Tom Matthies
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COW Coin
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DaVinci Coin
Forum Replies Created
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My favorate mouse is a Wacom Grahpire tablet!
Tom -
Something is badly amiss here. FCP should (does) handle motion on stills and looks very good to boot. Something is not right.
Are you rendering your timeline? FCP will attempt to play your timeline in realtime by dropping the resolution in order to play the motion paths. It will seem play without rendering, but you still NEED to render it. At times, it seems like FCP will not let you render. It “tells” you that it doesn’t need to render. Oh, but it sure does. Go under your Sequence pulldown menu and make sure that, under the three render pulldown choices, that ALL of the colors are checked, just to be safe. Change your RT settings on the upper left of the timeline to “safe”. (I’m in FCP 4.5 right now). Now, highlight every clip (CMD-“A”) and go back up to the Sequence pulldown and select Render All>Video. (hope I’m right…I’m going from memory on this one)
Anyhow, that should “force” CP to render your timeline. Things should look good now. I do “pan ‘n scan” all the time, and FCP does do a good job with it. I’m assuming that your stills are at least 720×480 for DV? Bigger can be better. Too big can actually degrade the finished product since you start to get all kinds of interframe flicker.
I’m in the process of loading a new G5 with FCP5 right now, but haven’t gotten to the point of being able to do an actual project yet. I’m told that FCP5 should handle this kind of sub-pixel rendering even better than FCP4.5. At least, that’s what they say…
Your finished video should look very good. Don’t get too discouraged at FCP yet. We also have two Avid Symphonys that do a lousy job at pan ‘n scan without additional plugins. Your system should look good. Keep at it. The quality you seek is in there.
Tom -
New 2.3Ghz running Tiger. Installed FCP5 Production Suite. Called up a few projects and so far, so good. It’s a little weird though. On clips that are offline, the playback will stall with dropped frame warning while playing the red “off-line” screen. I don’t remember it doing that on the old systems. I’ll get the rest of the files transferred and hook up the Aja LA over the weekend and give it a good test. Hopefully all will be well. I’m keeping the old system on-line for the time being however.
Keep your fingers crossed! Film at eleven.
Tom -
Actually DV25 is 5:1 compression and 4:1:1 sampling. I believe that I read somewhere that DV50 is about 3:1. and 4:2:2 sampling. Digital Betacam comes in at 2:1 lossless. It’s also 4:2:2 but at 10-bit resolution. The two DV formats are 8-bit. You can probably see the difference if you look very closely and have the right source material. But, for a good general purpose codec, it’s pretty usable!
I too use DV50 a lot with no problems at all. It’s a good compromise between quality and file size. I use it for all local commercial work and have never had a problem. Hell, my spots generally go into the On-Air servers at the TV stations at a much higher compression rate than I use anyhow. Most of the quality loss I’ve experienced is in that final step going-into the station’s server. Yuk!
My 2 -
You might try trashing our preferences. Do a search on the procedure.
I had this problem a while back. FCP didn’t take “forever” to load, but it did take MUCH longer than it should have. It’s been behaving since.
Tom -
Make sure that you render all of your still clips in the timeline. Often when you animate them, FCP will attempt to play them back in realtime but at a lower resolution. Everything will look fuzzy. Select the clips and force them to render and things should look better.
Just a thought…
Tom -
I haven’t had any luck with drives formatted with FAT 32, especially for FCP. They come up, as you say, as read only.
You should format your drive, if possible, with Mac OS Extended (not journaled) for use with FCP. Things will work much better.
Tom -
Lo and behold (I know how to behold, but I’m not too sure about the lo-ing part), when I started up this morning to check the multitudes of clever answers to this post…QT Pro was working. In my tired stupor last night, after editing all day and into the evening and THEN deciding to install the entire studio bundle on my new computer…did I even think to do a restart on the computer afterwards. Nope. That would have made too much sense.
I guess that’s all it took. All the greyed out features seem to be available now. Duh.
FWIW, the install went flawlessly. I installed on a new G5 that had not previously had FCP installed. It just asked for the old FCP4 serial number and then it took off. About an hour and a half later, it was done. Repaired permissions and called it a day.
I’ve launched each application and so far, so good. Everything seems to run, at least at the root level.
We’ll see how the rest of it goes as I transfer stuff over from the old G4 in the next couple of days, but so far, no problems at all. Yay!
Thanks for the help!
Tom -
I use the Graphire as well. I’m a total mouse spaz, especially in Photoshop. I have a tablet on every machine (three of ’em) and don’t even have a mouse on two of them.
Like Graeme mentioned, I find it much easier on the wrist over the course of a long session.
I’d recommend one.
Tom -
Thanks, I’ll give it a try. I just didn’t want to blow something up with different pin-outs or voltages.
Tom