[Steve Price]

Ignore me – I rendered the timeline and it’s all working fine. I’m having one of my blonde moments…I’ll get me coat…

[Steve Price]

Thanks for the advice – I’ll give it a try.

Meanwhile though – back to the Photoshop method – it is transparent after all, so ignore that bit.

However, when I open the psd file in the viewer it fits the whole thing to the viewer window, and as my file is 26000 x 576 pixels it appears as a very thin band across the screen. If I expand it in the canvas the type pixelates and is unreadable.

Any ideas?

[Steve Price]

Thanks Fellas,

On this occassion I am indeed using DV – call me fussy if you like but I’d quite like things like titles to work properly with DV as well as higher quality codecs! It does with Adobe Premiere.

I haven’t used the built in Boris title generator, so I’ll give it a go, thanks. I’m actually trying to create a crawl that contains two rows of text – one with the job titles in lower case and one underneath with the crew names in upper case.

Of course, FCP only lets me use a single line of text, and trying to make both layers crawl in sync (so the job titles stay in position above the crew names) is turning out to be very difficult to create.

Can I create two lines of crawling text in Boris?

Thanks again for your advice, it’s much appreciated.

Steve.

[Steve Price]

David that’s great thank you. I suspected that might be the case but I wanted to make sure before I dismount the TV from the wall to get the to the Component inputs. Why can’t they put these things at the front?!

Thanks so much for helping me,

Cheers,

Steve.

[Steve Price]

I guess so, but that’s still analogue, I was wondering how to keep everything digital all the way through the system.
Thanks for your suggestion though,
All the best,
Steve.

[Steve Price]

Fabulous! Thanks.

[Steve Price]

You might be right Alexander – My creative flow is a few steps in front of my technical know-how and it’s holding me up, and my frustration is compounded by the fact I would know exactly what to do on other sytems.

Time for a cup of tea I think.

[Steve Price]

I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t really think I have “unrealistic expectations” by demanding smooth looking video at 50% speed or credits that run smoothly.

Other cheaper edit packages can deliver this quickly and simply without any hassle, so naturally I expect FCP to do the same.

I admit I may suffer from “a failure to comprehend how these tools work in Apple’s software”, but in this case I exported my clip first as a self contained movie lasting about 10 seconds.

It’s true you need quite an in depth level of technical knowledge to use FCP, and for creatives like myself it’s not really the most user-friendly package. The requirement to make a self contained clip, export it to another programme, work on it, render it and send it back again seems time consuming and is inconvenient to the creative workflow, especially for something as simple as setting a clip to 50% speed.

On the other hand, to do something that was once incredibly time consuming and complicated – like editing a 9 camera concert for TV – has become an absolute dream, I can do it in half the time with results twice as good.

I offer these comments in good faith – I trust there are folk present here who share my frustration and don’t take offence at the slightest constructive criticism of Apple.

[Steve Price]

Thanks for the advice. However, there are a couple of things not quite right about this…

I have a 10 second clip of DV I’d like to use at 50% speed.

I’ve made the clip into a self contained movie in FCP. I’ve sent it to a Motion project. I’ve selected Timing and set the Frame Blending drop down box to Optical Flow.

Then I get this warning – “There is not enough available disk space to set the object ‘clip 2’ to optical flow retiming”.

What does this mean? I have 650Gb of space on the external hard drive and 175Gb on the internal drive, and I have 8Gb of RAM.

Thanks,

Steve.

[Steve Price]

Mike – I’m connected to an external G-Speed SATA drive, it’s not firewire so that’s not the problem, but thanks for your help.

David – I agree, but I can’t see why this issue has just occurred as I’ve had no trouble with the drive up to now. However, I did accidentally switch off the drive a few days ago while it was connected and in use. All manor of alarms started bleeping, but I’ve done this before on accassions without any problems.

So, I’ve just run a test on the hard drive and it’s definitley got a problem as it’s only reading at 49Mb and writing at 60Mb. The online test shows it to be rebuilding in the background – very slowly – so I’ll leave it overnight and come back to it tomorrow.

Thanks so much for your advice.