[Uli Plank]

I’d advise to use in and out points even on whole tapes instead of direct capture, though.

I’ve seen sound audio sync issues when not doing this.

Regards,

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

Is your PAL footage progressiv or interlaced?

If it’s progressive, you can go the 25 -> 24p route, which is fast and excellent quality.

BTW, in my experience Compressor is far slower than Nattress’ G Converter. Are you sure about your settings?

Regards,

uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

Hola Manuela,

another lens won’t help, these are basic optical laws: wide-angle has a wider range of focal depth than tele, and close-ups are narrower in focus than remote scenes.

Excuseme me, but you should study a little bit of photography. These facts apply to any optical system.

Regards,

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

Absolutely! And it won’t take years of tractic, just a few days. It will get a habit:
1. Full zoom in
2. Push auto (don’t bother for that fiddly manual focus)
3. Frame

Enjoy!

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

Animation is a very heavy codec (high data rate), which is causing the stutter. The gamma issue (getting darker) is a long standing issue between FCP and other programs. The best codec to avoid it is Sheer from BitJazz.

Regards,

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

Yes, you are going interlaced – or you’ll loose lots of temporal resolution! 60 (or 59,94) fps does not exist in SD.

Regards,

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

You can always use ProRes or Uncompressed if yo are concerned about quality. In my experience it’s hard to see a difference over the codecs I mentioned.

The problem is: DVCProHD in 720 is either 24p with 3:2 pulldown or progressive. If it’s interlaced by pulldown, go ahead with MPEG Streamclip. If it’s progressive, I’d rather use After Effects for this, since it can compose 60 full frames into 30 frames with interlace (much faster than Compressor too). Or get FieldsKit with it’s re-interlacer for FCP.

Unfortunately, FCP is not yet able (yet?) to preserve temporal resolution when going from full-frames to interlace.

Regards,

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

It all depends an Compressor’s “Frame Controls”. If they are activated, rendering times explode. For some reason they were probably active in one case and not in the others. They are only used in converting formats, not in compression. My suggestion is: separate downsclaing and compression.

I’d recommend MPEG Streamclip (free) for downscaling. It does a very good job in a fraction of the time, as long as you don’t try to downconvert from 50/60p to 50/60I (it’ll loose 50% of temporal resolution there). Save in a good format like Photo-JPEG@75% or DV50.

The feed the SD version into Compressor, make sure it has not activated “Frame Controls” and let it do it’s compression job.

Even if you are using two steps here, overall speed will be better. One caveat: this approach can only be used as long as the number of frames per second doesn’t change.

Regards,

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

We’ve got our EX-1 just a few days ago.

Since native MPEG-2 from the FX-1 is accepted, I think at least the 25 mbps mode should be accepted here as well. I’ll try the HQ mode in the next few days.

BTW, this is still MPEG-2, not MP4.

Regards,

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

In our experience with Blu-Ray, H.264 was superior at the same data-rate if the source was higher quality than HDV. When coming from HDV using the native MPEG-2 looked better. Obviously MPEG-2 and H.264 suffer from cascading, which is not the case with ProRes, BTW.

Regards,

Ui

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts