[Paul Carlin]

Just to add to what everyone else suggested… keep the video heads clean. Get a high quality video head cleaner and some Texwipes. Good head cleaners are highly toxic, so perhaps some gloves as well. The old tapes shed very easily and will clog the heads quickly. Also, be sure to capture the video as native interlaced NTSC (720×486). Then deinterlace and upscale it using something like Topaz Video Enhance AI (highly recommend).

[Paul Carlin]

This reminds me of how they would take all the film from an entire day’s shoot and put it into the back of the lowest paid crew members car (a Ford Pinto for sure) and have them drive these incredibly precious assets to the lab for processing at 2 AM after a 14 hour day. What could go wrong?

[Paul Carlin]

BMD DaVinci Resolve sells hardware to make up for the $300 software (no subscriptions). The software is very powerful and worth looking into if you are struggling to pay for Avid.

[Paul Carlin]

The software developers, namely Rohit Gupta who was featured in the Apple announcement video, have early access to the MacBook hardware. Posting this question at https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/ might elicit a response.

[Paul Carlin]

I can’t see the video (download is too slow), but I would assume that it has very fast changing imagery. An efficient codec relies on many adjacent frames being very similar to each other. It takes advantage of this and creates intra-frames that only contain the “differences” that have occurred since the last I frame. I frames are whole frames (think JPEG frames). Since your video has very different images on each frame for a long sequence of images (I assume), this is creating havoc in the codec as it can’t reliably recreate the intra-frames given the limited bandwidth available to it.

A multi-pass encode will do a first pass where it finds these “clumps” of demanding video compression and on the second pass it can then intelligently prepare for the data burst that is coming in the future by preserving some of the bandwidth ahead of time. It allows the encoder to better balance the data needs across the entire video. You should always use multi-pass when quality is the priority (vs. render time).

You may want to play with the Key Frames Every x frames setting. Try every 1 frame. These are the I frames, and if your videos is nothing but I frames, then you don’t have intra-frames. The file may be too big in the end (or it may sacrifice spatial compression to make up for the increased temporal compression), but you can try different settings to see if this helps. You can also try disabling Frame Reordering, as this will disable B frames. However, this contradicts the nature of your fast changing video, so I doubt this will be an improvement as you want to take advantage of the ability to reorder the frames for playback efficiency.

Under Entropy Mode, try CAVLC if you think the TV processor is the issue. CAVLC requires considerably less processing to decode than CABAC.

And set the render speed to Maximum. There is no advantage to lowering this other than if you plan on using the computer for other things while rendering.

[Paul Carlin]

Shift-Command-D will split a layer into two.

[Paul Carlin]

My suggestion would be to use Topaz Video Enhance AI to up-convert and deinterlace the clips. Take the 59.94p result into FCP and drop them into your 23.976 timeline. It will drop frames to stay in sync, but the temporal cadence should be acceptable given that you had 60 frames to choose from (24 from 60). If the speed of the clip doesn’t need to match (no sync dialog, for example), interpolate the source as 50p and FCP will skip every other frame giving you perfect cadence.

[Paul Carlin]

Are you sure all your frame rates match?

Not the answer you are looking for… but when I needed to capture DV I used an old Windows computer that had native firewire built-in. Another option for you is to go analog to PR422HQ. The stability of going analog may make up for any small loss of image quality. And the DV codec is not supported on Mac anymore so you will need to convert it eventually.

[Paul Carlin]

You are not the only one. After Effects allows more granular control over the video format whereas Premiere assumes you know nothing about video formats and hides everything under the hood. For this reason, I find myself editing in After Effects often. I find it ironic that the “Pro” was added to Premiere and not After Effects. However, for creative editing, you are better off using Premiere/Resolve/Avid. Keep in mind that Premiere allows you to take a shot on the timeline and make it into an After Effects comp.

[Paul Carlin]

If the film (24) is inside a 29.97 clip, then the clip has 3:2 pulldown added. You will need to remove this to get back to the original 24p. From what I can tell, Adobe PrePro does not have this option in the Interpret Footage dialog. You will need to use After Effects to do this. That said, the clip you downloaded from YouTube probably already mangled the fields to the point it will be unrecoverable. A $7 DVD of the movie would be a much better starting point.