[Zak Mussig]

Johan,

You’ve hit the non-universal wall. You’re going to have to crossgrade your install discs to the universal versions to get newer updates. For what it’s worth, there a big benefits to updating even on a PPC Mac. Versions 5.1.1 and 5.1.2 have both introduced some great new features and performance enhancements.

Zak

[Zak Mussig]

Just a quick warning…
Exporting with an Avid codec would be ideal for this, but I remember hearing that FCP 5.1.2 crashes on startup with Avid codecs installed. Anyone else hear that? Am I misremembering?
Depending on what version of FCP you have, you may want to be careful. There may be an opportunity cost involved with one method versus another.

Zak

[Zak Mussig]

Walter,
I guess that makes 2 of us with machines that aren’t broken. That’s fine by me. Coming from the G5, my first instinct was the same as yours to install RAM. Since I didn’t pay for the thing I took a little more care to read the instruction book than I typically would have before jumping in.

Zak

[Zak Mussig]

Hey all,
Got it sorted… stupid Photoshop issue. Some of the files had a group that wasn’t used for that particular graphic, so it was hidden. These obviously didn’t get caught by a merge visible and save PS action, and seem to be the cause of the problem.

Thanks for the help,
Zak

[Zak Mussig]

Your original sequence should be anamorphic. Your output sequence should have the same settings, but not be anamorphic. Dropping the original anamorphic sequence in the non-anamorphic sequence will letterbox it. Additionally, depending on what you’re doing with the tape, you could just uncheck the the anamorphic box on your original sequence settings, and output the now distorted sequence to tape. On recapture just mark as anamorphic and you’re back to 16×9 without ever having lost pixels to black bars on your tape. If you’re outputting to display, the letterboxed version may be preferred.

I’m not positive, but I think the difference between 4×3 and 5×4 has to do with the respective resolutions of NTSC and PAL video (720×480 vs 720 x 5 – something).
Hope that helps,
Zak

[Zak Mussig]

My firmware is up to date, and the same thing happened with 1 gig of RAM installed (didn’t have the RAM to use a valid 2 gig setup), so I’m scratching that possibility, an I’m going to assume I have a bad file, or files, in these timelines. There are Photoshop documents over every clip as an overlay graphic, so I’m going to check into those.
Thanks for all of the help and interest so far. Anyone have any advice for finding corrupted or troublesome media in a timeline? Any other ideas are appreciated as well.

Time to put my RAM back in.
Zak

[Zak Mussig]

Ernie,
Thanks for the quick reply. I thought the 2 gig limit had to do with some 3rd party piece of software or hardware. You couldn’t export anything using your Mac Pro until you went down to 2 gigs of RAM? I ask because I’ve been turning out MPEG 2s like crazy until this project. Other sequences from this same project have exported just fine in the past. I was only doing these again because 3 didn’t work the first time.

Thanks for your help, just trying to figure this out.
Zak

[Zak Mussig]

FCP 5.1.2 uses the Graphics card to accelerate FX Plug effects now that they’re supported. The reason FCP will run on an old G4 but not a mini because of their respective graphics capabilities is because, I believe, FCP requires an AGP (or PCIe) graphics card. The G4 has it and the mini doesn’t.

Zak

[Zak Mussig]

This is probably the technique that the link posted above uses, but if the color is unique in your frame ( there isn’t red all over the place) you can do this with the 3-way color corrector. Limit the effect by sampling a middle value of your color (in this case red) and then adjust the color saturation and luminosity controls while looking at the matte view. When you have a good matte, go back to final view, and de-saturate your image all the way. Your red should be b & w. The last step is to check the invert mask checkbox. Now nothing will have color except your red.

This is the 1 filter way to do this… depending on your footage and experience, mattes may give you a better result.

Hope that helps,
Zak

[Zak Mussig]

Walter,
FCP can’t display HDV externally. It’s a concession they made to allow for real-time editing of the long-GOP format.

iMan,
Go with the Kona. It will allow you to output your HDV footage to a monitor (I believe it even offers hardware acceleration for HDV). Even though you’ve captured natively over firewire this time, a Kona will give you other workflow options such as capturing to DVCPro HD. Beyond being an i-frame codec, DVCPro HD has a 4:2:2 color space.

Hope that helps,
Zak