[Tom Brooks]

Here’s my stored note on the complete list of settings:

Input Selection on front panel set to DV
Device in Remote mode
Menu Setup:
TC/UB SET: DV TC IN – INTERNAL
TC/UB SET: TC MAKE REGEN
TC/UB SET: TC RUN FREE RUN
TC/UB SET: JOG TC OUT OFF
DISPLAY SET: PB/EE SEL – EE
REC SET: REC MODE DV or DVCAM (should match your tape type)

Hope it helps you!

[Tom Brooks]

My old notes on the another model, the DSR-45, say to set DV IN TC to INTERNAL. It’s completely non-intuitive. Can you try that and see if it works?

[Tom Brooks]

My pleasure David. I try to provide answers that are both useful and within the scope of my knowledge. Interesting that I’m not alone battling that stutter. Talking heads and static shots can be wonderful, but pans or any movement that is very predictable and steady can show that dreaded hitch.

I never trust PowerPoint or any computer for critical playback, but sometimes it’s a necessity.

[Tom Brooks]

There’s a Motion Blur effect in FCP. Anything that moves gets blurred.

[Tom Brooks]

Fun thread. I finally learned not to use White Out!

[Tom Brooks]

[Craig Seeman] “You can create an AVI with MPEGStreamclip but I haven’t tested the results in WME on Windows.”

I used this method recently with decent results. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I had a problem with a hitch or stutter in shots with a lot of horizontal movement–pans and the like–but that could have been related to the playback environment as well.

I used MPEG Streamclip to make an intermediate AVI in PhotoJPEG codec, 75% quality setting. I think there’s a file size limit for AVI’s in the Windows Media Encoder (Sorry, I’m not sure on this — 2GB or 4GB??), so your clip is limited in length for this approach. The AVI was accepted with no problem in WME. I encoded to 1280×720, 29.97fps, key frames at 10s, 4Mbps total data rate.

Flip4Mac did a decent job at this data rate, too. But I liked the WME version a little better. It seems to stay cleaner on cuts, dissolves, and other wholesale exchanges of pixels. I wish I could get Flip tweaked to match the WME, but so far I haven’t. Recipes would be appreciated if you find any that work.

[Tom Brooks]

Without contradicting the previous posts, even though you seem to have properly handled your footage and setups, you could still have a problem. I don’t know how much Scenarist can be tweaked on a shot-by-shot basis. If it can’t be adjusted to get a good result, you might have to look to what you can do to help the text roll. You could slow down the roll speed and make the type a bit bigger and bolder.

Ultimately your trouble is obviously due to interlacing on the computer monitor. Your video is interlaced, as it should be for NTSC playback. For computer playback, either your video needs to be deinterlaced or your player software needs to deinterlace it for you. Strictly on the playback side, some DVD player software does a better job of scaling and deinterlacing than others. Roxio Cineplayer is a favorite of mine. In some players, the deinterlacing can be switched on or off (Apple DVD player for example). Try it both ways to see which is better.

[Tom Brooks]

I just did a similar length piece for PowerPoint playback on a PC. The sequence was 1080p29.97. Playback computer was a typical, Pentium 4, desktop PC in a corporate auditorium.

My tests found the following to be optimum: Windows Media 9, 1280×720, 29.97 fps, Peak-limited VBR, audio 44.1Khz, 16-bit, 128Kbps, 4Mbps total data rate. Flip4Mac encoded it acceptably, but I liked the results from Windows Media Encoder on the PC a little better. If your movie is standard-def, you can drop the data rate down to around 2Mbps if you like.

Quality was excellent on most subject matter, but pans and tracking shots had a rhythmic hitch or stutter in them (on about a 1/2 second interval). I could not get rid of that problem and I don’t think it was caused by frame dropping. I considered it minor enough to be unnoticed by 95% of my audience in this case. Perhaps the scaling from 1080 to 720 had something to do with it. I found that the wimpy PC could not handle 1080 at 29.97fps, so I scaled down to 720 for playback.

If you are playing back on a Mac, the optimum will be quite different. In that case, I’d definitely go with a Quicktime, H.264 file. Stay away from Windows Media for Mac playback.

[Tom Brooks]

My first suggestion is to try fixing it in Final Cut. If you can work on each click individually, it can probably be done by zooming way in on the waveform in the Viewer and setting keyframes to adjust the volume. The keyframes can be set to sub-frame accuracy so that very little of the surrounding sound is affected. The same technique is often used for P-pops, lip smacks, etc. If the click happens to be on top of another more important sound the fix might be worse than the click.

If that’s impractical because it would take you more than a few months of tedious work, the next solution is Soundtrack Pro. It does indeed have filters for clicks and pops. I believe you “analyze” the file first and then you “fix” the problems–in other words, you tell the program to look for clicks, it finds what it considers to be clicks, and then you tell it to go ahead and fix them. Make sure you always leave yourself a way back in case the fix isn’t what you want.

Others may suggest other audio cleaning programs such as Bias SoundSoap. All of these will basically do what you could do one click at a time with keyframes but they will automate the process.

[Tom Brooks]

Sorry George. I see you really hung in there and Jeremy and others were able to stick it out with you. Well done!