[Michael Gissing]

It depends on what the footage was captured as. Can you get info on a clip and tell us what the capture codec is please.

[Michael Gissing]

Don, firstly did you shoot with a UV filter? Australian light can be harder and stronger and thanks to all the northern hemisphere people using CFC’s in their deodorants, we have a hole in the ozone layer that lets in lots of extra UV.

I must admit, I am not used to seeing footage with that halo in spite of being in Tasmania with the most UV. As for getting rid of it, I would try the 3WayCC in FCP using the limit effect mode. Eye dropper the blue halo and then remove a lot of saturation and even use the white balance to shift away from blue.

Richard Harrington did an excellent tutorial on using the limit effect mode of the 3WayCC.
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/harrington_richard/final_cut_fixing_exposure/video-tutorial.php

hope this helps

[Michael Gissing]

It is a common mistake that people mistake wrappers for codecs. Quicktime and AVI etc are wrappers that can contain a huge variety of codecs, frame sizes and rates.

[Michael Gissing]

Winston, I did a search on ‘Canon 5D’ and found 149 results. This camera workflow has been covered ad nauseum and the answer that Shane gave is the simple correct one.

I suggest you search further as the frame rate and audio sample rate issues need to be understood as well.

[Michael Gissing]

What David is trying to help you do is match the sequence settings to the footage. What you also need to understand is how to select the correct Easy Setup before you import and edit footage.

What is your current Easy Setup and what codec did you import the HDV footage as. It is likely operator error and not FCP behaving strangely.

[Michael Gissing]

Firstly the PAL footage is not HD. Anamorphic PAL is 720 x 576. The file you are using has been converted from anamorphic to 16:9, hence the 1024 pixel width. If you have converted that back into 720 x 480, then it should be anamorphic again, regardless of what info tells you.

What does it look like in the NTSC DV timeline? That is what matters. If it looks slightly thin or stretched, then adjust the distort in the motion tab of the shot in the timeline. Once it looks right in the timeline, it will export properly.

[Michael Gissing]

[Eric Jurgenson] “DV PAL is upper field first.”

This is wrong. PAL DV is lower field. It is the only lower field PAL codec that I am aware of.

[Michael Gissing]

[Juan Salvo] “There is no way to keep the dolby-e intact when you are capturing.”

Why not? It is just a data stream embedded so you should be able to capture it into FCP and back out. Capture doesn’t re-encode PCM data.

In theory Dolby E was designed to be editable, but in practice I wouldn’t try it with FCP. Part of the problem is that FCP doesn’t pre roll the source before an insert, just does an instant start at the edit. This creates clicks in normal PCM audio as it needs to do a cross fade edit. With a Dolby E stream, the cross fade should be turned off on the tape machine, but even so, I wouldn’t recommend inserting into a Dolby E stream with FCP.

[Michael Gissing]

[Aaron Brenner] “Any idea why one of the HDV shots jitters?”

Did you check to see it didn’t have a shift field filter accidentally applied? Also HDV can get the jitters on fast movement but that looks different to field order jitter.

Is it happening on an HDV speed change shot? If so try experimenting with turning frame blending on or off and see if that renders smoother. Some speeds just look better with frame blend off. Not sure why.

[Michael Gissing]

Yes, it has been covered on this forum, but it may have been hard to find. An upper field sequence with lower field footage (in your case the DV) will not do vari speed properly as the frame blending happens before the shift field plugin.

The easy way to fix this is to copy paste the DV shots with speed changes into a lower field DV sequence. Remove all attributes but the speed change and then make quicktime files of each shot. Import the shots back into the HD timeline. I usually paste them on a track above the original shots so I can copy the attributes into the new quicktime replacement files. So apart from the speed changes, all grading and framing attributes are then rendered in HD