[Simon Hustings]

– I forgot to mention that I am using FCS 3 and Compressor 3.5.1. Snow Leopard 10.6.2 on an 8core Intel Mac with an external Lacie BluRay Burner.

“Is it me or do I spend half my life watching little grey bars turn into little blue bars??”

[Simon Hustings]

Cheers Daniel.

I got through the process without any major headaches. Compressor does a good job visually at creating BluRays. A little more control over the preset menus would be nice (without having to jump into xml).
My only other comment was that Compressor doesn’t seem to allow you to add the “Create BluRay” job action to AV that has already been encoded for BluRay. So every time I wanted Compressor to create a BD-R, I would have to start from the master and re-encode. And with multipass, that easily added 3 hours to my render time (For a 50min Prores doco, on an intel 8-core mac)
I guess the way around that would be to create the BD-R and save as a disc image and then use Toast to burn it.. but if changes needed to be made JUST to the BD Menu (created within Compressor) and not the master, I would still have to start from the master and re-encode again. Unless I’m missing something obvious??
One other observation is that when a “Create BluRay” job action is added to a batch and you render using distributed processing, the job shows up in Batch Monitor under my 8core cluster but only as one segment for audio and one for video. (as opposed to multiple segments for non-job actioned encodes such as general m2v/ac3 encoding) I assume Compressor is still using the clusters but is displaying the progress differently?

All the best,

Simon

“Is it me or do I spend half my life watching little grey bars turn into little blue bars??”

[Simon Hustings]

Well through a combination of horizontal and vertical blur plus a 1920 square pixel stage I was able to churn out some pretty reasonable scrolling credits that even stood up to scrutiny on BluRay.
But when time permits I’ll give Boris a try as well. Thanks for the combined advice everyone!

All the best,

Simon

“Is it me or do I spend half my life watching little grey bars turn into little blue bars??”

[Simon Hustings]

Thanks, I’ll give that a try.
Just out of interest, what project settings do you tend to use for your hidef credit rolls? Or do you round trip from FCP? Also, do you find that you get a visual difference in scrolling quality depending on whether you export your HD interlaced credit rolls with frame blending, field rendering or motion blur turned on or off?

“Is it me or do I spend half my life watching little grey bars turn into little blue bars??”

[Simon Hustings]

I understand what you’re saying bogiesan and I agree to a certain extent- the technical aspect of the credits should not affect their judgement of the other aspects of the doco. But the problem of creating clean vertical scrolling credits remains!
It’s not just for the sake of the Judges that I want to create the best possible credits to go with a great doco, but it’s for my sake, my sanity and credibility also!
It must be possible within Motion right? Am I missing something inanely obvious? I’ve been using Motion for the past 4 years and have created numerous credit rolls, idents, motion graphics etc but have never come up against this specific problem.

Yeah, Bluray submissions to a fest is new to me too. Their only other accepted format was DigiBeta!

All the best,

Simon

“Is it me or do I spend half my life watching little grey bars turn into little blue bars??”

[Simon Hustings]

Thanks for the advice Scott, I appreciate it!!

“Is it me or do I spend half my life watching little grey bars turn into little blue bars??”

[Simon Hustings]

Thanks for the input guys.
It turned out that there was a corruption hidden somewhere within the QT engine as I eventually lost all system audio on top of the iTunes and FCP issues.
Reinstalling Snow Leopard squashed all the gremlins and everything is back in working order.

Chalk another one up for the pasture!

“Is it me or do I spend half my life watching little grey bars turn into little blue bars??”

[Simon Hustings]

Tom, no matter what you do, your picture isn’t going to look the best.
Ideally, you want to avoid converting your DVD video to another format just to compress it down to Mpeg again, especially if you are going to be arking it.
If you want to remove 4:3 letterboxing from a video, you will lose about 25% quality straight off the bat, as all you can really do is scale the video to fit your 16:9 frame.

I would have a look at Compressor and MPEG Streamclip, MPEGStreamclip to demux your DVD TS_Video files to a workable mpg format and then send it to Compressor. If i’m not mistake, Compressor will allow you to crop your image (which will remove the LB) and then allow you to re-scale it to the require SD 16:9 dimensions all without the need of transcoding to a different format first.

If you’d prefer to use FCP, then convert your DVD footage to a useable format using MpegStreamclip, and then scale the 4:3 Letterbox video to fit your 16:9 timeline, finally, output using Compressor to your required Mpeg format. You might get a slight quality boost if you set your FCP sequence settings to high and maybe add a sharpen filter.

On the whole though, I’d expect the video to come out looking quite soft regardless of the method you use. Hope this helps.

All the best,
Simon

“Is it me or do I spend half my life watching little grey bars turn into little blue bars??”

[Simon Hustings]

Armand,
Does this happen only with a specific font or with all fonts in FCP? If it is a specific font, the font file may be corrupted. Check the font file validity within Fontbook.
Without any further details all I can suggest it to trash your FCP preferences. That will iron out any number of random issues. Search the COW for instructions on how to do this.

All the best,
Simon

“Is it me or do I spend half my life watching little grey bars turn into little blue bars??”

[Simon Hustings]

Ken,
There are a couple of choices I can think of:
1: Use a brush in motion and check the “write on” option. Kinda tricky to do without using a pen and tablet as Motion senses pressure of the pen and affects the brush stroke accordingly. Plus this is down to your own skills of calligraphy!!
2. Check out the LiveType fonts. I seem to remember there were one or two that had that write on effect. But they might not be in the font stye your were looking for.
3. The way I would do it is to type up your text in Motion using the desired font and then keyframe a mask over the word to reveal the letters over the desired duration. I use this method all the time to give the effect of text being written, or to show organic growth. May take a couple of attempts to get it right, but works well.

All the best,

Simon

Is it me or do I spend half my life watching little grey bars turn into little blue bars??