[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Both the Nattress Standards Converter and Compressor give excellent results on good movie footage.
Without knowing what your graphics look like it is likely that they may not be optimised for video compression.

When the article’s Slow-PAL 23.98 fps conversion is used, its usual to burn the DVD that way – with a 23.98fps NTSC movie, and let the DVD player add the pull-down.

With standards conversion it is ESSENTIAL to have a proper video monitor that displays the resulting signal correctly – PAL60 or NTSC 4.43 monitors will show a badly degraded scaled result.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Have a look at Live Capture Plus – which is a solution to FireWire capture problems:
https://www.squarebox.co.uk/lcplus.html

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Did you create a new user account, and log in under that?

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Repair Permissions on your main drive;
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/955228
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/952840

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
I had no issues – FCP, 5.1.2 dates from Sept.2006, FCP 5.1.4 came in Feb. 2007, after the shortlived 5.1.3 (which broke a lot of things) and for me has been completely stable – as good as FCP 4.5.

Whilst I still use 5.1.4 I’ve updated the version of Tiger to 10.4.11, and added (some of) the ProAppsSupport updates as well – the ones that date from that era.

But I’ve stuck with QuickTime 7.1.6, because I’ve got another Mac to run the iLife goodies etc that need a later QT version.

SoftwareUpdate still offers the FCP 5.1.4 upgrade if you run it on a Mac with an earlier version of FCP 5.1

[Paul Dickin]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Encode your 23.98 movie to 23.98 MPEG2 with audio. “
Hi
Do you have a frame size scaling workflow you use for this. Also frame-setting for non-progressive footage?

[Paul Dickin]

[Andy Mees] “although MPEG Streamclip does sit atop of Quicktime it isn’t just an interface for it…”Hi
True, Streamclip suppiles its own additional ‘Save As AVI’ plug-in component. But the rest is QT, and the QT MPEG-2 Component.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
This has been doing the rounds recently – I can’t vouch for its veracity…
https://www.larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_hard_disk_warning.html

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
The problem with Streamclip doing the PAL>NTSC conversion is that its just an interface for QuickTime, and QT makes 29.97 from 25 by repeating every 5th frame – not very pretty, if your smooth pans matter to you.

First transcode your PAL to a proper frame-blended NTSC movie – not NTSC DV as that has a 4.1.1 colourspace, not very compatible with a DVD’s 4.2.0.

The Nattress Standards Converter will do this in FCP, or you can do it in (more slowly) Compressor, using the preset to do this, with Frame Controls options to give you frame/field blending.
Then use a Compressor DVD preset to turn the resultingNTSC file into an MPEG-2 file for DVD SP.

In standard def anamorphic is just a flag setting, so your 16:9 transcodes will only look the correct aspect ratio in a program that compensates for this – QuickTime Player doesn’t.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
I think the article is saying that the inevitable failure-rate statistics mean that, as drive sizes get bigger, a RAID n:1 strategy is needed – 5/1, 0/1.
Unless drive reliability gets measurably better, as the drives get larger…

So whilst RAID speeds are essential for RT performance, backup strategies have to be more widely based.