[Tapio Haaja]

Well there’s also cheaper alternative called CVH QC Integration FX which should work in Tiger. It lacks some features but should be fine in your situation.

https://www.chv-plugins.com/cms/FxPlug/QC-Integration/QC-Integration.php?navanchor=1010038

[Tapio Haaja]

Yes you can of course deinterlace in another program and then bring clip to Episode. But if you’re encoding H.264 for example (or WMV if you have Flip4Mac WMV Studio Pro HD) it doesn’t make any sense. I find Mpeg Streamclips H.264 (and WMV) quality similar to Episode.

And if you’re scaling clips down to some small resolution then the quality in deinterlacing doesn’t matter.

[Tapio Haaja]

Well you can turn Quartz Composer files to Final Cut Pro (or Motion or After Effects) filters, generators or transitions with Noise Industries FxFactory Pro (https://www.noiseindustries.com/). I have build some simple generators and filters with Quartz Composer and FxFactory Pro and it’s relatively easy if you know the basics of Quartz Composer.

[Tapio Haaja]

Definitely go to Motion or After Effects. I don’t recommend doing anything more advanced compositing in Final Cut Pro. Mainly because Final Cut Pro have tons of bugs and strange behavior with alphas (and it’s even worse if you have fields enabled in your sequence). Final Cut is great for editing but Motion or After Effects is much more suitable for effects and compositing.

[Tapio Haaja]

I have no experience about Adobe Media Encoder CS4 but my opinion about other packages:

Apple Compressor
– Ok quality MPEG2 encoding
– Quite good deinterlacer but slow (for me this is one the most important point because I want high quality also from SD clips).
– Overall I find Compressor okay although there are some strange behavior / bugs

Telestream Episode
– Great interface
– Deinterlacing got better in 5.01 but is still bad
– Encoding quality is quite good with all codecs I’ve tested

If you want the ultimate quality H.264 you should check Mainconcept Reference. It does terrific job especially with low bitrates. My choice for H.264 and WMV encoding is Mpeg Streamclip powered with Flip4Mac WMV Studio Pro HD. Mpeg Streamclip is very fast (and free =), it’s deinterlacer is one the best I’ve seen and it’s interface is much more robust almost all the time compared to other packages.

My two cents
Tapio

[Tapio Haaja]

Okay it seems to be that I won’t lost my original camera if I first make camera track before turning offline camera on and going back to Motion. Even though it’s still rendering through offline camera in Motion.

One another question is where all my objects go inside ProAnimator when I turn 3d camera from motion on? Because I can’t see or find any objects inside ProAnimator when it’s turned on in Motion. So I must first turn it off and then go back to ProAnimator.

-Tapio Haaja

[Tapio Haaja]

I just recognised that since last update AE handles all the RGB-material with gamma 2,2. And this is only case with Intel-based Macs. PPC Macs still assume that RGB-material is gamma 1,8. Maybe this is a bug? I don’t know.

So when you export with Animation Codec it renders it out with gamma 2,2. And if you import that file to FCP for example you must change the source gamma to 2,2 from browser (by default FCP assumes everything is made with gamma 1,8, default gamma of Mac OS X).

You should also notice that now adays AE imports all the RGB-material with gamma 2,2 (if you don’t have color management turned on). I just noticed some of my old projects looked different than before… I think Adobe did this because they want AE projects look same on Mac and PC. This has not been the case in past.

But if this is the case ProRes should be right looking versiont. And if you want your Animation files look right in Quicktime Player you can but there adjustment layer with gamma 0,824 before rendering out. This changes gamma from 2,2 to 1,8.