[Scott Hathaway]

Thanks Bob. The initial problem was the cable. I had not inserted the cable properly into the Kona. Stupid. Secondary problem was the frame rate in the menu. Thanks for kicking my butt on that one. Thirdly, some of our captures (now that we have it working) are slipping sync by about 20 frames at the end of a 50 minute tape. Then when I try to play back the clip in Final Cut Pro, Final Cut does not see the clip. I have been capturing whole tapes as a single clip and letting Final Cut tell me the clip has stopped but has captured successfully. The clip has information in the finder and plays back correctly in the finder, in quicktime and in mpeg streamclip (just to check), but Final Cut Pro (6.0.6) does not play the clip. It does not see any information in the clip even though all the other applications say there is information there. How can I fix this without recapturing the 20 hours of tape I just captured. Any suggestions?

_________

I make movies, not a living.

[Scott Hathaway]

Thanks for the note. I discovered I was out of date minutes after posting. Thus far I’ve recovered all but two clips, neither of which are opening in VLC, meaning something more sinister is at hand. Does anybody know how to extract usable information out of possibly incomplete .MP4 files? Luckily I shot so much coverage it probably won’t even be missed. Yeesh what a nightmare. ALWAYS BACK UP, EVERYBODY.

_________

I make movies, not a living.

[Scott Hathaway]

Thanks Craig. Unfortunately I had not made a backup of these files so they exist only as recovery files. Bad practice and a tough lesson learned.

I attempted the XDCam EX Clip Browser importing and it did in fact make new BPAV folders but when I added them to the XDCam Transfer source column, it said there were “no clips” in the folder. I checked the finder and, yes, that all important MP4 clip is present, but some of the additional files like .BIM, .SMI and .PPN are not there. Any suggestions? Thanks again for the reply.

-S

_________

I make movies, not a living.

[Scott Hathaway]

Can you explain how you were able to “change the headings” of an MP4 file to open it natively in Final Cut Pro? I recently had a hard drive crash which has fragmented some of my data to places I cannot find and therefore cannot use the standard XDCam transfer route for rewrapping the MP4 files to .mov files. My biggest problem lies in the fact that most of the videos are spread across multiple files using .SMI because I had recorded two nights of a 1.5 hour dance performance on two cameras. I can view the MP4 files using Videolan’s VLC player, and VLC can transcode the MP4 files to H.264 .mov files (as well as a few other formats and codecs) however it is slow and the quality is not up to par with the original files. I have been digging through lost data for a week now trying to get this stuff back and now that it’s right in front of me, it’s frustrating that I can’t use my regular Final Cut Pro workflow (ie, xdcam transfer to fcp) because of some missing pieces. Help me Bjoern Adamski. You’re my only hope.

-Scott

_________

I make movies, not a living.

[Scott Hathaway]

Sweet job. My only comment would be to consider blurring the sign slightly. The video compression on your source footage looks a little softer than your sign. The gobo effect is extremely effective and realistic.

_________

I make movies, not a living.

[Scott Hathaway]

I’m on CS3. I’m gonna try slowly expanding the distance between keyframes with roving keyframes and spread them out evenly over the duration of the part I want slowed.

_________

I make movies, not a living.

[Scott Hathaway]

I succeeded in this effect by shooting the water on a sunny day in broad sun lit with a harsh mirrored backlight against a completely black, shadowless background. I then used the screen blending mode over my footage and got the results I wanted. By crushing the blacks a little the outcome was perfect. Furthermore I pre-comp’d the water layer and applied a displacement map to the background footage and mapped it to the water layer and adjusted the x and y distort thereby effectively ‘refracting’ the background image through the water.

_________

I make movies, not a living.

[Scott Hathaway]

Mosaic was the effect I was looking for. I applied it directly to the text layer and set it to 400×400. Thank you very much for your help.

_________

I make movies, not a living.

[Scott Hathaway]

Hi,

I’m on a PC trying to do exactly what the first poster said. What are good software buys for a PC that will compress video files for flash?

[Scott Hathaway]

Why not use effect> render> beam? It has two points and a whole slew of other options.