Matt Lyon
Forum Replies Created
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[David Roth Weiss] “Quicktime Conversion: An inferior video file conversion utility, best thought of as a convenience, but to be avoided 99% of the time. Compressor and even Streamclip are far superior.”
Hi David, can you elaborate more on this? I respect your opinion and I see that “quicktime conversion” gets knocked a lot on this board, by many different posters, as “inferior,” but I don’t generally share that belief.
From what I can tell, its scaling quality is equivalent to “better” in Compressor (provided you set your frame dimensions manually). It also has the advantage of being able to automatically insert keyframes at your edit points in h264 exports.
Granted, it can’t do things like good de-interlacing, or presets, or virtual clusters. But I use it all the time with very good results. It is also reliable and won’t mis-interpret your video’s field order. I can’t really recall a time where I ever thought Compressor blew away my “quicktime conversion” export. That being said, I mainly do high bit rate, progressive h264 exports for client reviews. It is entirely possible that there are situations that I don’t happen to come across, where Compressor would really smoke “quicktime conversion.”
Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto -
If disc space is not an issue, I’d go with 10 Bit Uncompressed 4:2:2.
Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto -
This came up in another thread recently and the consensus was that the error could be safely ignored.
I did a bit more searching and found this in the manual:
Hope this helps,
Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto -
[David Cooke] ” The graphics look clean and GREAT in motion and
the .mov I export, but after it goes into FCP and I render it, less that clean like AE.”David, this sounds like a different issue than your problem with the quality of nests. How are you monitoring your video? Are you using a broadcast monitor and proper video I/O hardware? Also, if you are rendering a .mov out of Motion, you shouldn’t have to render it again once you bring it into FCP (unless you are applying more effects). Are you sure you are using the correct render settings?
That being said, the motion graphics abilities of FCP will never match Motion or AE. You may be expecting too much from it. But for simple things, I usually find the quality is “good enough.” A tasteful amount of motion blur can improve things a lot. Turn down the number of samples and the strength of the motion blur and you’ll get a much faster render.
Hope this helps,
Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto -
[Rafael Amador] “The kind of issues that seems that Apple seems prefer to ignore.”
I don’t know what goes on inside Apple HQ, but it seems to me like this is really just a matter of economics. At FCP’s price point, Apple makes money by selling upgrades and new versions of the software. There are no mega-buck support contracts to rely on. Selling new software requires new features. So that’s where the programming resources get assigned.
I’m speculating here, but It could also be that this issue is so ingrained in the current architecture of the product, that fixing it would require more effort then Apple judges it to be worth.
I’m hoping the 64 bit version of FCP, when it materializes, tackles the fundamental issues that create these problems in the first place.
Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto -
Hi David, I definitely agree that media manager, when used correctly, can be the most reliable way to move media. But it must be done per project, and is not a one-shot solution like Alf was hoping for.
What also irks me about Media Manager is that it consolidates all your files into one location. So any finder level organization of media is lost (something I do a lot of).
What I really wish Apple would add as a feature is a “preserve relative paths” option in Media Manager. But I suppose this might not work too well if you have media spanning across multiple drives.
As a compromise solution, I reckon you could use the “create offline” option in media manager to create a “cleaned-up” version of your project. Then you could relink to your media after copying it via the finder to the new drive.
I agree that a massive copy of media from one drive to another has the potential to cause problems. I think this is where good organizational habits are important. If you’ve been militant about keeping file names short, and avoiding “problematic” characters and duplicate file names, then things tend to go smoother, in my experience.
Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto -
Hi David,
Nests can definitely be a PITA. Have you made sure the quality setting WITHIN the nest is also set to “best”? You can also try opening the nest, then force rendering the material. Does that improve the picture quality in the main timeline? I think the issue is something about FCP not being able to “see” the full resolution of the material within the nest (possibly it is only sampling the resolution of the “sequence setting” of the nest).
My memory is a bit hazy of the last time I had to deal with this, but you may be able to simply force-render the nest in your main timeline and end up with a result that matches un-nested material.
Hope this helps,
Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto -
Thanks for linking to my article, Rafael, but I don’t remember seeing that particular warning when I was troubleshooting those particular issues.
I have definitely experienced the “media not optimized” warning in other situations though. But like David, I just ignored it. Last time I saw it was with some media I converted using MPEG Streamclip. I’m really not sure what causes it … my WAG was something to do with the order the bytes are written on disk?
Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto -
Are you still planning on using your old hard drive? You could copy all your files to the new drive (in a manner that preserves the directory structure). Then unplug your old drive. Change the name of your new array to the EXACT same name as the old drive. Your files should reconnect automatically. So should your render files, if the path names do indeed match.
Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto -
Normally, FCP will only render audio files if it thinks it needs to. If you really want to FORCE a render, then press “command-option-r” to render a mixdown.
But as Shane says, if you set your realtime audio mixing high enough, you should rarely have to render. Even on my old G5 I would set it to between 32-48 tracks and I can’t remember ever exceeding the system’s realtime limit.
If you still can’t render, try changing the location of your audio render files in the FCP preferences. It could be there is a write permission issue on the directory you currently have selected. (Or use the “get info” window in the finder to fix the read/write settings of the folder).
Hope this helps,
Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto