[Roger Lansing]

Kevin,

That didn’t seem to do anything about the pixelization. The aspect ration did change when toggling the par button, but the video did not look any better.

Roger C. Lansing

Multi-Media Production Coordinator
National Baseball Hall of Fame

Cooperstown, NY

[Roger Lansing]

Dave and Kevin,
I very much appreciate your help on this.

Kevin, I went through the project and did the reinterpretation that you suggested. You were right, the QT file attributes stated “separating fields.” After reinterpretation, though, the files look the same. I have a couple of Digital Juice animations in this project that did not have the problem with “separating fields” but they also look jagged and reinterpretation isn’t working on them, either.

The file types for each of the QT movies is listed as “AJA Quicktime Movie”. Could the AJA card be causing this problem?

Roger C. Lansing

Multi-Media Production Coordinator
National Baseball Hall of Fame

Cooperstown, NY

[Roger Lansing]

Dave, thanks for the quick response. I am actually away from my machine right now and on the road. What I can tell you is that I have a varied mix of files, mostly in SD and a handful of animated elements from the Digital Juice library that were exported in native format (and size) using DJ’s Juicer. The video files look great in Quicktime player, in Final Cut and in Motion, but suddenly not in AE. I have never had this issue before, but most of my AE work in the past few months has been graphic oriented only, no video imported at all. I have used some of the DJ elements in the past, but have used their included AE projects to modify their elements…no issues when doing that.

I will get better info to you as soon as I am back in the edit suite.

Roger C. Lansing

Multi-Media Production Coordinator
National Baseball Hall of Fame

Cooperstown, NY

[Roger Lansing]

John,

Not sure if you are having the same weird issues that I did with Compressor a few weeks ago, but it was acting very strange for me. After some long frustrating evenings of trying to make it work, I finally remembered the old stand=by “trash the preferences.” I did that, restarted the machine and Compressor acted like it was my best friend once again. Hope that this helps or that you found another solution.

Roger C. Lansing

Multi-Media Production Coordinator
National Baseball Hall of Fame

Cooperstown, NY

[Roger Lansing]

Sorry that I have been absent from the board here lately, but there is a good reason. I am putting the finishing touches on the project that has been holding me up for two and a half weeks with various XDCam issues. After much discussion with Apple Tech Support, a solution was offered about installing internal HDs and editing off of those instead of off of the external RAID. This didn’t actually work until I disconnected the Mac Pro’s fiber channel card. Not sure why that solved my issue, but I have been editing now for 6 days straight, pushing the FC Studio system as hard as I can to get this project done under deadline, and not a single hiccup in the system. I moved all of the media off of the external RAID and onto the internal drives and I am going to get this done and delivered before the initial deadline, despite all of the setbacks. I can’t explain why this fixed it, but I would love some theories, if anyone has them.

Have a great holiday weekend, at least those that celebrate. I give thanks to this great board full of experts and people willing to share from their experiences.

Roger

Roger C. Lansing

Multi-Media Production Coordinator
National Baseball Hall of Fame

Cooperstown, NY

[Roger Lansing]

Sorry that I have been absent from the board here lately, but there is a good reason. I am putting the finishing touches on the project that has been holding me up for two and a half weeks with various XDCam issues. After much discussion with Apple Tech Support, a solution was offered about installing internal HDs and editing off of those instead of off of the external RAID. This didn’t actually work until I disconnected the Mac Pro’s fiber channel card. Not sure why that solved my issue, but I have been editing now for 6 days straight, pushing the FC Studio system as hard as I can to get this project done under deadline, and not a single hiccup in the system. I moved all of the media off of the external RAID and onto the internal drives and I am going to get this done and delivered before the initial deadline, despite all of the setbacks. I can’t explain why this fixed it, but I would love some theories, if anyone has them.

Have a great holiday weekend, at least those that celebrate. I give thanks to this great board full of experts and people willing to share from their experiences.

Roger

Roger C. Lansing

Multi-Media Production Coordinator
National Baseball Hall of Fame

Cooperstown, NY

[Roger Lansing]

To be precise there are four different XDCAM flavors;
– EX-1: 35 Mbps. Compressor: XDCAM EX.
– XDCAM HD CBR: 25 Mbps. Compressor: HDV
– XDCAM HD VBR: 35 Mbps. Compressor: XDCAM HD.
– XDCAM HD 422: 50 Mbps. Compressor: XDCAM HD 422.
I have a SONY EX-1 and so far I’ve only shoot in HQ so the files I get are XDCAM EX. I’ve never tried the SQ option. I guess that this one produce a kind of full raster HDV.

An addition to my post above is this:
What we got out of the Sony EX-3 was
XDCAM HD CBR: 25 Mbps. compressor: HDV

Roger

Roger C. Lansing

Multi-Media Production Coordinator
National Baseball Hall of Fame

Cooperstown, NY

[Roger Lansing]

The camera we used for this footage was a brand new EX-3. I don’t know if that makes much of a difference, but I am hearing from people who used the EX-1 media files with no issues whatsoever, and a handful of people using the EX-3 are having somewhat similar problems.

Roger

Roger C. Lansing

Multi-Media Production Coordinator
National Baseball Hall of Fame

Cooperstown, NY

[Roger Lansing]

Don,

Thanks for the info and for the link to the other thread. I read with interest what was in the other thread, and though my initial problems were not happening during the import process, I am very curious to see if there is a third party Quicktime component trying to break up the happy marriage of Final Cut and Sony XDCam. We loved the camera here at the Hall and it was certainly high on the list of consideration for addition to our gear. This major issue, though, was beginning to cloud that judgement. Maybe this will turn things around.

Again, thanks.

Roger

Roger C. Lansing

Multi-Media Production Coordinator
National Baseball Hall of Fame

Cooperstown, NY

[Roger Lansing]

Stephen,

I do understand that others are and have been using XDCam footage stored locally and externally. I cannot give a reason that it seems to work for me if I store the XD files on the local drive and not on the external RAID. I just know that yesterday, it was the only way that worked. Maybe I do have deeper issue with the RAID and/or XSan through the G5 Dual. I don’t know.

Anyway, to answer your earlier question, the projects that I did get done prior to this used various SD and HD footage:
-720×480 29.97 fps DV/DVCPro NTSC 4.5 MB/sec CCIR601
-720×486 29.97 fps Uncompressed 10bit 4:2:2 NTSC 26.9MB/sec CCIR601
-1280×720 29.97 fps HDV 720p30 Square pixel aspect ratio

One project was strictly the HDV footage, one was a mix of the DV and Uncompressed as well as some 620×480 SD archival media that has resided on the RAID for years.

Don’t know if you can infer anything else from this. I appreciate all of your help and have gotten a crash course here in how things work (or don’t work….)

Roger

Roger C. Lansing

Multi-Media Production Coordinator
National Baseball Hall of Fame

Cooperstown, NY