[Paul Mcglaughlin]

I would also suggest that you buy or rent a real HD monitor – one that supports the full res of the project. Also, know that the HVX200 chip captures 720p natively, and then hardware up-res’s it to 1080 (if that’s your spec). If you must deliver a 1080 master, think about up-res during your final render.

YMMV, good luck!

[Paul Mcglaughlin]

Yes, I’ve tried deleting all the prefs. Sorry I didn’t mention that inthe original post…..

[Paul Mcglaughlin]

Graham-

I’m experiencing this exact issue. Did you ever get it solved? Otherwise I’m going to start from scratch on the system (new OS, re-install FCP, etc.)

Thanks!

[Paul Mcglaughlin]

Hi all –

I’m also seeing this problem. Here’s our workflow:

1. Render to Animation, 960×540, sq. pixels, 23.976 fps. Pass textless backplate to PS.
2. Reimport 960 render, and render to NTSC & PAL, 10 bit (used to be BM 10 bit, but now Uncompressed 10 bit).
3. Setup Timeline in FCP, using rendered video, and PS static pages. (Here’s where we see the level shift, esp. when going from a motion transition to a static landing page).
4. output all to Digibeta.

I should mention that ONLY the layoff FCP computer is running Tiger, QT7 and FCP 5. All others run Panther, QT 6.5.2, AE 6.5 and FCP 4.5.

I’m going to experiment to see if I can find an acceptable intermediate codec for rendering that doesn’t exhibit the gamma shift.

[Paul Mcglaughlin]

AE network rendering is problematic, as the other posters have indicated. Yes, it can be done, but, it’s is very finicky. I run a small render farm, mostly used for 3D, but when there’s a render that will take long enough, we’ll use the AE render engine. I’ve actually have a comp rendering on 3 G5 cluster nodes right now- it would have been a roughly 20 hour render on a single machine, but will only take about6 1/2 hours across the network. Our rule of thumb here is if it won’;t take more than 1 1/2 – 2 hours on a single machine, it’s not usually worth it. The side benefit is if you’re churning out lots of work, you can render on the network, and work on other comps on your machine while the renders happen.

I looked at the Gridiron product, and in our calculations, it wasn’t worth the money, YMMV.