

Matthew Keane
Forum Replies Created
-
Thanks for the suggestions. I can see what Dave means about isolating one colour channel, and I’ve done it before for short FX shots, but I have about 7-8 minutes of footage to deal with, and a client who can’t understand why I cringe when I see the footage and want to fix it!
Also, I admit, I was feeling lazy and was hoping to find an easier solution. I was sure I’d read about plug-ins for averaging frames over time, for example for noise removal from low-light security camera footage, which I thought might do the trick if applied to just the blue channel. Not having much luck with my searches though.
Cheers,
Matthew -
You’re right that bit depth _shouldn’t_ affect sync. However I noticed some weirdness on a recent project when dropping 24bit 48k WAV audio files into a 90 minute timeline. The audio clip fell slightly short – by a few seconds – of the last video clip. So I rechecked everything – The audio files showed up as 90 minutes in Quicktime and Audacity, everything started at zero on the timeline… then I tried converting the 24bit WAV to a 16bit 48K AIFF. At first I relinked the audio clip to the new file, and this didn’t help, ut when I imported the new 16bit AIFF and overwrote the audio clip in the timeline, everything synced up.
And yes, I realise that doesn’t really make sense, but I was happy to have found a solution, and I still have doubts about audio sync with 24bit WAVs in FCP, but I admit I haven’t had the time to experiment further…
Matthew
-
Ok, just in case anybody is interested and I’m not just talking to myself…
I tried importing and editing a 50 minute m2v file from the DVD. FCP got horribly slow and eventually bombed (on a dual 2.7 with 2.5G RAM), so I guess I’ll stick with converting to DV first.
The new Reduced Instruction Set Consolidate is:
1. Import Converted DVD footage as Quicktime DV file and place on the timeline.
2. Edit clip properties to set reel name for the master quicktime file.
3. Set the capture property to ‘OK’.
4. Right-click the sequence icon to ‘Make sequence clips independent’.
5. Select all the clips in the sequence and drag them to a bin to make new clips and rename them for exports with coherent names.That’s it! All working happily. And It might even turn out that step 3 is unnecessary. In the meantime, that’s 20G of space recovered – and that’s just today.
Matthew
-
Hurrah! OK, I’ve now got this working. However, as I’ve been fiddling around all afternoon on-and-off, I’m not entirely sure what was key to getting it working, but I’ll have another source file like this to deal with tomorrow, so I’ll check then. Anyway…
1. Converted DVD footage is placed on the timeline as Quicktime DV file.
2. Unwanted sections are cut.
3. Set reel name for the quicktime file (without FCP crashing this time, thanks).
4. Set the capture property to ‘OK’ instead of ‘waiting’ (working with French FCP, so not sure of exact term there).
5. I select all the clips on the timeline and do ‘Modify – Make Independent’.
6. I select the sequence in the bin and right-click to ‘Make sequence clips independent’ (Probably redundant, considering step 5, but hey, can’t hurt, right?)
7. I select all the clips in the sequence and drag them to a bin to make master clips.
8. I rename the clips (in the bin, or on the timeline, doesn’t seem to matter) with sequential clip numbers to avoid confusion.
9. I select the clips in the bin and right-click to launch the Media Manager and… hey presto, it offers to reduce my 11G original file down to 4. Cool!In the Media Manager, I selected ‘base filenames on clip names’, so that I have some coherent file names, and chose to duplicate the sequence into a new project – and it’s all linked up to the new source files. It’s also working if I select only the sequence and launch the Media Manager.
I think the only steps I missed this morning were steps 3 and 4, but given the Media Manager voodoo I’ve been trying all day, I won’t be sure until I start afresh tomorrow. In the mean time I have a much folder of source files to archive and the original TC seems to have been preserved.
Next step – to try dropping an unconverted m2v video file onto the time line and doing a consolidate and convert in one go. But that can wait till tomorrow.
Anyway, hope that helps somebody. I’ll just drop in a couple of tems like ‘consolidating’ and ‘decomposing’ in case I send up googling for this in a few months time!
Matthew
-
Hi Wayne,
Yeah, I was kind of coming to that conclusion too – that dumping the footage to tape, then capturing from there was probably the easiest, if not the quickest, way.
Matthew
-
> Have you tried applying a Reel Name to the clip (and changing it’s status to captured if need be)?
I did try applying a reel name – at which point FCP bombed, and I went for lunch. Will try again in a minute…
Matthew
-
I’m doing the opposite at the moment – creating the NTSC version of a PAL DVD project. In my case I was able to go back the the original After Effects project and create an NTSC composition into which I dropped the existing PAL comps. I rendered this out as uncompressed and then used Compressor to crunch the MPEG2 video file.
In DVDSP, I saved a copy of my PAL project and deleted all the video files from the assets bin so that I could change the project settings to NTSC. All the tracks (including chapter markers), menus, scripts etc remained in place so I then imported the new NTSC assets and dropped them into place. The chapter markers sometimes need tweaking so that they sit on the start of a GOP in the new video file, and it looks like I’ll have to check the subtitle files carefully for timecode hiccups, but other than that, it went very smoothly.
Matthew
-
Thanks for that, Dave. The lazy part of me was wondering whether I could get away without changing the frame rate in all the comps, as the AE guy went a bit mad with his pre-comps and there are over a hundred of them! But I guess it won’t take that long, and the results will probably be better.
Thanks,
Matthew -
I’ve only been using it for computer-based playback so far, so those limitations haven’t been a problem, but that’s useful to know – thanks!
Matthew
-
I’ve been using MPEG Streamclip to mux the 5.1 ac3 audio and m2v video files spat out of compressor. Very fast – almost worryingly so – but I can’t find any fault with the synch on a 90 minute encode.
Matthew