[Matt Lyon]

I don’t recall having your specific problem but I generally avoid using nests for anything other then short term tasks, like applying an audio or timecode filter to a whole sequence.
Similar experiences to yours have left me feeling that nests aren’t reliable in the long term.
Have you tried copying the nest into a new, empty project, then relaunching fcp with only the new project open?

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

I’ve definitely seen the same thing occur to noisy footage I’ve worked on. A natural property of modern compression algorithms is they will “smooth out” small details and color differences to keep the data rate low.

I’d stick with h264, but you can try turning up the data rate, turning up the keyframe rate (or setting keyframes to “all” — which will cause the data rate to skyrocket).

You should also try downloading the free x264 plugin. IIRC, it has “film grain” preset that attempt to preserve grain and noise in the picture — probably worth a shot!

Hope this helps,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Hi Randy,

Well I’m going to respectfully disagree with Tom and say that I think the subclip tool is perfectly appropriate for your workflow.

Yes, it would be better to rip each music video to individual files, but given that they were ripped as one large clip, I think that subclipping is a fine way to organize them.

And I’m not sure why you are thinking you need applescript or something … it seems you are overthinking this a bit. If you put all your subclips in a bin, select them all, then select “modify>audio>apply normalization gain…”, each clip will be individually analyzed and normalized based on its peak audio level.

You can then select them all and use the batch export tool to create individual reference movies. You MUST do this step since you are using a compressor cluster. Unless you need to do further editing, you don’t even need to put your clips in a timeline.

But in terms of achieving maximum quality, your biggest hit is coming from the fact you are converting your files to DV, then re-converting to h264.

You’ll probably get a slightly better result if you can bypass FCP completely and rip directly from DVD to your final h264 preset. But this only is viable if you don’t need to do anything more sophisticated then setting an IN and OUT point on the source DVD. Maybe there is a ripping program out there that can normalize audio as well? I’m not sure…

But if you absolutely need to use FCP, you should consider ripping your files to a higher quality intermediate format, like pro-res, or at least DV50.

As far as the final compression settings, you should follow the recommendations of your Video-DJ software.

Hope this helps!

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

I agree with everything your saying Tom, but in this case the poster is trying to batch normalize a bunch of subclips from start to end, so he’s gonna get the same results whether normalizing in a timeline or in the browser, no? (unless the normalize command ignores the subclip limits when applied in the browser, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t)

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Doesn’t the normalization gain in fcp just apply a “gain” filter with a level automagically dialed in? Definitely non-destructive, since one can simply remove the filter at any time and nothing is baked into the original audio.

Tom, what is the reason for not applying normalization gain in the browser?

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

I was mucking around with my still frame cache today and realized I misspoke in my earlier post. If you turn down the application memory cache, the still frame cache goes down as well, since it is just a percent of the overall application cache. Duh…

Anyway, I don’t seem to be able to allocate more then 750 megs of RAM to still frames, at least on my machine at my current gig: G5, os 10.4.11, fcp 6.0.6

Anybody else have better luck setting a higher cache?

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Hi Tucker,

I’ve noticed that many keyboard shortcuts won’t stop the playhead, for example: zoom in/out/all, mark clip, select all, etc.

FCP seems to stop the playhead for any mouse click, and for certain other keyboard shortcuts (toggle autoselect, for example). This is true at least in the version I’m running, 6.0.6 … I can’t recall if the behaviour is different for 4.5

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

In addition to Bouke’s suggestions, does Premiere have an option to “include file names in EDL comments”?

I haven’t tried importing an EDL in a while, but I /think/ that FCP should be able to read this data, as long as Premiere can provide it.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Hi Eli, I think your instincts are correct and you should try to get the full length shots from the lab. You should then be able to cut and paste the keyframes and have them eye match, as you said.
Given how far along the process you are, I can’t imagine an easier solution at this point. Have them send one shot to test before trying the whole batch.
Next time, if you have to send shots before locking the cut, at least send the full res versions, so you don’t need to do the second conform and vfx render pass.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Hey Doug,
that’s some interesting discoveries. I can’t say I’ve experienced the same issues you’ve been having with compressor. Have you tried setting qmaster to never use cluster storage? I’ve never noticed compressor creating temp render files inside the fcp app package, but I’m going to check that out when I get home. Could you have the “output” directory set to “source”?
The \”send to compressor\” option has been fairly reliable for me… But I haven\’t used compressor 3.5 a lot.
I suppose you could experiment with changing the temp render dir inside the fcp App package to a sym link pointing to one of your arrays. But that would be playing with fire, IMHO.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto