[Steve Braker]

Andy Mees did it for you, look here for Simple Crop: https://homepage.mac.com/andymees/Free-and-Easy/FileSharing4.html

[Steve Braker]

Andrei, as with most of FCP there are various ways. One is to disconnect the “Source” patches to the left of the timeline – “a1(A1” etcetera. Click on the tabs with the lower-case letters (a1) so they disconnect or move away from the upper case ones (A1). Now when you place a clip it will only place the video.

[Steve Braker]

Rocco, Shane gave me a sound beating over a closely related concept just yesterday: https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/923308?pview=t#head – and the manual seemed to be on his side. I was pretty darn sure myself. Is there any evidence that a QT conversion really does ignore the sequence renders? I’d love it to be true, but can’t find any indication either way in the manual…

[Steve Braker]

Thanks, Shane. I can’t remember where I picked those particular muyths up. I hope I haven’t contributed too much to popularizing them. Or others…

[Steve Braker]

Apologies to Shane and to Jeff, (and thanks to Shane) I think I just stumbled on a big hole in one of the things I “know” about FCP.

It has been my impression that a QT reference movie only contains references to the source media, and that it therefore isn’t affected by the compression used in that sequence unless you ask it to (by leaving renders intact or by recompressing all frames). I had thought that when a reference movie was read by something like Compressor or DVDSP, QT was reaching all the way back to the timeline and essentially rebuilding renders to output to the new format.

On revisiting the manual (starting P. 239), I see I had it wrong. It is now clear that, although the reference movie directly hooks up media that didn’t require rendering in the sequence, in the case of rendered material it either contains the renders (at sequence settings) or refers to the renders saved by the sequence.

Is this correct now?

My other assumption has been that exporting uncompressed – without any renders available – would render anything requiring it directly to the output file – so in that case those renders would be uncompressed. In the case of Jeff’s photos, that would mean everything.

Is this still correct, or is this a myth?

[Steve Braker]

There’s no DV compression necessary when using a DV timeline to go to DVD. Just output as uncompressed or as reference movie (with renders trashed) – the DV timeline is just a convenient way to edit and monitor. The stills will only see the final compression. Sure, DV50 is fine too, but the results are no different if you don’t use that compression.

I disagree about HD and here’s the reason: Jeff is obviously serious about the quality of these images. He will spend some time being frustrated and searching here and perhaps Apple forums for hints on getting better results.

That’s great, but if all that energy is directed towards getting an optimal result at 1080 or 720 resuolution, he will lose all that and more when it gets crunched down to 480. He will get flickers and shimmers he hadn’t seen before, plus his resolution will suffer from having been scaled twice instead of once. If his efforts are put into an optimal result at 480, then that optimal result is what he’ll get.

An NTSC DV timeline as described above (or DV50) will get him optimal WYSIWYG results on a DVD, with only one compression (to MPEG2) and only one scaling (from the image to final resolution).

All the above is assuming a DVD delivery. We still don’t know how Jeff is showing this…

[Steve Braker]

Depends how you’re delivering. If you’re delivering on DVD then there’s no advantage (and some possible disadvantages) to any of the HD formats. If you can show it at a higher resolution then go for it.

[Steve Braker]

I’m gonna assume the attitude is improving and tell you straight up: I’m talking about the manual. “Scrub tool” and “scrubbing” have several entries in the index. There are 2 different settings that affect scrub behavior, I can’tr remember where they are but they’ll be in the manual.

[Steve Braker]

I had an idea about where one could search on the word scrub to find some answers, but I seem to have forgotten where that was.

[Steve Braker]

It’s frustrating to me too since I always want to go the other way… FireStore forces everything to be saved as stereo, and I have no use for stereo… Oh well.