[Neil Sadwelkar]

From the Blackmagic HD Link Pro 3D page…

HDLink Pro 3D DisplayPort also supports HDMI 1.4 for compatibility with the latest full resolution 3D televisions!

SMPTE 352M video payload identification ancillary data is used for automatic input format recognition and RGB/YUV color space detection. Color precision is at an incredible 10 bit in both SD and HD formats. Video data is automatically rounded down to the bit depth of the connected LCD display for superior viewing quality.

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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

You can set your HDV timeline to render using ProRes that should speed up rendering of effects. Else your approach of exporting the HDV timeline to ProRes and then working in a ProRes timeline is the better approach, albeit at the cost of larger file sizes. But then, as you say, disk space is getting cheaper all the time.

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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

You can correct a variety of glitches with Rainer Standke’s free Too Much Too Soon plug-ins. There’s a hair and scratch removal plug-in there which can take out small glitches easily and quickly.
If it works for you, don’t forget to donate.

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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I\’ve used a MacBook Pro as my editing machine for many years too. It\’s not as fast as a desktop, obviously, but I didn\’t need it to be, in my situation. To increase it\’s usability I\’ve added the following…
Connected to a 20\” in Cinema for a larger screen
USB apple keyboard and Apple magic mouse
Sonnet Expresscard eSATA card to connect to SATA drives
drive dock to connect to bare SATA drives for large file work
Matrix MXO2 mini to connect to analog TVs and HDMI devices.
Of course, FireWire and USB drives

All this let\’s me carry a mini studio in a backpack and set up in minutes in the field.

For home use I use a iMac as my desktop, and it\’s networked to my MBP. My media lies on a collection of disks which connect to the MBP and the iMac as needed.

The one thing that\’s a limitation with any MBP is speed. Especially if you\’re doing DVD encoding, complex layered compositing, and other such processor intensive things.

Otherwise the convenience and portability is great. But that has to be the reason for getting a MBP.

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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I do a lot of this stuff for my clients.

For the future you can consider sending over the files on a hard disk, or Blu-ray disk, or even multiple DVD-Rs. I will do whatever it takes to import them in FCP and send back the project and media files on a small hard disk.
If its Canon files I can even stripe them with time code and reel numbers and transcode to ProResHQ.

When you’re done with the project, I can help recreating a master from the originals which I will keep till the project is finished. So you have an off site backup as well.

Does this sound like a workable plan?

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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

In Beta SP or Digi Beta there is a distinct Assemble mode and an insert mode.

From what I recall, with many DV camcorders its not the same. In these DV (or DVCam) camcorders, if one has black recorded on tape, recording happens not in assemble mode, but in insert mode . Where one pauses recording, or stops it, the time code is continuous and doesn’t have that assemble gap that Beta SP or DigiBeta creates.

I remember this from shooting with a DSR 250 about 10 years ago when we used to black tape before shooting.

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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Which version of FCP, QT, and MacOSX? And, are the titles from FCP, or imported graphics (for eg. .jpg, .png, .tif, .tga) or some other?

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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I’ve responded to this thread with my own theories too. But I’m curious as I’ve heard of this issue but never had a troublesome sample. If you don’t mind can you please send me the sample 4 sec animation as well as the m2v that you made with all the suggestions yo’uve got in this thread?

I have my own set of settings for MPEG2 particularly as most of the stuff I get is 24 fps HD and goes out as 29.97 fps NTSC so I deal with this often.

You can do a yousendit or mail me at
neilsadwelkar -At- gmail -dot- com
Just replace the -At- and -dot- with the symbol and period.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

My experience with HD to DVD, particularly non-square sizes like 1280×1080 (faux HD?) for 1920×1080 is…

Export sequence at its native HD settings.
Check how the movie looks in QT player. It will look fine.
Run this HD QT through Compressor and make an SD quicktime, same frame rate.
It will be a 720×576 or 720×486 QT which will be anamorphic. That’s normal.
Use this SD QT to compress to m2v in Compressor.

It will look better than an HD QT to SD m2v conversion.
Conversion time even the sum of the two stage HD-SD and SD-m2v will be less than the straight HD QT to SD m2v.

Experiment with the frame controls in Motion especially in the HD to SD conversion.
Do trials on small 1-3 min segments till you hit a good setting. Then do a longer 10 min compress, and then go for the whole thing.

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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I’ve done PAL to NTSC with Compressor, and with a careful application of settings it turns out pretty good. 24fps to NTSC does better.

So, if at all it is an option, you could take your final edited NTSC timeline, export it out as an NTSC Quicktime with audio. Then use compressor to convert that to 23.98 fps Quicktime. At this stage scale the movie to 720×576 which is the PAL frame size.

After that use CinemaTools to conform that 23.98 movie (with audio) to 25fps. Sound (and picture) will run 4% faster but in PAL countries we are used to film (24fps) material coming out as 25fps PAL at 4% faster speed. This method has less motion artifacts overall than the 29.97 to 25 conversion.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India