It's not a "miracle fix", but it's definitely worth trying to throw it through Sonic Foundry's Noise Reduction plugin. If you have Sound Forge or Vegas (or any other editor that supports DirectX audio plugins) you can grab the demo off their site and try it out.

Basically it works by grabbing a "noise fingerprint" from a few samples of only the noise (no "real" sound, just background) and creates a very fine tuned FFT to apply to the whole clip. Again, no miracle promises, but it does go a long way towards brushing over mistakes with noise.

Edit: Oh whoops. This is the Mac forum. Unfortunately, Sonic Foundry products exist only in the Windows world. It's a good enough tool that you should at least take a clip from your shoot and hunt down someone's PC that you can try it on (heck, if you don't have any pc-enabled friends, I'd even give it a shot).

Jeff,
Peak is, indeed, a handy and powerful tool. But its filters won't scrub out motor noise, such as an air-conditioner, which actually consists of an orchestra of frequencies. I was faced with something similar recently (an idling bus motor). Even with multiple filter passes at different frequencies I could not adequately eliminate the noise. Worse, with each pass the desired sound degenerated.

I guess that's why sound engineers are so valuable for ensuring that what we hear is as good as what we see...often better, in fact.

<<<-- Originally posted by Nathan Gifford : Bad audio can only be fixed on Star Trek.
-->>>

Nathan,

That has got to be the funniest thing I have read on the net today! Man you need to make that part of your sig.

I have a titanium G4 laptop with FCP, and I'm planning on getting an external hard drive that's USB 2.0 but i can't decide if i should pay the extra 100 bucks to get 7200 rpm as compared to the 5600rpm HD.

I'm a pc guy so I buy internal drives. The price difference between 5400 and 7200 drives on internals is usually so small I just get the 7200. I have heard that 5400 will work but I have not used them. I usually get the fastest products I can and I do analog video as well. Daniel Berube is a big apple guy so you may want to post this question in NLE on the Mac discussion to get some better answers.

In the meantime try this link

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58636&SaveKCWindowURL=http%3A%2F%2Fkbase.info.apple.com%2Fcgi-bin%2FWebObjects%2Fkbase.woa%2Fwa%2FSaveKCToHomePage&searchMode=Expert&kbhost=kbase.info.apple.com&showButton=false&randomValue=100&showSurvey=false&sessionID=anonymous|156807880

Good luck

Your powerbook doesn't support USB 2.0. Get a firewire drive instead... it will connect fine but will only run at USB 1.0 speeds (12mbps)

cheers.

This is a quote from apple's website. I don't know if it is still accurate.

FireWire drives

These drives are not currently recommended for video capture or playback with Final Cut Pro. We are in the process of testing various FireWire drives as they come out. These drives are suitable for the backup and transport of broadcast quality QuickTime clips from one editing suite to another, and due to their ability to be hot-swapped, are particularly valuable for this task.

Hope I'm not off base with this quote but it is from apples site

Good luck

Which G4 do you have? The newer ones have better FireWire ports, improved buss speed. I know many PowerBook users that use the internal drive for capture. A high speed internal drive is now available also (60GB,5400rpm). External FireWire drives do work and are much faster than USB 1 (400-Mbps vs 12 Mbps). When picking a FireWire drive for external use people are torn between speed and size.

Ken Tanaka really likes the new Wiebetech enclosures and drives http://www.wiebetech.com/ You may want to look here http://www.barefeats.com/ for reviews of various drives for your Mac.

Jeff

You are right-
an air conditioner is very "broad-band", and would be next to impossible to take out. I have managed to remove frequency-specific sounds, or sounds that are on a narrow bandwith by using inverse-phasing. This is where you put a microphone on the source you want to remove (hum from an electrical device- usually 60 / 120/180 hertz) and another mic on your talent etc. Flip its phase and add it back to the mix to remove that sound. Works so-so.

Again, having someone who is concentrating on your sound for you, that you trust, and knows their stuff really makes a world of difference when you are directing and have a ton of other issues to tackle. I usually travel with an audio tech, and I never think about audio. Then I can light, frame, and direct talent.

Jeff Patnaude

If you drop a thin metal rod down one of the compressor vents, that'll usually put an air conditioner out of commission. Then you can shoot noise-free. (Morale: always carry thin metal rods...and tranquilizers for barking dogs) ;)

Just wanted to add my 2¢...probably doing a VO is best. Knock out the audio on the clip completely, go get some ambient noise that fits what you had in mind (you don't have to go back to the same place - you might get compressor noises again), and layer the dialogue over it.

