[Paul Hawke-williams]

Hi all!

Just wanted to add a few things, better late than never!

QT Reference movie – when you use the “export as quicktime movie” option the resulting file if you DO NOT click the “make self contained” tick box is a reference movie. AsTerry mentioned, make sure you render the timeline first as the renders for the reference file live within it (i.e. it references the original media from the timeline and adds the render files into the reference movie, not render them for use within FCP)

Send to Compressor – in FCP7 you can send to Compressor and while its encoding you can come back to FCP7 and still edit. Its a little slower but does work. You can’t quit FCP7 though if you are using Compressor to encode a timeline.

Share – the share option is a kind of shortcut to some of the Compressor encoding features (think of it as easy setup for output) but when using the share option you can’t continue to use FCP7. There is an option to send to Compressor from within the share window so you can sort all your encode formats and naming out and then send it over.

MPEG2 should be one of the easier codecs to be squashing files to but 12 minutes for a 24 minute video seems OK to me (I get similar on my machine) but the audio should be quicker as suggested.
If you’re going to H264 then there are hardware options to speed things up including Elgatos Turbo H264 or the MAX option on some Matrox M02 boxes – both are accessible from within Compressor.

Happy squashing!

Paul Hawke-Williams
http://www.digitalmediatraining.co.uk
http://www.macguruwales.co.uk
http://www.corporatehd.tv
Media Trainer – Mac Support – Video Production

[Paul Hawke-williams]

iMovie shouldn’t have a problem with standard miniDV, it does have functions where you can compress HD to a smaller file size which has no impact on miniDV. You might be right in that it may throw away half your interlace info on export BUT you can take iMovie projects straight into FCPX so try it and let us know what happens!
Cheers

Paul Hawke-Williams
http://www.macguruwales.co.uk
Media Trainer – Mac Support – Video Production

[Paul Hawke-williams]

HI all

I’ve just invested in the PHYX keyer and its the best £110 I’ve spent in a long time!

It’s currently on sale by the way, think it’s 20% off, can’t be sure, but still worth the money.

Had some miniDV footage, green background, poor lighting, found Primatte RT in FCP and Motion did OK but the poor background lighting was getting to it. Downloaded the PHYX Keyer demo, tried it, amazing! Thought it was a bit poor to start but then noticed the drop down menu for 4:1:1 colour space and it cracked it!

Definitely a massive thumbs up from me!

Paul Hawke-Williams
http://www.macguruwales.co.uk
Media Trainer – Mac Support – Video Production

[Paul Hawke-williams]

Try setting your canvas window to “fit to window” for playback (the left hand drop down menu above the canvas video display – that might help.
Cheers

Paul Hawke-Williams
http://www.macguruwales.co.uk
Media Trainer – Mac Support – Video Production

[Paul Hawke-williams]

Hi Paul

The filters in FCP are either FXPlug or old-school scripting. I know that the FXPlug filters are an offshoot from Motion and so should be using your graphics card more than the standard scripting filters so if you did upgrade the card it should give you better realtime playback (that’s if the card is listed as supported on the FCP tech specs page of course).
As for profiling, you may find that FCP unexpectedly quits on the first launch after installing the card as FCP will be expecting the old card and may have an issue. All that does though is flush the preferences and it should re-profile when you open FCP the next time. You could always get rid of the FCPprofcache file from the preferences (~library/preferences/fcp user data) and it should force it to profile again.

Hope this helps
Paul

Paul Hawke-Williams
http://www.macguruwales.co.uk
Media Trainer – Mac Support – Video Production

[Paul Hawke-williams]

Hi Tim

Heres a little info, hope it helps!

1. Compressor: DV/DVC Pro
Should I go to Pro Res?
You should stick with the format you brought the material in for best results, so if you’re using DV then leave at DV. The only reason you’d want to change this to Pro RES is if you’ve converted/captured material at Pro RES or have a number of different formats within your timeline.

2. Video Processing: Render in 8-bit
Any reason to change with DV source material?
8-Bit is fine for DV, you’d only really need to go to 10 bit if you were working on uncompressed material or anything that might be leaving your timeline for further compositing.

3. Motion Filtering Quality: Normal
Should I change to best?
This can be left as is unless you’re going to use the motion tab for resizing or positioning of the clips in your timeline, and even then I’ve not really noticed much of a difference with DV material myself.

4. Render Codec: Autoset at ProRes 422 [HDV… only]
I’m not entirely clear why FCP would autoset to that when I have no HDV material.
This is a setting purely for long-GOP material (HDV and XDCAM) and won’t have any effect on your DV timeline.

As a rule of thumb, everything FCP does to your timeline with the setting will be fine. The ideal workflow would be to keep the footage in it’s original format for as far through the process as possible, only converting from the timeline once the edit is complete.

Cheers
Paul

Paul Hawke-Williams
http://www.macguruwales.co.uk
Media Trainer – Mac Support – Video Production

[Paul Hawke-williams]

Hi all! Just adding my two pence worth:

Exporting a QT from FCP does make a duplicate of the timeline but if you take that straight to DVDSP it will only compress the video to MPEG2 and leave the audio uncompressed

If you Send To Compressor you get a better output for DVD as it uses the cuts in your timeline as compression markers therefore giving a better video quality, especially with high movement footage

In compressor you also have the ability to adjust the compression settings far more than you can with DVDSP.

And finally, in Final Cut Studio 3 you can send to Compressor and then get back to editing in FCP straight away, it doesn’t lock both programmes while compressing as it did in FCS2.

Hope this helps!

Paul Hawke-Williams
http://www.macguruwales.co.uk
Media Trainer – Mac Support – Video Production

[Paul Hawke-williams]

Double click your sequence in the browser and it should come back.

Paul Hawke-Williams
http://www.macguruwales.co.uk
Media Trainer – Mac Support – Video Production

[Paul Hawke-williams]

You could use the clip opacity to et the result you’re after.
Click the overlays button (it gives you a black line for opacity at the top of your video tracks and the pink line for audio levels in your audio tracks), choose the pen tool and add keyframes on the line in the same way you would for audio adjustments. You could have opacity for the crawl at 0% to start and then the next keyframe combo could give you a fade to 100% at the point you want it, just do the reverse at the end.

Hope this helps!

Paul Hawke-Williams
http://www.macguruwales.co.uk
Media Trainer – Mac Support – Video Production

[Paul Hawke-williams]

Walters solution works, but if you want EVERYTHING in your sequence to be 4dB higher you could use the Audio Mixer (under the tools menu) and there is a master fader, you could push that up by 4dB and it will effect every track and clip.

Cheers!

Paul Hawke-Williams
http://www.macguruwales.co.uk
Media Trainer – Mac Support – Video Production