[Ron Moody]

Sorry for the typo. I said that LiveType and Motion are great but are not FCP, I meant that neither are AFX (After Effects). My thought was that while you can do pretty much everything in After Effects that you could in Live Type or Motion, by the time you’ve finished in AfterEffects, you would have already finished the next project in FinalCut/LiveType/Motion. You can do more in AFX but you can do really well a LOT faster in LiveType/Motion.

Again, sorry for the typo.
ron from maui

[Ron Moody]

Oops, forgot to say thanks

THANKS!

I appreciate your expertise along with your quick response.

ron from maui

[Ron Moody]

I tried writing the file to the local hard drive, then copying it to the network drive. It worked, but now the conversion program doesn’t seem to see the file.

Oh well, tech support, here I come.

ron from maui

[Ron Moody]

Recently I made the leap to the Mac and FCP. It was Vista that made me jump ship, I was afraid that Adobe would force the issue like they did when they moved from Premiere 6.5 to Pro.

The first surprise was when I found that you could not output more that about 8 minutes of video from the timeline to AVI. It’s a known issue with Quicktime that I located in Apple’s support info.

I’m trying to output Quicktime now then use an external conversion utility. That’s brought it’s own set of problems but we’ll see how that works out.

My thought though was that I would take the leap to the Mac since its OS seems vastly superior to anything Microsoft is likely to accomplish… ever. There have been a couple of unexpected surprises along the way.

First, not long after I took the leap, Adobe announced their intentions to release PPro on the Mac. I’ve been using Premiere since version 3 or so with the Miro DC30 card. The titler no longer crashes like it used to, and since I use it for (mostly) simple 28m30s projects, it (mostly) works for me. I look forward to the same quick throughput on the Mac as I’ve come to appreciate on the PC.

Second, LiveType and Motion are great. Neither are FCP, but neither is FCP LiveType and Motion. You can really turn something out quickly that’s attractive and move on to other projects. I’m looking forward to having access to all three programs on the same platform. It’s an asset that I didn’t anticipate, but now that it’s within reach, I’m looking forward to it.

Third, while I appreciate Adobe’s porting the suite to the Mac, I hope they don’t do it blindly. Encore for example is trash. It’s better than it used to be but for me to sit and wait on a program to do similar things that are pretty much instant in Premiere is unacceptable in every way. I’ve not gotten to the DVD app in the FCP suite yet but I understant it’s great. I hope Adobe sees them as competition and reworks Encore from the ground up.

Fourth, Audition has been one of the great surprises in the suite. It’s strong, stable, and very fast. I can turn things out in minutes that elsewhere take hours. I’m greatly saddened that Adobe has both chosen to not include it in the suite, AND not port it to the Mac. It fills it’s role in the suite as well as After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Notice that I did not include Premiere in that trio. I don’t think Premiere is as strong in its sphere of influence as those three programs are in theirs (four if you include Audition).

Random thoughts, but perhaps some will stir discussion in this thread.

Ron from Maui

[Ron Moody]

I had a similar problem but haven’t yet found a solution. Adobe (after going through all the various things they said to try) said I apparently have a hardware problem.

I don’t know that I agree since I finally gave up and went back to Premiere 1.5 and have been using that to meet my deadlines since that date, without complaint.

I don’t mean to muddy the waters but I guess you’re getting the same frustration from me that I had with tech support. I think the problem may be with hardware acceleration in PPro 2. I haven’t been able to find a way around the issue so far (it’s been several months).

I’ll keep my eyes on this topic however. Maybe someone will come through for you.

PS I almost forgot. In evaluating the problem, it seemed to be specific to any overlaid title (the underlying video became jerky) but was most noticible on scrolling titles, which behaved exactly as you described.

It’s nice to know I’m not alone.

Ron from Maui
ronmoody@yahoo.com

[Ron Moody]

Thanks, I downloaded it last night. I guess I erased the old files since I can’t find them now. I’ll turn out a new 29:30 quicktime file today and try it out. I was encouraged to see that they state there is no quality loss in converting quicktime to AVI.

I’ll bet there is a long line of Mac purists that would argue that point. (In case my ‘subtle’ jab isn’t clear, I’ll bet there is a long line of Mac purists that would argue that the avi format can’t hold a candle to quicktime.) I have no desire to argue that point, especially since I think it’s very likely true.

Thanks again,
ron

[Ron Moody]

Per Apple’s tech notes, Quicktime is limited to one gig. I’ve actually gotten a little over two gig before the avi becomes unusable, but there is a limit to avi’s you can output from FCP. The limit I’ve discovered is around ten minutes or so. I haven’t fine tuned it any closer, execpt that I know 15 minutes doesn’t work.

ron

[Ron Moody]

Im using an Imac Core2 Duo 2.33 with 3GIG of Ram and a 500GB Hard drive. While I understand that to get real-time output, I need an external drive, here’s my question.

When I output a sequence to a movie file, the movie file has a couple of unrendered frames in it. I don’t get it. Prior to outputting the movie, I have used the command D keystroke to render all clips and transitions. Yet when FCP outputs a movie file, not all transitions are fully rendered. If I were trying to output to tape live, I could understand dropped frames, but I’m not.

My background is Premiere and in that program, even if you don’t render the timeline, it renders it to the output file. I can’t think of a single reason that FCP should give me this result.

Any ideas?

Ron from Mai

[Ron Moody]

Key… You said back and forth. Quicktime can only export up to 1GB AVI’s. That somewhat limits things in my opinion.

Ron

[Ron Moody]

I’d have to agree that Apple gets a poor grade for playing well with others.
ron