[Michael Pye]

Fantastic, thanks guys. I did read the manual (rare, I know) and it was indeed a HD project in DVD Studio that I imported the .m2v file into, so it’s odd that it shouldn’t work. Anyhow, excellent suggestion Robert regarding the 60 minute preset, I’ll give that a shot and let you know what happens!

Cheers.
Michael

Macbook Pro 15″, 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3, Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT; OS X 10.5.8, Final Cut Pro 6.0.6

[Michael Pye]

Thanks for your help Rafael, I’m glad you like it. Can I ask – would the same principle apply to the shot at the end (close up on smiling little girl). The background is a white, however the client requests blue sky / fluffy clouds…! Is there a way of achieving this within FCP as regrettably I do not own Photoshop.
Michael

Macbook Pro 15″, 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3, Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT; OS X 10.5.8, Final Cut Pro 6.0.6

[Michael Pye]

… and on that note, if either of you know of a way I can smooth the appearance of the flowing water in the river, in the opening sequence, while retaining the overall speed of the time delay, I would also be very grateful.

Macbook Pro 15″, 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3, Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT; OS X 10.5.8, Final Cut Pro 6.0.6

[Michael Pye]

Ok, no need to shout!

… but nevertheless, a very heartfelt *thank you* as that was exactly the problem. For some reason the sequence presets had reverted to default (how it managed to do this without warning me with the standard ‘don’t do it!’ dialogue box, I don’t know). This of course was the source of the issue. Fortunately for me, the piece is quite short, so I created a fresh sequence with the correct settings then dropped the original marked clips back into that. Phew!

David – thank you also for your input, I am using a Firewire 800 drive, and had already ruled that out as the source of the problem before I made the post.

To both of you: you can watch the (draft version) of finished product, if you are interested, right here…

https://www.tracingtea.com/kyrgyzstan.html

Many thanks for your help.

Macbook Pro 15″, 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3, Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT; OS X 10.5.8, Final Cut Pro 6.0.6

[Michael Pye]

Brilliant, that is a great deal simpler! Many thanks.

Macbook Pro 15″, 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3, Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT; OS X 10.5.8, Final Cut Pro 6.0.6

[Michael Pye]

Thank you, John – superb thinking. I found of course I had to delete the frame numbers from the end of each value and also and ‘format > cells’ as ‘time’ but that only took a few moments. Thanks!

Macbook Pro 15″, 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3, Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT; OS X 10.5.8, Final Cut Pro 6.0.6

[Michael Pye]

Slightly embarrassing to respond to one’s own post, but in case any user of this forum experiences the above issue in future…

The solution is a program called Perian, which provides native support in Quicktime (and therefore also FCP), for various odd codecs such as that mentioned above.

Macbook Pro 15″, 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3, Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT; OS X 10.5.8, Final Cut Pro 6.0.6

[Michael Pye]

… and finally as an explanation of the above, please read below a response from one of the software developers at ClipWrap.

“The rewrap option is lossless in the sense it ads no additional loss – your camera has already compressed the image into a low bitrate format, we simply wrap it in a QT movie so quicktime can play it back. Any other option is going to transcode the image – ie, decompress it and then re-compress it in another format. Prores is much less efficient with disk space – it takes much more space to encode the same image – the trade off is higher bitrates for lower cpu usage.”

Macbook Pro 15″, 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3, Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT; OS X 10.5.8, Final Cut Pro 6.0.6

[Michael Pye]

As a brief addition to the above, I should mention that the ‘wrapped’ files do have a tendency to ‘jerk’ – although this may be because I am running a dual-core machine. The Prores output however, looks fine.
Michael

Macbook Pro 15″, 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3, Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT; OS X 10.5.8, Final Cut Pro 6.0.6

[Michael Pye]

I have experienced a similar problem, courtesy of a member of my film crew who copied over the raw .mts file stream without the directory files (hence FCP Log and Transfer cannot recognise them).

To the rescue however is a program called ClipWrap, which costs $50 – half the price of Toast – and offers transcoding to Prores 422, AIC, DV or DVProHD. Alternatively – and far more attractively – it can do ‘wrapping’, which losslessly reconfigures the original .mts as a quicktime movie.

Hope this helps.

Macbook Pro 15″, 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3, Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT; OS X 10.5.8, Final Cut Pro 6.0.6