[Rendertainmentllc]

Here’s the easiest way to get a little grain onto your image. In the Viewer, click on the button on the bottom right with the little “A” on it. Select Render, then Noise. In the Viewer you’ll see what looks like TV static. Put this on a video track above the video you want to give the grain effect to. Lower the opacity to about 3 or 4 and you’ll get a nice film grain effect.

To get the video to look more like film, take your original video clip, make a copy of it and place it on a video track directly above it. Lower the opacity to 50%. Deinterlace the top clip upper field first and deinterlace the bottom clip lower field first. Add a gaussian blur filter to both clips at about .7 to soften the hard video edges. Apply the film grain technique from above and the results look pretty good.

Film look plugins like Nattress and Cinelook and Magic Bullet do a very good job, but if they’re beyond your current budget this free technique will get you by.

[Rendertainmentllc]

We have 4 different FCP suties where I work, and each bay is different. One gets a lot of timecode breaks when it captures, 2 get them occasionally, and (luckily) my bay rarely gets them. Once in a while it does happen in my bay though. There will be no timecode break on the master, but FCP will “detect” one, stop, say “Locating timecode break” and search backwards. Then after a couple minutes it will start capturing again, but with a 5 second gap between where it “found” the first timecode break and the new clip. Very annonying, because if you go back and capture that 5 second gap later (with handles to hard cuts on both sides) there’s no timecode break detected.

Sometimes it is a problem with the tape though. The other day I was capturing an old movie from the early 90’s to format and edit for TV and FCP kept detecting many, many timecode breaks. The movie (which we had received from the company that sends us a lot of these type of movies) was on a new digibeta tape. I looked at the timecode as it played in the digi deck and didn’t see any inconsistencies. The breaks were so numerous though, I decided to restripe the tape with new timecode. Set it up, put new timecode on the tape, and it ended up capturing the whole movie without a single break in timecode. Go figure.

[Rendertainmentllc]

I always set the tone in my timeline to be -20, as I’ll be outputting to either digi or HDCAM at -20. I never let my audio peak over -12.
It takes a little while to make the adjustment from analog to digital meters, but once you get used to the difference it’s no problem.

[Rendertainmentllc]

Try fading down with the pen tool. You’ll have to have the transparency overlays on. I’m not positive this will solve your problem, but it seems to work well as an alternative to the text shifting problem that occurs when you fade down text using the regular cross dissolve.

[Rendertainmentllc]

I’m not absolutely positive this will work for you, but it’s worth a shot to try. Since you’ve got two monitors, go to Window>>Arrange and set it to “Standard”. This will put your Browser, Canvas, Viewer, and Timeline into the left monitor. Now, go to View>>Video Playback and set it to Digital Cinema Desktop – Full Screen. This should turn your right monitor into a playback monitor. I know this works with HDV, as I’ve used this method before and the playback looks very good. As far as I can assume, this method should work with DVCPROHD. Good luck.

[Rendertainmentllc]

If you use the pen tool to fade out your text (you’ll have to have the transparency overlays on as well), you won’t get that jittering that seems to happen when you use a dissolve to fade it out.

[Rendertainmentllc]

Mute all tracks other than dialogue. File>>Export>>Audio as AIFF. You’ll then have one file that is only dialogue. Then, mute the dialogue tracks and unmute the music & effects tracks. Export those to an AIFF. Import both of these files into your Browser.

Start a new sequence and bring over a copy of your video only into this sequence. Drag in your dialogue to A1 and your M&E to A2. Double check to make sure it’s all synced up and lay it off.

When a project is completely done, I do this process in order to have a separate VO track, SOT (dialogue) track, music track, and effects track. Burn all these separate .aiff files to a data DVD so you have all your audio archived. Believe me, there are times when it really comes in handy to have done this.

[Rendertainmentllc]

I’m sorry, I forgot to add that my above post would be a good alternative if you don’t get a AJA IO LA or similar.

[Rendertainmentllc]

Go to the Easy Setup and choose HDV 1080 60i. It’s always worked perfectly for me when I’ve used an FX-1. Good luck.

[Rendertainmentllc]

I agree. I’ve never had any problem when I’ve used the Easy Setup for HDV 1080 60i. Everything works like a charm.