Indeed, I -do- like Wiebetech drives. I've had a few weeks using one of their new SuperGB drives (120Gb) which is 7200rpm -and- powered strictly by the 6-pin Firewire connector (no power brick!). Works great with both my TiBook G4 as well as my Quicksilver G4. I also have a Wiebetech 40Gb MicroGB drive which is 5400rpm and also bus-powered (much smaller enclosure).

In my experience with these drives, a well as a 5400rpm 80Gb Maxtor drive (yeah, I have a hard drive fixation but I'm working on it) I can say that 5400rpm will do fine for FCP capture and editing. But 7200rpm drives really do make a notable difference in editing performance.

There are so many brands of Firewire drive enclosures today (Weibetech, Granite, Firewire Direct, et.al.) that it's a great time to be shopping for high-capacity Firewire drives. The sizes of these drives boggle my mind. Weibetech just announced their 200Gb Super DesktopGB drives this week. Kowabunga!

For the typical 2 to 2 1/2 hour community theater productions I do, I've been using full size DV tapes as a Master for later dubs to VHS. Those babies are expensive, and you can still get the occasional dropped frame during playback (a DV "feature").

Authoring via a Superdrive is not practical for the lengths that I need. Also, even making a 1-hour DVD takes way too much machine time for my purposes.

Has anyone had any experience with actual DVD recorders, such as the Panasonic or Toshiba? I'm not looking to author here, only to make an archive master. I saw a post somewhere that mentioned these, indicating they were selling for around $600 or so, but I can't locate it. Maybe I imagined it.

Gotta be a better way to make quality archive copies than using these $28 tapes.

Has anyone on a Mac used Cleaner 5 to make Windows Media files? So far, I've only made QuickTime files and have tinkered with it enough to get a pretty fair ouptut.

I was reading the Cleaner 5 manual today about creating Windows Media files and it's a bit confusing. I'm wondering if I'm making this more difficult than it really is. Is it simply a matter of changing the settings appropriately and uploading the file to the server (like QuickTime)? Or is a "pointer" file necessary?

Building the Windows Media file is really just a matter of telling Cleaner to build a wmf, which it can do in the same batch as your mov compression. (You may have to tweak the wmf settings a bit to get good results, though. WM seems to have a different perspective on imaging than Quicktime.) Getting your server to actually stream the file will require some server-side monkey business.

Thanks, Ken.

I went ahead and clicked the "WMV Medium Download" preset and gave it a try. Ack! What a lemon compared to QuickTime! Lots of pixelation, and the sound isn't as good. And what the heck are those huge black strips on each side? I know QT has the black strips too...but not as wide as Rhode Island! And don't EVEN get me started about the clunky control bar.

I'm sticking with QuickTime.

Yeah, that's the hitch. I've been away from that end of the business for a little while, so my knowledge may be dated. (Any absence longer than a month makes a person ancient.) But, if I recall correctly, a Windows 2000-based server does need to be configured to stream (with a facility called Windows Media Services, if I recall correctly). That is, a wmf file cannot stream without assistance.

Conversely, and wonderfully, Quicktime 5 introduced a self-contained streaming format whereby an mov file can be formatted to automatically stream to the viewer by itself with no server-side fiddling.

But the best way to check on the Windows front is to look through support.microsoft.com and look-up Windows Media in the knowledge base.

While the taste of the experience still coats your tongue you might be interested in this little tidbit from the news wires today.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=569&ncid=738&e=1&u=/nm/20021101/tc_nm/tech_microsoft_video_dc

Not to disparage Microsoft (my "partner" for 20+ yrs) but, really, speaking as a shareholder maybe they should just concede this front to Apple and move on to other fronts. Well, a billion here, a billion there...

Here's something you can try in FCP:

1) Open the captured audio in the viewer. Try to isolate a frame with only the air conditoiner noise.

2)Use the zoom tool to maximum zoom and count the number of cycles in one frame and multiply by thirty.

3)Apply hum remover filter to clip and enter number from 2) in the frequency slot.

4)Check off at least the first harmonic (experiment with harmonics and Q if it doesn't work right away)

I found that by entering 150 and the first harmonic it removes the XL1s motor noise from my quiet nature footage almost entirely without ruining the other sound. Maybe it will work for your problem and is free if you have FCP. Hope it pans out!

I'm burning dvd's off my superdrive. With the iDVD program included with the computer- its way simple. Just "drag and drop." Burning time is like- 20 minutes to more for longer lengths. Max time is 1 hour on the disk, and with DVD studio pro, you can go longer by adjusting compression.

DVD media is only a couple of bucks, and its lossless off of the computer.
Superdrives are about $400 (cheaper if someone has a lead?).

Good Luck.

