[Michael Gissing]

Leave the field setting to upper for the sequence. Only set sequence to none if the content is true progressive. HDV is interlaced so that was poor advice.

All you have to do is drop the deinterlace plugin on the freeze frames. FCP has a basic deinterlace filter which is fine for a freeze frame. I use Nattress deinterlace filters if I choose to deinterlace moving pics in an interlaced sequence to achieve a progressive look. Good deinterlace plugins help reduce the resolution loss.

[Michael Gissing]

Forgot to mention the ATI 4870. PCIe graphics cards compared to obsolete PCIx. Big difference to FX plugins & Color.

Retire the G5 as an ftp/web/print server.

[Michael Gissing]

[David McClave] “What if money’s not an object?”

Well that’s just plain silly. If moneys not an object buy the gruntiest MacPro with buckets of RAM and big fast drives.

I recently bought a 2.9 Nehalem MacPro Octo with 16 gigs RAM, Snow & FCS3. I retired my Tiger G5 2.6dual with 4 gigs RAM. What a world of difference to performance – particularly the really slow stuff like renders and Compressor.

This is the best way to get speed. Everything else is tinkering with a Model T to race a Ferrari.

[Michael Gissing]

VHS is SD so it will not help to try to record that signal into an HD machine. The Canon can be switched to record DV but I still do not recommend DV codec when it can be so easily avoided.

[Michael Gissing]

Two things to add to your welcome and comprehensive post. Audio should be 48Khz not 44.1khz as your setup indicates. All digital video should be 48khz so if the Nikon records 44.1 like the Canon D5 it should be converted to 48 khz as it goes through Compressor and the sequence therefore set to 48khz as well.

Also search this forum for Gary Adcock’s excellent advice on ProRes 422 versus ProRes (HQ). With 1280 x 720 material I think Gary’s advice is to stay with plain old ProRes and not bother with HQ.

[Michael Gissing]

[Larry Asbell] “HELL-LLO? Aren’t we’re talking home movies from VHS here?”

Yes, silly me wanting to pre-empt the next round of panic posts about funny wavy interlacy sort of lines on movement and blocking on lovely red titles. All yours to deal with Larry.

[Michael Gissing]

[Larry Asbell] “ProRes is great, but DV resolution is pretty good and for home movies you may like the significant space savings.”

Cheap fast external drives means that there is no real reason to go DV. As a codec, I think it is a poor intermediary before going to mpeg2 for DVD. It is particularly blocky on titles and graphics which then translate poorly to mpeg2.

I also avoid DV because working in PAL, I hate the fact that it swaps field dominance to lower. It is less of an issue in NTSC but the days of going to DV to save a bit of space are over.

[Michael Gissing]

I presume you mean DVD recorder as there is no way to loop through a play only machine. I assume this extra signal path is to stabilise the VHS video timebase. Best would be to pass the VHS signal through a timebase corrector which will do a much better job of stabilising the signal.

I also presume you are going composite video and analog audio into the Decklink. If Component video is available, that would be cleaner than composite. Try going straight into the Decklink from the VHS to see if it is neccesary to loop through the DVD recorder. It may look better so I would trouble myself to test it. Don’t record the VHS to DVD just loop through, otherwise you are transcoding to mpeg2 and that will cost quality.

In FCP capture the footage as SD ProRes to get the best quality to file size. Also it is an editing codec.

[Michael Gissing]

I think you should go back to basics and study the RED work flow in FCP. There are very helpful pdf’s at the RED web site and searching the COW will throw up lots of advice.

Editing _p proxies is not a recommended work flow. Zooming them will look ordinary too.

[Michael Gissing]

IMX50 seems a strange choice of SD codec. Have you tried ProRes 422 in SD? That way your files and sequences will be ProRes – no render except for the animation codec graphics.

With FCP vers7 there is ProRes 4444 which has an alpha channel. Unfortunately I don’t know if that codec is available for a PC based AE setup but it would be ideal as the graphics file to match in with ProRes files and sequences.

Alternatively the graphics could be imported as a tiff sequence into Motion and exported as ProRes 4444. Animation codec is 8 bit as I understand it so if 10 resolution is required, the tiff sequence option would be better marginally better. Once the file is ProRes 4444 then no more rendering in the sequence.