[Rory Brennan]

Bobby,

I’ve had this so many times and despite all the “solutions” i’ve heard of nothing has really fixed this for me. So, I export the clip as a self-contained, same as source, QT out of FCP, then take the QT to Compressor.

This may not be the correct answer as such, but at least you’ll get the job finished.

RB

Rory Brennan
Editor
New York City

“Have a nice day!”

[Rory Brennan]

James,

I generally capture footage at the resolution it will be broadcast. (For festival films 720 is fine)
Also, if you capture everything at 720 then all of your footage will have the same quality. That said, if you wanted to go to 1080, the 720 upres’d footage will still look good. Furthermore, your system should be able to handle 1080, just play it safe with dynamic resolution etc.

By the way, are you J Cooper of Dreamer, Australia??

Cheers.
RB

Rory Brennan
Editor
New York City

“Have a nice day!”

[Rory Brennan]

For stability reasons I always export a QT from FCP to take to compressor as I never really have much luck going straight from FCP into compressor.
That said, I would export “same as source” (HDV) then bring that into compressor. If you export ProRes, you are running your video through an additional compression, which I believe won’t help improve quality.
Finally, make sure your compression settings are correct. Do you want letterbox, anamorphic, middle-cut or crop’d sides. The more you start changing the video around the more problems you will have as compressor isn’t a several thousand dollar hardware unit.

Rory Brennan
Editor
New York City

“Have a nice day!”

[Rory Brennan]

Matthew,

Check out Other World Computing for hard drives. Very good price. Western Digital drives are even cheaper though some people don’t trust them too much.

RB

[Rory Brennan]

Correct me if i am wrong, but isn’t that the problem a corrupt clip gives you. I think if you delete the corrupt clip out of the timeline it should be fine.

Mark ‘In’ at the start of the sequence and Mark ‘Out’ half-way through then press ‘Play in to out’. If it plays then the corrupt clip is in the second half. If it doesn’t play then the corrupt clip is in the fist half. Keep reducing the mark in and out to narrow down the clip then cut it out. Just delete it and re-dig.

That is of course if this is the problem.

Maybe also try restoring an earlier version of the sequence/bin from Avid Attic.

[Rory Brennan]

Perhaps a more thorough option would be to consolidate all the media to your desired drive. Whilst this might take longer, it should grab everything you need without you worrying about missing files.

[Rory Brennan]

We’ve had this too. Very annoying. Either convince your sound dept. to purchase a plug-in for aaf or do what we do.

– Duplicate sequence into new bin.
– Delete video track/s (can’t remember if this is entirely necessary)
– Select sequence in new bin. Select CLIP>MODIFY and change sequence format to SD 23.98
– Close project. Open new SD 23.98 project.
– Open bin from HD project in the new SD project.
– Export OMF as per usual.

Hope this helps.

RB

[Rory Brennan]

Hmmm. Big question. Assistant editors cover a lot of stuff, as I

[Rory Brennan]

Guys,

Thanks for the responses.
So the most important thing for me that I’m really trying to clarify is this:

Because the video coming out of the deck is decompressed to 170 mb/s, capturing at Avid 2:1 roughly returns the video rate to 90mb/s which is close to digibeta compression. Thus there is no significant change in quality.

Is this correct??

Thanks for the help.

RB

[Rory Brennan]

Spot on. You set-up the wrong size file.
Make your AE comp 720×486 because Avid uses D1, not DV resolution.
The jittery result they see are stuffed up fields. Also make sure you render lower field first.