[Tom Brooks]

Hmm. 64-bit. You need an answer from Panasonic on that.

[Tom Brooks]

Have you searched posts for dropped frames or dropping frames? You will find long lists of things to check, starting with the “fit to window” display in the Viewer.

[Tom Brooks]

Hey Sick, 🙂
Another thing…some of the folks here that use HDV have recommended making a copy of your sequence and changing the compression settings of it to 8-bit uncompressed. This causes transitions and graphics to render better than they would in HDV format–for final delivery of sequence. Graeme Nattress is one who does this, so you can search his posts and focus in on HDV sequence settings. I’m not sure if this offers any advantage in your situation.

Here is a handy site with a bitrate calculator that can help you decide what bitrate to select when encoding your preview version.

https://www.3ivx.com/support/calculator/index.html

[Tom Brooks]

[Sick Puppy] “: Small file to upload to .ftp, (for preview) but good quality.”

A two hour show is pretty long for ftp uploading or downloading. How fast is your upload speed? Try to think about how many megabytes would be possible for you to upload. For just a preview, you’ll probably need to scale your video down instead of providing a full 1280×720 size. 960×540 or 640×360 would be better for preview.

For this purpose, the ideal would be a fast encoder that gives decent quality at the lowest data rate. Putting all those together, I would choose Windows Media CBR. You will need some version of the Flip4Mac or Episode software to make Windows Media on the Mac.

Quicktime Sorenson 3 is also good if you have Sorenson Squeeze. Third choice is Quicktime H.264. It’s a beautiful quality codec, but the encoding time is long and it is less common on clients’ PC computers.

[Sick Puppy] “2: Full res for DVD encoding, etc, but must be playable in Quicktime.”

For this, you export Quicktime Movie using current settings. Take the resulting Quicktime movie into Compressor and use the Best Quality 120 Minute 16:9 setting for DVD.

[Tom Brooks]

I believe the drivers currently on the panasonic download areas ARE Vista compatible. This happened several months ago.

[Tom Brooks]

Yeah, that button is on the back of the camera, near the scene file dial. That will give you output from the camera via FireWire and also deck control via same. Then, just use DV NTSC easy setup (unless you have shot 24PA).

[Tom Brooks]

With today’s faster computers, shooting 24PA, editing in 23.98 and adding normal 2:3:2:3 pulldown when going back to tape should be no problem, should it? In other words, you’d shoot 24PA, but master to 24P.

A question: If you lay back to tape with the 2:3:3:2 pulldown of 24PA, will that be properly flagged on the tape to allow you to capture from that tape in the future as 24PA and automatically remove pulldown during capture?

Thx.

Final Cut Studio, FCP 5.1.4, After Effects 6.5 Pro, Quicktime 7.2, G5 Quad 2.5, Kona-LHe V3.4, 4.5GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7800-GT 256MB, G-RAID 2x1TB FW800, Mac OS-X 10.4.10.

[Tom Brooks]

[Sean ONeil] “Do you have Quicktime 7.2?”

Yes, I have QT7.2. I’m in FCP 5.1.4 at the moment, however, and I have not applied the most recent Pro Apps updates yet.

I captured a few seconds of Beta-SP (good old 525i) using the NTSC 8-bit Uncompressed Easy Setup. Created a new sequence, set FD to None. Inserted the clip set as it was captured to Lower. No problem. Changed clip to None — looks the same.

Created new sequence and left if set to Lower. Changed clip FD to Upper and put it in the sequence. Now it stutters as it should with reversed field order. Change it back to either Lower or None and it’s OK.

So, I’m definitely not seeing that field dropping behavior. Setting the clips to None doesn’t seem to change a thing. They still behave exactly as they do with setting on Lower. In other words, they do not become progressive because of this setting. They still play as 60i the way they were shot and captured.

The only adverse setting is when you tell FCP that the clip is Upper when it really isn’t. That causes FCP to play it Upper First and gives it that stuttery motion because the later motion is playing out before the earlier motion.

Final Cut Studio, FCP 5.1.4, After Effects 6.5 Pro, Quicktime 7.2, G5 Quad 2.5, Kona-LHe V3.4, 4.5GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7800-GT 256MB, G-RAID 2x1TB FW800, Mac OS-X 10.4.10.

[Tom Brooks]

I’m puzzled at the moment. I don’t have any digibeta in house. I’ll try it with some beta-sp though.

[Tom Brooks]

Without Automatic Duck, I’m heading for Motion. You have to do a few more clicks to get both scale and position to ease, but it’s a lot more workable than FCP’s keyframes. Since I’m putting a Motion project in the timeline, rather than a rendered movie, it works fine when the sequence compression is changed–just re-render. AE seems to scale objects more cleanly, though.