor 2 can do very high quality frame rate conversions and de-interlacing, using the same optical flow technology that is built in to Shake. The results are better than any plugins currently available for FCP, better than DVFilm and better than Magic Bullet, but it is slow. Basically you create a preset in Compressor that will take your program and convert 29.97i to 23.976p. Run some tests on material that has cuts and dissolves in it though, to see how they turn out — I’ve only tested it on single shots; but I promise if you do it at the highest quality settings, you will be stunned by the results.

Look around on the FCP board for other techniques vis a vis Compressor. It’s also a very powerful way to speed-convert clips.

[Lu Nelson]

— oops, scratch that. It’s pretty obvious that any layer can be an adjustment layer, it’s based on Alpha I guess. Or I can track matte an Adj Layer to the file, no problem.

Interesting interplay when using AE 7’s exposure effect, including its gamma controls — turning the exposure down and the gamma UP on the picture layer, then applying exposure in the adjustment layer to bring gamma back down and exposure back up according to the ‘lights’… much closer

thx

[Lu Nelson]

A-ha — OK, that sounds right. Is there a way to use an animated file — let’s say a grayscale animation which represents the movement of my lights — as an adjustment layer itself?
Or do I have to represent those ‘lights’ only by masking and feathering the adjustment layer(s) which are otherwise simple solids?

thx

LMN

[Lu Nelson]

for that matter, the whole lord of the rings trilogy was awfully edited; but especially the first one. And they won an oscar for editing….