[Michael Gissing]

Given your source material is interlaced, you would be better off doing the deinterlace as you have been. Personally, I prefer to use third party plugins to deinterlace before final render so I can see the effect and tweak the deinterlacing shot by shot if necessary.

Just changing the sequence settings, even if it then rendered everything as deinterlaced, would be using the FCP deinterlace which is not the best. Compressor is better than FCP and many think that third party deinterlacers are better again.

[Michael Gissing]

Not sure where the image quality drop is being observed. I hope you are checking the output from FCP on an external HD monitor via a Kona or Decklink card.

Uncompress .mov or .avi will be the same codec. Changing the wrapper is not likely to help, especially as FCP is quicktime based. Although a big file, uncompressed (if you can get a common codec) is best.

[Michael Gissing]

m2t is not an editing codec and it is highly compressed (mpeg2 in a transport stream basically).

I don’t know the AVID you refer to so I don’t know what other options you have to export. To solve the sync issue though, you might be better exporting the audio separate from the video and resyncing in FCP.

In the past I have had issues importing an AVID generated QT file which was supposedly Apple uncompressed 4.2.2 but it looked weird. The facility with the AVID somehow fixed this, probably by using third party software, to take the uncompressed from AVID and make a Blackmagic uncompressed QT which imported fine.

[Michael Gissing]

I can only suggest restarting with the Apogee unplugged and see if that helps.

[Michael Gissing]

My first guess is that the DV tape might have audio at 32Khz, not 48khz.

Of course trashing preferences/ repairing permissions is always advised when FCP plays up, particularly, I find, when capturing via firewire.

The other issue is possible conflicts with firewire. Are there any other firewire devices on the same us as the capture device?

[Michael Gissing]

Sorry, I thought you were working with DV codec. But regardless, standard def is broadcast interlaced so although you are working with animation, your sequence will need to be interlaced for playout to digi beta.

Try setting up a new sequence with fields set correctly (NTSC is lower from memory – I work in PAL). Drop you AE file in and see if that helps. If that isn’t the trick, then try exporting again with fields on, matching the FCP settings. The only monitor to trust is an external.

[Michael Gissing]

[Michael Brodner] “and wondered if anyone knew how some of these people are getting their hands on the footage to do this?”

They pinch it from the copyright owners of course. Ripping DVD’s and finding files for free seems to be acceptable to the younger generation. I just wonder how we will make money in the future.

If you want to use FCP to make youtube vids with other peoples material, then perhaps asking on a public forum isn’t very wise.

[Michael Gissing]

Is this a file supplied to you or are we talking about a capture issue?

Some basic info about file type, capture technique & settings and sequence settings will also help us guess better.

[Michael Gissing]

DV is interlaced lower field so you need to export from AE with fields set to lower.

[Michael Gissing]

The shabby look in quicktime player is probably because in preferences you haven’t selected “use high quality video settings..”