[Padraic Culham]

Not a scam, but definitely some flaws in their process.

I took advantage of this complimentary trial offer last year. Downloaded the free stock footage clips. Canceled my account. My card wasn’t charged. Everything was good.

Fast forward to now, when I’m looking into actually signing up and becoming a paid subscriber, but I can’t do so with my email address, as it’s already “used” in the system. In order to become a paid subscriber, I have to use a different email address.

I understand that they want to track and prevent people from signing up for the free promotions over and over again. But if a person is willing to become a PAID subscriber, perhaps they could take the flag off of that existing email address and let somebody give them money?

Mac Pro 2×2.8 QuadCore; 6GB RAM; FCStudio2; Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium

[Padraic Culham]

Mr. Doyle, I stand corrected. Thank you.

I retract my snarky remark.

Mac Pro 2×2.8 QuadCore; 6GB RAM; FCStudio2; Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium

[Padraic Culham]

My favorite line from the website:

“Technically, it is impossible to make a “true” HD product — like the movie, Avatar — from Regular 8, Super 8, and 16mm movie film.”

I wasn’t aware that Avatar was “true” HD. I was under the assumption that it was 2K or 4K. Alas.

(Although the fact that he had to mention it implies he may have gotten some interesting inquiries: “I want to make my grandmother’s 8mm footage look like Avatar. Can you do that with your digitals?”)

Mac Pro 2×2.8 QuadCore; 6GB RAM; FCStudio2; Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium

[Padraic Culham]

I’ll take a shot at this one. Having read the original post through a few times, I think I understand the question.

When rendered out and encoded, the individual pieces (2, maybe 3) look fine on yt (assuming youtube). When combining the pieces (from various frame rates and image sizes) into a single movie, the lossless/near lossless render looks fine (“…original avi looks crystal as you would expect”), But when that single movie is encoded/uploaded to youtube, compression artifacts are rampant.

The why is likely quite simple – your combined video is longer than the individual pieces. Thus, when encoding into h.264 or any other temporal-based codec, the quality of the full movie will be affected. And when the movie goes through the additional encoding step on youtube, that will hurt the quality even more.

Thus, Walter’s answer was most likely the best one – take this question to the compression forum.

And when you do, approaching the forum with a bit more respect and humility will only help your cause. Most of the people here understand the frustration that comes from trying to solve these sorts of problems (though likely NOT to the extent of “1000x attempts”). That being said, most of the people here also maintain a sense of decorum and courtesy. Approaching a generally non-troll forum like this one with an inflated sense of entitlement (“Please help ME!”) and uncalled-for anger when your question isn’t easily understood is frankly a bit baffling.

I did like the poem that came out of this thread, though. (Perhaps a ‘like’ button should be instituted?)

And Dave – I didn’t take any time away from work to write this. I was rendering, so I had a few minutes to kill.

Mac Pro 2×2.8 QuadCore; 6GB RAM; FCStudio2; Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium

[Padraic Culham]

‘Small house’? – while I do loves me some hyperbole, Mr. LaRonde, there is the variance of geographic subjectivity. For the price of a small house here in SoCal, one could look into getting their own Panavision film cam. Medium house may get you a large format IMAX cam. But I digress.

I’ve also had a great deal of success keying with DVCProHD (usual shooting caveats apply – well-lit green screen, minimized spill, etc).

One thing I have come across, though, is in regards to rendering DVCProHD to send back to edit. I’ve not had much luck rendering out a DVCProHD QT from AE; typically, I get a compression hit that affects the quality of the image, not just the ‘effected’ areas. I’ve worked around this by rendering out ProRes422 or animation (if I’m sending it to a Windows based editor). I’ll concede that it is possible I’m missing something in the setup process for my renders, and if any of the pros here have any thoughts on that, I’d love to hear them.

Mac Pro 2×2.8 QuadCore; 6GB RAM; FCStudio2; Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium

[Padraic Culham]

One other thing to look into – some Magic Bullet software can get tricky with upgrades; that is, it’s not necessarily forward compatible. I came into a similar issue when I downloaded a patch update for MB Colorista; (I think it was 1.0 to 1.1). After installing the patch, my previous projects would fail to open (Magic Bullet error). Granted, you’re using a different piece of MB software, but it may be something to double check.

Mac Pro 2×2.8 QuadCore; 6GB RAM; FCStudio2; Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium

[Padraic Culham]

Must double check the camera, but a firmware upgrade may indeed be due.

Got the error when connected to the Mac via FW 400. No other FW devices were connected at the time. Error came when trying to do the Log and Capture directly from camera to FCP.

WAS able to get the footage using the (seemingly preferred) method of copying the files from the camera, and THEN L&Ting into FCP. (Used USB connection to copy the files to the computer).

Mac Pro 2×2.8 QuadCore; 6GB RAM; FCStudio2; Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium

[Padraic Culham]

Dave – do you have your STOCK ANSWERS posted anywhere? And if not, maybe we should make rumblings to the Cowlords that they SHOULD be somewhere. I’d love to be able to access the wisdom without having to scroll through threads.

Mac Pro 2×2.8 QuadCore; 6GB RAM; FCStudio2; Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium

[Padraic Culham]

Adobe’s new methodology to avoid copy protection limits a serial number to a select number of installs (2 or 3, I believe).

They would prefer that you officially un-install or transfer your serial number before loading onto another machine.

I had a similar issue a couple years ago when my laptop went belly-up. Because I didn’t ‘transfer’ the license before reinstalling on a new computer, I came across the same error.

A call to Adobe customer service/tech support, and I was able to resolve the issue. Sounds like you should be able to do the same thing.

Mac Pro 2×2.8 QuadCore; 6GB RAM; FCStudio2; Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium

[Padraic Culham]

Usual questions on this one:

Mac or Windows (presuming windows based on the .avi)

What codec are the QT files? Where did they come from – camera source, or exported from an edit program?

Mac Pro 2×2.8 QuadCore; 6GB RAM; FCStudio2; Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium