[Martin Baker]

You’re talking about scaling the waveform up visually without affecting it’s volume yeah? Unfortunately there isn’t a way to do this, good feature request though.

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
________________________________________
Ten Final Cut Plug-ins for just $10 each

[Martin Baker]

Someone’s giving you really wrong information there –

DV25 is 5:1 compressed – 3.5MB/sec
DV50 is 3.3:1 compressed – approx 6.2MB/sec
PhotoJPEG isn’t 2:1 compressed, it uses a variable compression ratio depending on the complexity of the image.

Run your own test with an export to PhotoJPEG with the quality slider set to 75% and then do the same export to DV50. I bet the DV50 version is the larger file.

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
________________________________________
Ten Final Cut Plug-ins for just $10 each

[Martin Baker]

Yes I was probably one of those editors raving about it Lee. The DV50 codec is totally broadcast quality and I use it for more than 90% of the work I do. You’re right that there’s a lot of DV in broadcast these days but the regular DV25 and DV50 codecs are world’s apart in terms of quality. As regards comparison with PhotoJPEG (not sure what you mean by “analog PhotoJPEG”), the two are very similar but the big benefit of using DV50 is that it’s enabled for RT effects in FCP. At some point, I’ve stuck an uncompressed capture next to a DV50 capture of the same footage and it is impossible to tell them apart on screen. Even when you zoom right in to the pixel level, the difference is so negligible it’s not worth worrying about.

At the risk of tempting fate, the bottom line is that I’ve never had a problem with using DV50 in over a year and a half. DV50 just works great in FCP.

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
________________________________________
Ten Final Cut Plug-ins for just $10 each

[Martin Baker]

and just for the record, using the zoom slider in the Timeline window will always zoom into the playhead position even when clips or transitions are selected.

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
________________________________________
Ten Final Cut Plug-ins for just $10 each

[Martin Baker]

Save some keystrokes – you don’t actually need to tab to the current time field in the Canvas, just type the timecode in and the playhead will locate to it. This will also work in the Timeline as long as you don’t have any item selected.

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
________________________________________
Ten Final Cut Plug-ins for just $10 each

[Martin Baker]

Yes I’m listening Paul, just a bit of a delayed reaction!

The good news is that FCP is very similar to DS in a lot of ways so it’s a relatively easy transition. If you want to pop round for a chat, drop me a line martin(at)digital-heaven.co.uk

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
________________________________________
Ten Final Cut Plug-ins for just $10 each

[Martin Baker]

Wow another DS-FCP convert! Welcome to the club Rick, I remember your name from the DS-L.

1) Yes you can do this. Select the clip(s), then with the Slip Tool (S) or Slide Tool (SS) active you can either type in a +-x frames offset or you can use the < and > to nudge frame by frame. Holding down the Shift key will nudge in X frame increments as set in User Preferences>Editing.

2) With the Canvas active (and wireframes displayed) pressing Option-Left/Right/Up/Down arrow will move the clip in 1 pixel increments.Adding the Command key gears down to 1/10th pixel increments but the Shift key thing for large increments doesn’t work.

3) Nope unfortunately you can’t. You want metakeyframes or whatever they’re called on DS which are sort of there at the top of the Filters or Motion tabs but you can’t actually do anything with them…I was hoping that FCP5 was going to get Motion’s curve editor but it didn’t.

4) That’s the way it is. FCP won’t automatically scale down something larger than the sequence size when it’s loaded into the Viewer in the same way that AE does. Personally I don’t find it a massive problem just one of those things.

5) You’re used to only being able to have one sequence open at a time in DS (or has that changed these days?). I do this many times every day and it’s only just occurred to me that one thing you can do to speed up the process is to duplicate the current sequence and then rename the ORIGINAL rather than the copy. That way your currently open sequence updates with the renamed version.

6) I believe some changes to this are on the way in FCP5 (certainly scaling quality options).

7) Yes would be nice but realistically I doubt this will happen. There are some advantages to having separate apps but with integration between them which is clearly the way that Apple are going with all this.

8) ignored.

9) no comment.

This is the page you’ll want to bookmark Rick for those feature requests:
https://www.apple.com/feedback/finalcutpro.html
they do read them.

As I’m sure you’ve already found out FCP is very close to DS in many ways so it’s not as bad a transition to make as it is for some people. Good luck!

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
________________________________________
Ten Final Cut Plug-ins for just $10 each

[Martin Baker]

That’s how it’s supposed to be. Upgrading to QuickTime Pro ONLY affects the QuickTime PLAYER application, nothing else. You will still be able to export to H.264 and the other codecs from FCP, Compressor, After Effects etc even if you don’t have the QT Pro upgrade.

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
________________________________________
Ten Final Cut Plug-ins for just $10 each

[Martin Baker]

But…you don’t need a QT Pro key to export H.264 movies from iMovie or use H.264 in iChat…and they all use the QuickTime encoder.

As the Ars Technica review says, nothing causes more confusion than the QTPro thing, Apple really should drop it and include it in the OS as standard IMHO.

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
________________________________________
Ten Final Cut Plug-ins for just $10 each

[Martin Baker]

Some facts…The QTPro key has NO effect whatsoever on FCP. With QT7 installed you will be able to export to H264 from FCP WITHOUT having to spend the $30.

The QT Pro key ONLY affects QuickTIme Player’s features, not any other app on your system.

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
________________________________________
Ten Final Cut Plug-ins for just $10 each