[Sean Smith]

Check to make sure you don’t have two things with the same tape name synced differently. I had a similar problem before when my multitrack audio (all with the same tape name) contained a phone tap that needed to be offset. When all of the mics lined up, it would group fine, but when one was out of sync, Avid would change the Aux TC for those subclips automatically and ruin the group. The solution was to re-import the phone tap clips with a different tape name. I just appended “PT”.

[Sean Smith]

I think you might have to have the clips in the AMA bin selected when you relink too.

[Sean Smith]

I have clocked a lot of hours blurring stuff for reality TV. There are a few things that can happen that tend to ruin everything.

If you trim the clip with the blurs, it will move the keyframes, since I think they’re always elastic keyframes for the blur effect. This doesn’t sound like what you’re talking about though.

Are you using the tracker? That will create an offset. I usually set the beginning and end keyframe to the same thing, turn on and run the tracker, then fix the other keyframes as needed. You can try toggling the tracker on and off and see if that has anything to do with it.

The most annoying thing for me is when I accidentally add a point to my blur shape when I’m halfway through animating the blur. Avid will try to add it to the other keyframes and often ruins the whole thing. If you don’t catch and undo this immediately, you might have to start over.

I’ve also run into some weird things where the shape doesn’t actually move where I drag it. The only thing I’ve been able to do there is restart Avid, but there may be another solution.

Also, I don’t know how you work, but I find that you save yourself a lot of trouble if you just apply the blur effects to empty filler instead of the clip itself and use a separate one for each shape. Sometimes I use the paint effect instead, set to blur mode. With the paint effect, you can use one shape set to blur and another shape set to erase. This can be easier for some complex shapes, and it also works for a vignette effect.

Hope I at least told you something useful.

[Sean Smith]

You could try decomposing the sequence with “offline media only” checked. That would tell you what media is offline too. If you’re dealing with grouped clips, you may want to commit multicam edits first.

[Sean Smith]

So, if I understand correctly, you’ve imported a jpg sequence into FCP and are just trying to render it in the timeline, which is giving you a 2-day estimate. Is this right?

I used to use a lot of 1080 png sequences in FCP, and this is what I did. Let me know if it works for you. First use Quicktime Pro (Version 7, which gets hidden in the Utilities folder in Applications when you upgrade to Snow Leopard) to “Open image sequence” and select the first image in the sequence. Save this as a reference movie. Then import that into FCP and see how it works. Also, be warned that if you change any of the files in that image sequence, you will have to recreate the reference movie or Final Cut will give you a “General Error” when you try to render it.

[Sean Smith]

If it looks good in FCP, it’s probably your export settings. You could try exporting a quicktime movie at the current sequence settings just to see if it looks good. Of course, that file might just be too big to realistically upload.

A few questions to get you better feedback. What are your sequence settings? What settings are you using to export? Also, is using Compressor an option?

[Sean Smith]

As far as color goes, avoid h.264 whenever you can. You could always tweak brightness and saturation either on the clips or in compressor to get decent results though, since I still find that h.264 is my best bet for web videos. A few test batches with representative samples should get you some acceptable settings.

Or or you editing at h.264? I’m not sure if you’ll get that color shift if that’s the case, but editing in Prores probably makes more sense.

As for DVDs, I’ve spent plenty of time trying to figure out the answer to the “how to get the best quality SD DVD” question. Here are two things I found to be repeatedly true:

1) To get your video quality up with a given bitrate, crush your blacks. You could try it with whites too, but you’ll get noticeable artifacts too soon; I don’t think it’s really worth it. In the filters > video tab in Compressor, check BlackWhite Restore. Depending on how dark the footage is, you can slide the value to whatever works for that footage. Do some test exports, paying attention to the darkest portions. What this will do is take all that noise within the black values, different values that are not even visibly different, and interpret it as a single black value, saving more data/second for details that you actually want. If you’re going through Compressor anyway, this is probably the most useful compression technique I’ve found.

2) This may not be so useful, depending on what software you have, but for some reason after a lot of banging my head against the wall with Final Cut Studio, I tried authoring a DVD with Adobe Encore without even compressing the video first in Compressor, just exporting at sequence settings. Better results every time! Especially with the menu text, which was killing me in DVD Studio Pro.

You never actually mentioned what program you’re authoring the DVDs with, though it looks like you’re saying the m2v before authoring is ugly. Give Encore a shot without the Compressor DVD settings. I’m interested to see if it’ll work for you as well as it did for me.

[Sean Smith]

Final Cut is not great when it comes to alpha channels. A lot of ‘personality’ there. I had this same problem myself a year or so ago. We were using png sequences that I was making reference movies from in QT Pro then importing into FCP. Sometimes there was an alpha channel in these, premultiplied on black. My advice: save yourself a lot of trouble and take care of as much alpha stuff as you can in After Effects. Rendering a long hold there (or just copying the single frame over and over in FCP) is probably the easiest thing to do. I’m curious if anyone else has a different answer though.

[Sean Smith]

No, we’re PC-based.

Actually, when I was at my last studio, we were using FCP, so I did use Automator a bit, but mostly for renaming/reordering file sequences. It’s extremely easy to use. The big limitation on using Automator is that you can’t really split your automations into multiple branches, i.e. if a file name ends with “0” do x, if it ends with “1” do y. You’re also limited to the functions that are there or what you can find online.

This eventually led me to Applescript, which is a lot more powerful and I recommend to anyone in a Mac environment. As far as languages go, it’s very easy to learn and has English-like syntax. With Applescript, I managed to make a program that could automate some Quicktime Pro tasks for me. Lots of Apple programs have Applescript functions ready to use, and even when they don’t you can emulate user interactions to get around that. The other nice thing about it is that you can put some Applescript code within an Automator workflow and get the best of both worlds.

But, like I said, I’m stuck on a PC here.

[Sean Smith]

What are you trying to accomplish? There may be a way to work around this.