Tony Silanskas
Forum Replies Created
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I usually crop to keep the aspect ratio correct but make sure you aren’t cutting off something you want to keep around the edges.
tony
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Surprisingly, iMovie has a setting to clean up rolling shutter a bit. Some people have had success using this and then stabilizing their footage. Now if only Final Cut could learn a little from iMovie.
tony
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As far as I know, you can’t change the audio to MP3 with Compressor so you might need to use Episode. But, try it with Compressor and see if they accept it. Never know and would save you from buying another program. I believe turning off “YUV 4:2:2: Color encoding” under the Extras tab will make it 4:2:0 but check on the compression forums to make sure. And I agree with Andrew about setting the Field Dominance yourself, (lower in your case) as I’ve also had issues when on auto.
tony
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First off, glad you’re taking the next step and learning some new software and gear.
For internal drives, I usually get the WD Caviar Black drives as they have been good for me over the years.
For external, I usually get OWC drives, specifically the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual RAIDs. You can get ones with eSata and have pretty decent mobile throughput if you have an esata card, of course. I’ve had many issues daisy chaining graids before so gave up on them. The CalDigit drive is probably good as I’ve used their drives before, just not that one as I haven’t jumped in on USB 3.0 yet.
Also, make sure you keep your RAM in pairs, preferably the same size, too (ex. 2x 2GB sticks). This keeps the throughput as fast as it can go.
As far as your computer goes, once you start using RED footage you’re going to want a faster Mac as it’s very CPU intensive. But, you can edit it, just will be slower on your machine than a newer one. If you are just going to TV than you could downconvert it to 1080p ProRes which will make it a bit easier to edit with.
tony
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[Adam Cook] “I would think you could by a thunderbolt port after they became available and put it in your Mac Pro.”
Sadly as of now Intel is saying you need a new Mac Pro to use it. Hopefully that will change:
From CNET : “no plans to offer Thunderbolt PCIe cards. In fact, Intel says that you will need a new computer/motherboard to get Thunderbolt. That means Mac Pro owners won’t be able to add it on to their systems.”
tony
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What are your sequence settings for the final sequence you have everything in or are you batch exporting out the 1920×1080 and 1440×1080 sequences separately?
When you copy and paste clips from one sequence size to another you have to change the distortion/motion settings for the copied clips as Final Cut only automatically does it when you Insert/Overwrite in an original clip. You can quickly change the distort settings of the imported clips by just fixing one clip, copying it, then selecting all the other imported clips and paste attributes Basic Motion, Distort and Aspect.
tony
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First off, bravo for troubleshooting as much as you have as many people try one thing and then give up. Thanks for sharing the info, too, as it cuts back on the rather useless preliminary questions I see on here way too often.
Workaround: Have you tried just exporting the clip from Color as a self-contained file and inserting back into the sequence so Final Cut isn’t rendering it from within the program? I know Color had some issues rendering in Final Cut when it first came out but I thought they fixed a bunch of those. Had to do with certain settings used on the clip in Color. Are you doing something special to that clip in Color compared to the other clips? I’m no Color expert, though.
Have you deleted all the renders from Final Cut with the Render Manager and then try rendering again? Sometimes one bad render file can cause a General Error.
tony
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What I meant by quality was that ProRes Proxy is roughly 12Mb/s for the SD, ProRes LT is 29 Mb/s and ProRes 422 is 42Mb/s. So you are gaining a lot more information in the file when going from Proxy to LT and LT to standard ProRes. This becomes a big issue when you start to color correct or add effects to a shot since you want as much information from the original file as possible when doing these things. And with any type of compression, the less the bitrate, the more the artifacting as it has less information to display. And this true when you render out graphics in a Proxy timeline as it’s rendering to the low bit-rate Proxy codec. But I’ve used Proxy and agree it looks way better than it should sometimes, given it’s small footprint.
Now, I say if you think it looks good and the client’s happy then go for it, as it saves a bunch of space and renders faster. One thing you could check is to see if you are rendering in High-Quality and Best Motion settings in your sequence settings. It seems weird though that “Sending to Compressor” makes it look better. And I’m happy to see “Sending to Compressor” work for you as I gave up on it years ago.
tony
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Thanks Braden for the detailed specs. Your settings look OK so here are some additional thoughts:
– If you’re having issues with the Handbrake files before you converted to ProRes that could be where the problem is. Try a different setting in Hnadbrake, or better yet, a different DVD.
– Final Cut does a terrible job of handling h.264 files so that could be why it was stalling in your HD timeline, though it sounds like it’s a bad clip.
– FYI: No need to use ProRes HQ on files smaller than 2K, as it’s overkill and adds a lot to storage and render times.
– Trash Final Cut preferences and repair the system drive permissions.
– Try making a new sequence and dragging the ProRes clip in it and have Final Cut set the settings for you. Does it play back correctly?
– I also noticed you have the Field Dominance set to none for both your sequence and ProRes convert, which I’m guessing is so you can edit progressive in the 29.97. This is a long shot, but are you setting the Handbrake file field dominance to none? I’m not at my computer right now and can’t remember if you can set that in HandBrake. If not, than your DVD h.264 file is interlaced and when you are converting it in Compressor to ProRes you’re making it progressive so there could be something weird going on there, too. But that workflow should work.
tony
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No problemo.
tony