Jeff Patnaude

my question is perhaps very simple, how do you output to a standard which toast recognizes as videocd and lets me burn it that way. I have fcp 3.0 and i dont know how to do it.

From FCP choose export>Quicktime. One of the options in Quicktime is Toast format VCD. Burn the file in Toast>Other>Video CD.

Jeff

This is a ruthlessly newbie question, and I know I can find the answer by research, but I'm hoping someone will take pity on me. What is the relationship between the DVD encoding and the density of a commercial DVD and that possible on a DVD-R? Which codec available in Quicktime comes the closest to the commercial standard? From the comments above about submitting content to production facilities on DVD-R it sounds as if the compatibility is there, but are there relative length restrictions?

Thanks in advance for any info.

Linc Kesler

What do people mean by "editing performance"? Rendering speed? Capture performance? ... As far as I know HD (>4000rpm)do not affect "editing performance". Processor speed , memory bandwidth and architecture, codec type, caches (L1 and L2) are the determining elements.

Editing performance is rendering, capture and more. FCP is scaleable, it will do
DV or uncompressed, even HD. So, depending on what your capturing a low performance (4000rpm) hard dive may, or may not be suitable. However, as we go up the scale the hard drive performance needs to improve. HD is usually done on FCP with SCSI RAID 0 and fiber optic controllers.

FCP has to render all its effects so the speed of the hard drive can have an impact there as well. I expect real time (RT) effects in future versions of FCP so the render times will become a mute point.

Some users report capture problems with the slower drives. It can be the result of many of the factors you list (memory, cache size, processor speed etc.). Many times it is the result of drives that need to be defragmented or are just too full. Faster drives sometimes can help out under those conditions.

Jeff

Agree if higher data rates (HD, video servers,vid on demand....) have to be in/outputted. Lots of the problems people get with "slow drives" in editing systems relate to non optimal tuning and hardware balancing of the system. Here http://www.wwug.com/forums/uleadmediastudio/index.htm is a site where rendering performance is being published. At the time it was created I discussed the HDD speed matter with Terry...turned out HDD speed not being relevant (and thus not included in the test results). Of course the test are not about FCP or MAC but the basics remain the same.

not in my fcp 3.0 it is. I cant find toast video cd under any of the options you have when exporting quiktime.

I take it your not using OS X 10.1.5 ? What version of QuickTime and Toast are you using?

Jeff

thats right Jeff,
i am using os9 quicktime 6.0.2 and toast 5
if that is the reason then that is a big bummer
have you got any solutions?

Go to my .mac iDisk http://homepage.mac.com/jtdonald/FileSharing5.htmland download a file called <<<make VCD on the mac.sit>>> Instructions are included and it will work on OS 9.

Jeff

Most commercial discs are very roughly 9 GB and DVD-R are roughly half that size. QuickTime does MPEG 2 multiplexing and is fairly fast but is not considered the best quality. It is a compromise of speed and quality. The very best (speed and quality) multiplexing is done via hardware. I believe Media 100 makes a board and so does Discret (see also Cleaner 6). Apple is rumored to be working on a board as well.

Jeff

I'm using Avid Xpress DV. I've been trying to output some footage to play as a Quicktime file. No matter what format for outputting that I choose, I get terrible edge tearing with motion on the output files. I don't see this in the composer window in XDV. Any suggestions?

On close inspection what's happening is that two out of every five frames it looks like the interlaced fields are not lined up with each other. So it goes: 3 good sharp frames, then 2 out of mesh frames, then 3 good sharp frames, the 2 out of mesh frames, etc.

Folks:

I have a project in FCP that I cannot get to send proper video out. My setup (FCP3.02, dual G4 with Jaguar, Panasonic DV1000 and Toshiba monitor) and all other projects done on it over the past several months work fine...it's just this project that won't fly. The video just jumps around on the monitor from the very first frame whenever I try to watch it just as external video or print to video. Parts of the sequence will sync up and run fine. Other parts will not; and I lose external audio whenever the video goes out of sync.

I have tried every setting related to external video I can find, but that doesn't seem to be it. It seems like the project file itself is corrupted somehow. A file output to FCP movie from this sequence runs fine in QT PLayer, but will not re-load into FCP as a single source (fails with a 'general error' message). I have tried cutting and pasting into a new sequence. I have suspected something wrong with some of the source files, although they all look fine and the sequence plays solid end-to-end within FCP itself. But I recaptured some of the sources anyway, to no avail. I tried moving sources around onto different drives in case it related to some kind of bus congestion problem, to no avail.

