Roger Poole
Forum Replies Created
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Len, the only reason it’s not advisable to use jpegs in FCP is that it’s a compressed format, which FCP has to un-compress to play back. This requires a lot of computer horsepower and often results in a crash or an out of memory error message. If you have somehow managed to avoid both I would be inclined to leave things as they are, as a tiff won’t look any better than a JPEG. However, if you insist, then pic A.tif will not replace pic A.jpg because the suffix is part of the file name and will be seen by FCP as a new pic. What you could do is place the TIFF on top of the JPEG then copy the JPEG and paste attributes to the TIFF, then delete the JPEG. The TIFF would then look and behave just like the JPEG version if you had made adjustments there. I can’t think of a simple way of doing what you want to do but this would be a lot easier and quicker than trying to manually duplicate any behavior adjustments you made to the original jpeg.
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Mark, I’ve been running a similar setup on my Mac Pro for a couple of years. The only difference being that I’m running separate boot disks. People do run FCP7 on later OS’s but it’s not perfect. The first thing to break was the FCP voice over tool under Lion. The color pickers have been broken for two or three years on the later OS’s. You can pick up a copy of Snow Leopard on Ebay for next to nothing, that will allow the full FCS3 suite to run as expected. That being said, your iMac depending on it’s age, may complain when you try to install 10.6. Only one way to find out.
With caveat’s, Mountain Lion is the last OS that will run FCS3 so maybe you have some elbow room there. Mountain Lion is still available from Apple. -
As others have suggested a Graphics card doesn’t output a real video signal. You cheapest option would be the Blackmagic Intensity Pro which will give you interlaced or progressive HD video/audio out via HDMI to your external video monitor/TV. Check ebay.
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Jpeg is a comressed format and although all camera’s record stills in this format to save space on the card it is not a delivery format and is lossy. If you take a jpeg and alter it in any way then re-save as jpeg, the whole thing gets re-compressed and you loose image quality. It’s far better to save as a tiff or png, both of which are uncompressed formats and also have the advantage of being able to carry tranparency – or alpha, if required. Older versions of FCP didn’t like jpegs, and for good reason. Being a compressed format FCP has to uncompress them to play in the timeline, most often resulting in a crash because of the huge processing overhead required. Although FCPX and Premiere can handle jpegs better jpeg’s still require a lot of processing power. I think it far better, and quicker, to deal with stills outside of the edit, in Photoshop or whatever, for resising etc then saving as tiff or png. The size of your images should match those of your sequence dimensions, i.e. 1920×1080 @72ppi. If you plan on doing pan and scan you can double the resolution to 144 or 150ppi. This will allow you to push in on the image without losing resolution and image quality. Size matters. Pixels are a fixed size. a 1920×1080 frame size is natively 26×15 inches regardless of the tv screen dimensions, the bigger the screen the bigger the pixels are displayed. Most point and shoot still cameras record images that are at least 4ft wide in pixel dimesions, which in this example means that 4ft has to be crammed into 26inches. It’s excess baggage and a much bigger file size than required for video sequence. If not dealt with beforehand will result in massive project size if lot’s of stills are used in the sequence.
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What’s wrong with cloning your existing disk to the new SSD? If you are upgrading your Mac pro to get better performance from other 64 bit app’s you might like to run, ok. But FCP7 is a 32 bit app and so can’t utilise more than 4 gigs of installed RAM. It can’t utilise GPU processing so a graphics card upgrade will not help. Also, FCP7 is not processor aware, so it can’t utilise anymore than one processor or core. If you intend keeping FCP7 then I would suggest leaving your present boot disk in the Mac Pro. Put the SSD in another bay and load that up with anything new that you wish to run. Boot from which disk and O.S. you need on the day.
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M’mm, this is a bit of a worry as I’m just in the process of going from FCP7 to X. In my case also on a Mac Pro and also the Blackmagic decklink Studio 2. When I installed the Decklink software I got a message telling me I needed to update the software for the card. Well the card doesn’t have software so I assume what they mean is a firmware update which I’m loath to do because I might loose functionality in FCP7 which I run on Mountain Lion from another boot disk.
If FCPX isn’t giving you the full list of output options like it does in FCP7, what if you go to the Blackmagic control panel in System preferences and check “Set default video standard as” I can’t check it myself because I removed the BM driver for the time being. Also I found that there are no bars and tone in FCPX which is a bit of a bummer. -
Christopher, I believe the variable frame rate is Apple’s way of controlling the exposure because the iPhone doesn’t have an iris in the real sense of the word. What gets me though is the target frame rate of 30fps, when the majority of the world including China where they make them is on 25fps. However, Filmic Pro is the App you may be thinking of. It gives fixed frame rates of 24, 25, 30 and more, depending on hardware. Also various aspect ratio’s, focus lock, exposure lock, etc. Can be a bit clunky but does a good job.
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As I suggested. Use Clipwrap to transcode to ProRes and then use Mpeg Streamclip to convert to AIC if that works for you. H264 is not an editing format for you.
Roger.
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Mr G, I’ve never used FC express but it seems that your stumbling block is that the ProRes codec is not supported. As Mr R. suggested you could use Editready but would need to update your O.S. Well… Clipwrap, the predecessor of Editready, is still available and will run on your system, you can download a trial. Using that you could transcode to ProRes and then run the transcoded ProRes files through MpegStreamclip to an HD format that FCE can work with, be it AIC or whatever?
If you can’t manage to get the files off the camera I had a quick look on youtube and found this. Inexplicably the guy is running Windows on his Mac but the process is pretty much the same for Mac.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lijJz9DkCRk
Excuse my apparent flippancy. I couldn’t resist :o)
Mr P.
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Gerret, You do have Quicktime 7 installed, specifically v-7.6.6 ? If so, you have to drop the x264 codec into the correct folder, Library/Quicktime. Open that folder to check you have the correct folder, it has all the codecs in there. Once you have X264 in there you can build a custom X264 pre-set following Larry Jordan’s instructions. Save it as a custom pre-set for future use.
Toast. I’m still using Toast 11 so I can’t help you with your version. In 11 click the customise button then the encoding tab to set re-encoding to never. As I said, if you burn the disk directly it will defy your preferences and re-encode anyway which will destroy your carefully crafted x264 encode. Building a disk image first is the way to go. It may seem a long winded approach but it is actually quicker. Again, you can keep the disk image to quickly burn more copies at a later date if you wish.
Compressor. Yes you are right, that version doesn’t give the give the Blu ray burn option. Anyway I prefer to turn that option off and change the end action to “Do nothing”, that way you get to keep the encoded blu ray and audio files to use again if you wish – or to use in Toast.
Good luck.