[Michael Gissing]

Not free but CHV make a cute plugin that lets you take a definable area and clone it over the lens dirt.

It can be tracked by keyframe and you can adjust parameters like softening edges etc. However as mentioned, a panning shot makes this a tedious frame by frame exercise unless the sky is fairly uniform.

[Michael Gissing]

Are you able to check the final on an external monitor? Judging quality on the FCP viewer is not advisable.

[Michael Gissing]

Speeding up in FCP can look pretty good. The important thing is that the original is actually shot slo mo. 135% is not a big speed manipulation and speeding up should look better than frame blending when slowing below 100%.

Motion has more options with speed manipulation which might look smoother (optical flow etc)

Also if you go back to your original file and use Compressor to make the shot the exactly length you want with frame controls, (whilst converting it to ProRes)that might be better yet. Lots of options.

[Michael Gissing]

Do you have audio scrubbing turned on? (View> audio scrubbing toggle or SHIFT + s)

[Michael Gissing]

MacPro dual quad 2.93 Nehalem, 16 gigs RAM, ATI 4870 graphics card. Internal 4TB RAID made up from Seagate 1.5 TB drives. Kona3, Tangent Wave.

SL 10.6.2
FCS3 with the latest 7.0.1 updates & Color 1.5.1

Most work is delivered on WD or Lacie externals running FW800. I use the internal for render files as the master clips are on the external.

[Michael Gissing]

Wayne, I do my best to make sure all my clients can read H264 files. For years I have recommended to them to download VLC media player if they don’t already have quicktime.

But there are still heaps of people who just have Windows Media player and get confused when it asks them to download a codec. For that reason, if a file has to be made available to the widest audience, a WMV version plus an H264 version should be made available.

Lately I have discovered Miro – an amazingly good free media player that plays full screen HD mpeg/ H264 files much more smoothly than quicktime on windows. It also has a feature that connects you to legal free content from NASA and hi def wildlife & underwater footage. It is cross platform so although you don’t need it on the Mac, it is worth considering if you are coaching clients with Linux & Windows.

[Michael Gissing]

I just rendered a 1 minute title sequence in ProRes 4444 (2048 x 1080) adding a Nattress gamma filter (orange lines). 3 minutes on my system.

[Michael Gissing]

I went from a dual 2.5 G5 to a dual quad 2.93 Nehalem MacPro. I also went straight to SL & FCS3. It absolutely blows the old G5 away rendering ProRes, HDV or Uncompressed. I haven’t had XDCam footage since the change over, but I send to Color and have it render back ProRes anyway so I can’t image a need to render XDCam here often.

Perhaps that just confirms your theory about early Vs late model MacPro’s and it might also be Leopard Vs SL.

[Michael Gissing]

Yes to use Compressor with frame controls. The 7D is capable of shooting 1920 x 1080 at proper broadcast frame rates & 48hkz sound.

Whoever shot this should get a swift kick up the arse for shooting the wrong frame rate, pixel dimension and audio sample rate.

[Michael Gissing]

Actually Mandi, that isn’t a common story in my experience. Rarely is footage captured in one system and then expected to be transferable to a different edit system on a different OS.

It is bad enough with captures within FCP and various versions of Quicktime, but no, I consider it unusual to change to AVID after capture.

Recapture off tape is probably most reliable way in case you need to recapture for online and must have timecode and reel numbers all correct. Unless that info can be maintained within a file transfer, I wouldn’t attempt converting to AVID codecs.