Zolotroph
Forum Replies Created
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Cinema Tools is designed expressly for this purpose. Have you tried it?
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I suspect the graphics card is the problem. I recently upgraded my Mac Pro from the stock nVidia card to the ATI X1900XT, and I can detail a particular case in which the newer card performs much better on a particular 2D task:
I am using two SGI 1600SW monitors (1600×1024) on a Mac Pro. When using Google Earth, I tried stretching the viewing window to span both monitors and use the maximum amount of screen real estate. Trying this with the stock NVidia card led to a very low frame rate, followed by a complete application freeze. The same action works just fine using the new ATI card.
I would suggest testing playback of your videos on a Mac Pro with a higher spec graphics card to see if it solves your problem.
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[Bob Zelin] “There ain’t no 42″ 1900×1200 monitor on the market yet – nor is there one for 50″ or 65”. But don’t worry – just wait until April , I am sure we will see LG and Samsung release them by NAB2007. “
Bob,
FYI- Panasonic and Pioneer are both now selling true 1080p plasma displays (1920×1080), starting at 50″.
Panasonic Professional 1080p plasmas:
Pioneer 1080p plasma:
Happy New Year!
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[Tom Matthies] “You are seeing both field one and field two at more or less the same time. Since, on a clip with a lot of motion, you subject had actually moved slightly in the frame from the time the camera scanned field one to the time it scanned field two, and both fields are being displayed, the “freeze frame” will jitter when it is paused.”
Bingo. What Tom said.
This is normal, and correct. Welcome to the wonderful world of interlaced video. For some real fun, try doing paint or roto work on interlaced video in a compositing application. Unless you deinterlace the video first and make separate frames from each field (effectively doubling the clip length), and then reinterlace the clip for output, your comps will look like crap.
-zolo
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[Peter McAuley] “Hopfully this doean’t mean that Apple won’t be shipping printed manuals with the app. That would suck. I hate printing out 1868 pages myself.
Peter McAuley “
Well, if the size of the box is any indication, I think you’ll have nothing to fear…
😀
-zolo
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“My brain hurts. Thanks for the help.
Richard”
Richard,
Your workflow looks perfect. Good luck on the DVDs!
-zolo
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“Zolotroph, glad to hear from someone else who’s taking advantage of this really cool workflow.”
Yeah, it’s worked out pretty well for me. I suppose the ultimate would be to capture the DV footage using a DVCAM deck with SDI out, capture to FCP with an SDI card and do all of the editing and effects in an uncompressed timeline. Check out the recent post in the Aja IO forum, titled “Component or SDI, which is better quality?” Apparently, the Sony DSR-1500 does chroma smoothing on 4:1:1 DV when outputting it via SDI. Interesting…
-zolo
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For the very best DVD quality, follow this workflow:
1. Upgrade to DVD Studio Pro, and ditch iDVD
2. Work in an uncompressed sequence, or a sequence using the Quicktime Animation (lossless) codec . While your initial DV footage won’t gain any quality by doing this, any further text, graphics, transitions, filters and effects you add will benefit from the lack of further DV compression.
3. Compress your finished project to MPEG2 using either Compressor (2-pass VBR compression) or a better software encoder like BitVice.
The upside to this method is superior quality DVDs. The downside is the cost of buying DVD Studio Pro, and the need for at least 2 hard drives striped together (RAID 0) in order to get realtime playback for editing in FCP.
-zolo
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For a real eye-opener, create a bright red circle on a grey or black background. Drop it into both an uncompressed and a DV timeline, render a 5-second clip of each, and compare the output. Next, take those two files and compress them to MPEG2. Shocking.
-zolo
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[Erik Lindahl] “Doing my offline in DV, converting the final edit to uncompressed and then do online in uncompressed 8- or 10-bit does give a better final result. “
I concur. While you can’t improve the initial DV footage by dropping it into an uncompressed timeline, any elements that are added to the project (graphics, titles, etc.), or any color correction or filtering that is performed on the material will definitely benefit from the lack of subsequent DV compression. When encoding MPEG2 video, uncompressed source material yeilds visibly better results than DV-compressed source material.
-zolo