So... anyone out there bumped into this before?

thank you jeff. I downloaded the file but vcd jelly does not take any quiktime files it keeps telling me that they are a file of unknown type, anyway it will not process it. So i cant use the japanese program because that will also not accept quicktime files coming from fcp. However i got toast to accept my fcp files(it was simple actually)but my big files i output(550mb) because i want the best quality on cd are reduced by toast to a mere 26 mb. The quality is not exactly what i tought it was going to be.... i have got better vhs tapes then that!!
any suggestions about improving the quality?
thanks,

Can you please provide complete details about system, OS, drives, software versions etc.

Jeff

Have you updated to the latest version 3.5.1? It has many bug fixes.

Jeff

It's actually up to 3.5.3 now, which I do have. No one else on the Avid site is complaining about this, so that's why I suspect I'm doing something wrong. Any other ideas?

Jeff:

Hardware wise:
Mac G4 dual 1.25G
Two internal 120G ATA drives
One external 120G Firewire drive - Que QPS-525
Panasonic AG-DV1000 MiniDV deck

Software wise:
OS 10.2.1
FCP 3.0.2
QT 6.0.1

The sources are from two different cameras (Gl1 and a high-end Sony MiniDV consumer model) as well as the usual Photoshop, .wav and .aiff things. The video just flickers a few random squiggles until I stop the cursor on the time line, and then it shows as a still on the video monitor just fine. I tried to correlate the changeover between the unsynced gibberish and clean video with render/RT points but there doesn't seem to be and connection there.

Thanks for your interest.

Jeff:

After reading a few more threads on this forum, I went back and transferred every one of the 32 source clips to the second internal ATA drive, then shut the external firewire drive completely off, relinked everything to the new drive and re-rendered. And voila...this time it worked. Now the video is clean and print to video works fine. Could it have been a firewire bottleneck, or is this external firewire drive a snake in the grass? I've never had any problems with it working with OS 10, either on my G4 or platinum powerbook.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

It could be a couple of things. Try reformating the FireWire drive. If you've had it for a while it could be the wrong format. In the Utilities folder is a program called Disk Utility, run the Erase part and select Mac OS Extended and erase it. You might also try a new FireWire cable. Check the Que web site for any bugs with 10.2.1 and see if there are any patches to download. Do you have anything else on the drive? If so try to keep only FCP media on it. I seem to recall reading something about Que drives and FCP. I'm not 100% positive but I think there may be a problem with the drives and compatability with FCP. I'll dig a little and see what I can find.

Jeff

Oooo...

Apple today announced the new PowerBooks with 1Ghz G4 processors -and- internal SuperDrives (DVD/CD burners). New iBooks were also announced, as well as price reductions across the line (they -were- a bit pricey).

For more information go to:

http://www.apple.com/powerbook/

I have just cut my new showreel on imovie and exported it to my gl-2 with no problems.
The trouble started when I tried to dub the mini-dv tape information to VHS with my S/VHS deck.
Tried all of the combos of plugs and settings the GL-2 manual sets forth
and anything else I could think of with no luck. Hoping I am just missing some tid bit someone out there knows about and not have an incompatibility problem that cannot be solved...?!

What exactly is the nature of your problem? No footage being transferred? Footage looks bad? Etc...

Woohoo! More toys!

thanks for asking Ken. Basically I was getting no image and then blue screens with vague vague hints of the images on the reel. turns out my remote for the deck was low enough on batteries that when I thought I set it to L1, it did not do it and there is no way of setting this on this deck without the remote. anyway, got it working and it looks great. cheers!

Apple posted an update to the G4's SuperDrive firmware today. Apparently this provides a solution for using 4x media in the drive (previously a problem), as well a few other fixes.

The update is available through your System Preferences > Software Updates facility under OS-X. But I highly suggest reading about this update first to determine if you need it at:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86130

since the process cannot be undone.

I am looking to buy a portable hard drive for video, what is the best? I have had 2 Lacie drives crash on me after moving them in my car a few miles, and one was 2 days old!?!?! I need a RELIABLE portable drive. Any suggestions?

...is WeibeTech.

http://www.wiebetech.com/

I use both a 120Gb Super DesktopGB and a 40Gb MicroGB for FCP3 work and can say they've been excellent values and very reliable.

Of course maybe you should first check your car's suspension before investing more in Firewire drives. ;-)

...that is cold....

Thanks for the info

I've got the 800mhz powerbook, is it possible to buy the Superdrive and replace my current DVD/CD-R/RW with it. Or should I wait for a firewire DVD-R/RW?

Do you know how we can take video & audio from a DVD and use it in Final Cut Pro? This is not about stealing from Hollywood: Someone made a DVD of a business conference and one of the speakers at that conference wants us to excerpt their speech for use in another production. We can't seem to figure out how to get the DVD content into FCP!
Many thanks for your kind advice.
Scott Shuster
New York
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