[Todd Gillespie]

Hi Justin,
I wouldn’t say this is the best or the easiest way, but it’s the straight forward way that I would create it.
Create a Color Solid, uncheck ‘Uniform Scale’ and reduce the scale height until you have a bar size you like. Then apply a mask to the solid. You’ll want to make the mask has a lot of extra vertical space (height), then you can crop the sides of the bar. Add a lot of feather to the mask. Done. You do need to keep track of the mask, my first try I had a bar of 1 scale height, and it was difficult to pull the mask apart, so you may want to separate the mask corners before you completely reduce the bar size.

Once you’ve built the bar correctly, then you can add transitions to wipe the bar on/off.
Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

That’s happened to me before. A restart and a trashing of the preferences usually fixes it.

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Mark is correct, as usual. If you are looking to make the freeze frames LARGER, then using Photoshop or another image manipulation software would work better then FCP.

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Yes, the rendering is the real time killer. I haven’t used Brorsoft, so I have no idea of the quality. Chances are there’s not much of a time savings, but it depends on what output you are trying to render to. I’ve found some compressors that work great with one codec (like MPEG-2) but not be any quicker with others. So you might find one compressor that works better with the favor of video output that you are looking for. As to the quality, it shouldn’t matter which compressor software you use. The output codec should dictate the quality. You will be fine using Sorenson or Streamclip, Compressor is great if you want to access some of the features like the Frame Conversion or setting up chapter markers for DVDs, but if you don’t need it, then there’s no benefit.

Good Luck,
Todd

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Hi Ben,

I tried a handful of different codecs over the years to see if there was any other codec that would be close to the quality, but with a smaller size as ProRes was, unfortunately I never found one. ProRes was always the best choice and the easiest to work with. Especially when dealing with HD footage, I don’t think you have a choice. I usually never dealt with LT because the little savings in space wasn’t worth the time to deal with.

Yes, ProRes is about a GB per minute. Welcome to the world of quality HD footage. Hard drive space is cheap. You’ll spend more time and effort trying not use ProRes, than to accept the larger file size issue.

Sorry there wasn’t more options,
Good Luck,
Todd

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Hi Sam,

You’ll see from previous threads that you’ll need to ‘match’ your footage for FCP to run smoothly.

FCP doesn’t like h.264. You’re best bet is to convert to HDV 1080i.

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

All is not lost. The trick is (I’ve done it many a time), create the new AIFF file. Delete the original MP3 from the drive. (This is while FCP is closed) then reopen FCP, then when FCP asked where the file is, uncheck the exact media box and point FCP to your AIFF file. Done.
Good luck

[Todd Gillespie]

Control v

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

Mark you’re posts are always entertaining and a little insightful.

To add onto Mark’s comments, I came to a similar junction a couple years ago, (as did most editors who’d been using FCP) and tried Avid, Premier, and FCPX. As Mark eluded to, it’s wasn’t so much about the tools in each program has, since they’re almost all the same, but rather how our projects need to go into the software and get delivered out of the software. That made our decision easy to make.

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Todd Gillespie]

I’ll dive into the water…while this is not a ‘fix’, this should be a work around that has helped me a bunch of times.

I’m not sure if you have an effect on the clips? If so, then it’s a common problem when trying to dissolve between clips with effects. If not, it might be an issue with the LT?

In any case, what you want to do is export both clips as stand alone movie files. Then re-import those clips back into your sequence-then add the dissolve to the new clips. It shouldn’t have any issues. A better idea would be to try testing the clips with the export in a new sequence to check if you see the brightness shift. Once you know the clips and the dissolve works correctly in the new sequence, then you’ll know if it’s an issue with the dissolve or the sequence.

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production