[Lu Nelson]

Yes, you can preview through Decklink but you need to also get Synthetic Aperture’s Echo Fire Software (it can be configured for Decklink), and let that be your main preview solution for AE. This creates an output device that the Color Finesse UI can use as well.

[Lu Nelson]

The latest Automatic Duck claims to support 3rd party filters transitioning from FCP to Motion — so, you need a CC that runs in both. You could try Color Finesse from Synthetic Aperture, as it is precisely the same plug-in in either app. The only drawback is that it runs in its own interface, and because of this, you have to also run their other product Echo Fire, in order to get previews on your SMPTE monitor (you also have to disable FCP’s video out — using Command-F12 — before you apply the Color Finesse plugin or the Echo Fire output program will not be able to take over the monitor). However, that combo should work.

Color Finesse is bundled with AE Pro. I wonder if that bundled version could be copied to FCP’s plugin folder and woud run there?

[Lu Nelson]

I have the x800 which you can easily overclock a bit, to match the x850 — making it equivalent to the fastest ATI card you can get in an AGP mac. However, if you can get your hands on a (now discontinued) nVidia 6800 Ultra DDL (and you can spare the PCI slot next to your AGP slot, as it takes up that space with its cooling assembly), it might be a bit better with Motion, as the nVidia cards apparently do not have the 2048×2048 layer size limitation when working in Motion that the ATI cards do. It seems nVidia cards can handle 4096×4096 layers…from what I’ve read elsewhere on this board. Too bad I figured that out after I bought my x800. Oh well, otherwise the ATI is great and probably cheaper than the nVidia in any case.

[Lu Nelson]

Boris Continuum runs in Motion, uses some of the GPU horsepower (for some filters anyway), and does contain a motion tracker, but it may only be able to pass data to other Boris filters, I dunno

LMN

[Lu Nelson]

A-HA — OK, so to clear the render for it, I could just select the clip and hit ctrl-B twice, for instance?

I’ll try that..

[Lu Nelson]

Ha — interesting. I heard something about this…are you sure it’s true for all nVidia cards? For instance the discontinued 6800GT? I wish I had some extra PCI slot space to spare for that massive thing…4k image sizes would help me a lot!

[Lu Nelson]

Well, an example file in the series would be named something like:

xxx-xxxxxx-xxxx_01.jpg (and so on…)

but I’ve also tried it just as:

xxxxxxxxx-01.jpg (and so on…)

and no luck with either.

[Lu Nelson]

Motion can’t handle any single element larger than 2048×2048 in most cases, without complicated workarounds…I’m not sure what you mean when “scaling up the view”: are you zooming in on the canvas, or scaling your picture? Do you need the picture to change scale in the project (i.e. appear to ‘zoom in’ or ‘zoom out’?), if you want to actually move and modify these pictures in motion, scale them to no larger than 2048×2048, and as a general rule, no smaller than double your frame width (in this case 1440). That will give you room to play around with them and the scaling quality will be good as long as you set anti-aliasing quality to ‘high’ and possibly turn on field rendering and motion blur if necessary…but do these steps only just before you render as they slow the system quite a bit

[Lu Nelson]

Compressor 2 uses Optical Flow. It will batch convert your files at a very high quality — if you use the best quality options in all cases it will take an enormous amount of time but it is superior to any of the frame rate conversion software out there: magic bullet, DVFilm, Nattress etc.; as long as you can afford to wait for it.

Also beware it does not preserve the timecode or original logging data of your clips.

[Lu Nelson]

I would digitize all the stuff each in their original format, then use media manager ‘recompress’ to export everything to a single unified OFFLINE format, and edit in that for a while. When you get close to your fine cut, reconnect everything and do a media manager TRIM, to export a new project file, and delete media you’re not using (use “copy” rather than “use existing”, if you don’t want to eliminate all the original footage just yet). Then you can look at converting the media you’ve got to deal with to a single ONLINE format (PAL to NTSC, HDV to NTSC, e.g.), since there should be much less of it at that point.

also note: that the best NTSC<->PAL conversions are now done by Compressor 2; but they’re slow.