[Uli Plank]

Well, I’m surprised when you mention a lot of noise with a PD-170, from my experience it is a very low-noise camera. If you are talking about compression artefacts from DV, well, that’s another story. Hard to get rid of, if Magic Bullett doesn’t cut it, you might give Graeme Nattress’ film tools a try, but don’t expect miracles. Don’t forget to set the timeline to a better format than DV25 when trying such things, or you’re going to loose any improvement on export.

If we are really talking ’bout noise as in low-light situations, you could try two things:
– After Effects has a very good de-noiser starting from version 6.5 (ex Grain Surgery), slow, but powerful.
– BitVice, a MPEG encoder from http://www.innobits.se has a temporal de-noiser called DVNC, give it a try with a setting around 3.

Both are available as demo versions.

Good luck,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

Actually there are graphic designs that just can’t be reproduced accurately on video, and from your description this is such a case.

Make very sure (with the help of the scopes in FCP) that your luma is not over the top and that chroma saturation is not exceeding the targets. Instead of the flicker filter apply a mild vertical blur and carefully increase it’s value from something very small until flickering stops (this will preserve more of the logo’s detail). There is such a filter now in FCP 5.1.2 (and there always was one in AE, if you have it).

Finally, don’t write your video out for compression as DV25, use uncompressed, DV50 or Photo-JPEG@75% to get it over into Compressor. If you experience color/contrast shifts, use BitVice for encoding.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

Yes, definitely get that book by Hullfish and Fowler (dmp, I think, check at http://www.dv.com). I’ve learned a lot more from it than only designing the suite.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

I wouldn’t consider latitude such an important factor here. Stop-motion is normally shot under carefully controlled lighting conditions, which any decent digicam can handle. It’s outdoors where film still has an advantage.
I get excellent stop-motion results from my Canon 10D with a very good macro prime on it. I’d second the suggestion to capture large. Stop-motion is so much work, you’ll want the full quality at the source, and storage is cheap these days. Who knows, your movie might be so good, it could get sccreened in HD one day or even deserve a transfer to film?
One more thing: If your images show some very soft gradients in background, you should rather shoot raw (if the Sony does that). I’ve seen banding on some images with subtle color transitions when grabbed in Photo-JPEG and later compressed further for DVD.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

With the changes to cache sizes suggested in an article here at the Cow, AE runs very stable for me on a MacBook Pro. Right, it may not use the computer to it’s limit, but with the latest improvements in Rosetta it is quite workable. So, I’d also say: “go for the MacPro”. Only on a Quad G5 AE is still faster than on a MacPro. But our older dual G5 2GHz can’t keep up any more.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

Could be the reason, yes!
Apple started shifting their plug-in standard in FCP 5.1.2 from (more or less) AE-compatible to fxPlug (which before was used by Motion only). While this should normally affect video plugs only, who knows? Whenever a system starts showing erratical problems, it’s a very good idea to remove third-party plug-ins and see if it helps.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

Photo-JPEG@75% should be good enough then, and you may want to grab 24 fps.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

Maybe you are looking for FCP Rescue?

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

OK, first a question: What’s your target format? DVD, the Web or a tape recorder? This will influence the choice of codec for the timeline.

A RAID can be helpful, yes. AFAIK, SnapzPro is first writing your footage to disk uncompressed and later it converts into the format of your choice. So (depending on other factors of load on your machine) you might get better frame rates with a RAID.

The best codec for editing would be something like uncompressed 8 bit 4:2:2 if your system can take it (RAID needed). If not, Photo-JPEG@75% is a better compromise than DV.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

I’d still consider faulty memory, the usual tests don’t really tell you much. If you have the opportunity to swap it from another machine for a test, just do it.

Regarding external FW drives: Yes, having one of them going to sleep can spell problems. Make sure they are set in the Energy Saver to never sleep when you are editing. If I remember well, there used to be a freeware thing called “Spindown fix” if they still do.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.