[Todd Reid]

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.

as my third post mentions, that’s very close to what the engineers had to say.
Of course they said it very “engineery”.

The sad fact is that where I work we deal with hundreds of hours of footage and use dv25
to maximize our server space.
We do promos in dv50, but choose to stay in the 25 realm for our programming.
Can be very frustrating, but is more cost effective.

Thanks for you valuable input.

[Todd Reid]

I’ve had 2 engineers in my suite for the last 30-45 mins.
What we seem to have come up with, basically boils down to dv25 interpolation.

We tried the same animated gfx in a dv50 timeline and it played fine with no jagged edges.
When FCP had to re-compress the dv50 quicktime to dv25 in order to play in realtime,
that’s when those jagged edges were introduced.

I’m getting closer to understanding this phenomenon.

My saga continues…

[Todd Reid]

I have to admit, this is the type of answer I was hoping NOT to get.
The tone of “Stock answer #2” and ALL CAPS, immediately puts someone on the defensive.

I am looking for a discussion among professionals as to why this happens to some aspects of the example and not others
and not hey your an idiot you should know this.
I’ve been a professional editor for many years and I know about rendering and external monitoring.

Let’s play nice and share knowledge.

[Todd Reid]

try taking your overlays off.
(safe title, timecode & luma)

Thought they might have fixed this “feature” by now.

[Todd Reid]

one quick tip for text within FCP is to make sure your text is on even & whole numbers.

under the motion tab, the center fields should be, for example 2, 4, rather than 1.34, -13.6.
Mostly just the horizontal, but I keep em both even/whole when possible.

Doesn’t fix everything, but I’ve found it does look much better.
Ironically I’ve found that LiveType files look better when you break this rule and place them at 0, -1.

Anyone know why?

[Todd Reid]

Good catch.

I meant to ask what his image size was, not resolution.

I stand by my suggestion to lower the dpi for a possible solution to the strobing gfx.
It worked for me.

[Todd Reid]

What is your resolution on the photoshop files?

I’ve solved this problem a few times by knocking 300dpi gfx down to 72 dpi.
Anything over 72 dpi is useless in video anyway.

[Todd Reid]

confirm that you are on the correct capture setting.
I had a similar problem when I accidentally had the DVCPro50 codec instead of the customized setting I had for our Beta deck.

Also, if you only have 1 firewire bus, buy another one.
Your mac came with multiple firewire connections (front & back), but only 1 firewire bus.
It is highly recommended that you only have one device on one bus for video capture.
i.e. your Lacie needs to be on a different bus than your AJA.

Now having said that, I worked at a place that had 4 systems using only the 1 bus that came with the mac.
They eventually, after 1 year of daily use, added extra buses to all, and it did seem to work smoother.

Good luck.

[Todd Reid]

NOW its working….after I post to the cow.

thanks for the proximity effect!!!

[Todd Reid]

sounds like your drive is dying.
I had similar symptoms with a Lacie drive and it eventually died.
Luckily, it was still under warranty, so Lacie was great at replacing it.
I did however loss 16 hours worth of footage.

If you can get it to power up and stay that way for a while,
I would move your stuff to a different drive.
The longer you wait, the greater the chance that you will lose something.