[Michael Pye]

Thank you, Arnie. I accept your point entirely, but the corporation in question are tight / stubborn and have specifically requested that I do a transcode rather than my simply acquiring a new drive. While I agree with you that this is beyond absurd, I would value any light you (or anyone else) might be able to shed on the topic of why the transcode has produced a smaller output than anticipated.

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]

John, thank you very much again for your suggestions. The final products are to be a 10 minute promo and a 30 second advert, so I have lee-way to play around when it comes to encode times – mercifully so as I am only using a dual core machine at present! My final question in that case would be: since I am working with relatively small end-product, is there a setting (other than frame controls, as you rightly have pointed out), that would allow me to produce a higher-quality DVD than the 90 minute best preset? As I said in my first post, the client does not have HD playback technology (they’re in Central Asia), however, it is likely to be used in presentations (projector screen).

With many thanks.
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]

Thank you both very much your responses.

First, a minor mistake in my original post: the working format will be Prores HQ 1080i25.

Two follow on questions, if I may please:

1) (To John) if – as you very helpfully point out – it would appear other users have had issues with HQ, in your view would it be best to convert the HQ files to standard 422 (1980×1080 25p) to minimise potential problems?

2) (To Zane) with or without HQ, would a sensible workflow for SD DVD be to directly export the Prores using compressor’s mpeg2 template, or should I perform an intermediate stage, that is, first export the Prores HQ to an uncompressed SD format?

Many thanks again,
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]

May I thank both of you for taking the time to reply to what I now realise was a fairly basic question. Your forebearance is much appreciated!
– Michael

[Michael Pye]

Shane,

Thank you again for your advice, which was very helpful. As it happens I have an old DV capture I have been intending to edit for a while, so I applied the detect function to that and it worked reasonably well. The only issue is that it marks the first frame of each take, with the result of course that you can cannot use the marks as out points – doing so adds frame of the next take to the your clip … all in all, it seems manual sub-clipping is the way forward, as you originally suggested.

Michael

[Michael Pye]

Shane,

Thank you for your help, I really appreciate it. I will definitely investigate look into the ‘time of day’ mode for the future – in your view, does this highlight a possible advantage of using a flash media-based camera e.g. an EX3 – precisely because these *do* create separate clips as you shoot?

As concerns software, however, was it naive for me to have wondered whether there is a function in FCP which can analyze a full-tape capture and identify where the breaks are, hence subclipping automatically? I ask this question out of curiosity rather than laziness – I am familiar and comfortable with the manual procedure!

Thanks,

Michael