[Ninetto Makavejev]

Thanks for the tip, it almost sounds too easy.

The material delivered to me is (supposedly) uncompressed AVIs in Adobe-RGB space.

So am I right in assuming that setting up the comp as 709 will interpret this material correctly when I export final comp as Blu-ray m2t files?

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Thanks much for the advice.
Over at the AE Forum they have advised the following workflow:

1)Make sure imported material is interpreted as correct color profile, i.e. in my case I have RGB uncompressed AVIs.

2) Set up HD Composition with 709 color space and drop material into comp.

This all almost seems too easy for me, that AE/Adobe is intelligent enough to convert the color space accurately. I will be exporting to blu-ray so only then will I see if the translations really works as almost “auto-pilot”.

I am aware that sometimes rookie editors ignore the color profiles of projects they export, so I have to verifiy the uncompressed AVIs indeed are Adobe RGB profiles, I have no desire to color corrected all their stuff for free!

Anyone else have experience with this?

[Ninetto Makavejev]

I believe “title exchange” has an XML editor that allows for global change of font and font size, but I have never used it myself.

info here:
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools/TitleExchange/index.html

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Hard to understand what your problem is.
What version of OSX are you running? OSX understands (reads) all PC-drive formats excepting some RAID arrays. It can write to FAT32 PC-drives and with the help of Paragon’s tool can also write NFTS drives.

On the PC side you will need MacDrive to read/write Apple HFS-formatted drives. Both MediaFour MacDrive and Paragon NFTS work fine for cross-platform solutions.

good luck,
n.m.

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Premiere, like the rest of the CS4 Suite, is cross-platform: so your PremProj from the PC will open on the Mac. You may have to re-link the media if drive paths are different.

But beware(!) if you e.g. are capturing on either platform in exclusive codecs… i.e. if you capture HDV on Mac you will not necessarily be able to edit the files on your PC… since the Quicktime HDV codec will not be installed by CS4 on a PC… etc.

good luck,
ninetto

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Huge difference? In order to know what “difference” is being refered to here, the question is justified: was the previous machine an intel-mac, was the previous machine running Tiger, Leo… or what?
Only then we non-telepathic humans will be able to draw a conclusion.

That said, there ARE numerous reports about performance with Snow Leopard, and NOT all are flattering at the moment.

As usual, there are a number of issues with 3rd-party plug-ins and programs… entire forums dedicated to work-arounds with Snow Leopard.

Until then… if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

regardz, n.m.

[Ninetto Makavejev]

I have run into this issue also. AME in CS4 has no PAL 1080p preset.
After checking around on H264 and various media players capable of outputting this format, this is my conclusion (which may not be 100% correct):

it seems that many devices (both hard and software) that play H264 do not really “care” if the material is encoded as progressive or not: it will interpret the footage according to the capability of the hardware attached to it… e.g. if you encode h264 @ 1080i PAL and the device can display progressive frames, then the interlace flag will be “ignored” and full progressive frames will be displayed.

That was my conclusion when recently preparing a PAL H264 1080i file to be played at an art exhibition with a WDTV media player attached to a XGA beamer.

Now, what does this mean when progressive-encoded material is supposed to play on a CRT-monitor? Hmmm, not sure about the vice-versa, but I could imagine it works in that direction too. I guess you could consider this whole interlaced or non-interlaced with H264 as a “virtual” prog/interlaced material.

Or does someone know more exactly what is going on with H264 interlaced vs progressive?

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Thanks for the info and motivation!

I suppose the workflow is a bit backwards, but since the DV edit is done already, it is OK to just drop the finished edited DV sequence into a new ProRes sequence, and render that out as you suggested? Or do I have re-convert (via Media-Manager) or recapture the raw DV master material?

regards,
ninetto

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Quicktime Animation is super-duper, the render times in AE are not even longer compared to using native HDV as raw material.

But yes, there is still one last question. Since your original (VERY clear, thanks) description that 25p DOES have fields, i.e. is interlaced, but with both fields recorded at the same time… I have to wonder, when do I tell AE to interpret the material as “NO FIELDS”, if in fact HDV progressive material also has fields? This question comes up e.g. when using the QT-Animation material for effects, but rendering out to HDV 50i.

Or am I just beating a very dead horse, let the render presets decide?

thanks and
buona fortuna, ninetto

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Thanks for clearing up some of the confusion. I probably shouldn’t open up the can of worms “why must 25p be packed in a 5oi wrapper with 2 fields”… but nevertheless when exporting the material out of FCP into a lossless codec, then the question arises:

How can I get full vertical resolution out from this 25p (50i) material? Which progressive, lossless codec DOES AE like?

hiside, ninetto