Output to After Effects and back to FCP
 

I've got a gig cutting together this project for a client... he's got a nice set-up with a high end G4 and he dished out the dollars for Magic Bullet as well.


here's the deal: I need to work on every single shot of the project. I need to color correct all of it and need to do an assortment of other things before I get to the Magic Bullet Look Suite.


I was asking around on some MB boards about some issues and was told it was best to CC in AE since I would be able to see how it effects the shot after applying MB and that makes sense to me.

The issue is that I've been told that my methodology for getting clips into and back out of AE isn't right.

(I'm pretty much doing exactly what this article says:
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage...en_fcp_ae.html
)

Now this article is a couple of years old and I know there has to be some people that are doing this on a regular basis and can give me the straight sh*t on this subject and I trust the people here more then many other boards I read.

Sooooo, if you output to AE and then back into FCP tell me what settings and workflow you use.

Thanks in advance!

OH, and he won't spend the money to get Automatic Duck so don't bother suggesting it.

FCP4, DVX100 and Timecode break repair
 

Greetings,

Has anyone out there used FCP4's new "create new clip at timecode break" feature.
It's an interesting addition and could be very helpful for those unexplained timecode breaks that pop up here and there.We will be testing this feature next week as we recently shot a project in 24P advanced on the DVX100 and some of the tapes are full of breaks between start/stops. They didn't occur when reviewing the footage or powering off, but just during a normal start/stop.
I'd be curious if anyone else is having this problem and has any ideas on what may be casuing it.

Cheers,

Paul

I have been exporting the footage out of FCP (& no audio) as a Anim quality Quicktime movie> In AE add the timeline to the render queue and then render (when you feel like a coffee) in AE lossless (as i often have some transparent parts in the footage) then import that back into a FCP bin.
Apparently you can also export as a FCP reference movie to save HDD space. Is this what you were asking?

plugin AE<->FCP
 

has anyone used the plugin to convert AE into FCP. Sounds handy but a bit expensive.
Takeshi

If you look at the article I reference they say to export as FCP movie... this way AE only works from the original captured files.


Exporting back they suggestyou use the MAKE MOVIE export with a variation on the LOSSLESS preset resetting the format to DV and LOWER FIRST.


This, I believe, is when you don't have layers like you are talking about.


I've read the reviews of Automatic Duck and it seems pretty cool, it does something like recreating your timeline in an AE composition. But I've never used it and at 300+ US$, doubt I will for a long time unless a client buys it and lets me play with it.

Thanks-I'll hit my Disk with Norton and see how it goes. I managed to get results by making some room on the drive but now I am getting crashes as soon as I try to render or even when I open up a projetct sometimes. It's all very strange!

Need Mac help please!
 

I'll admit it. I've only been using a Mac since December and really have no idea about how it works.

It's a power mac. 2 120gig drives. I had both on my desktop. I clicked on my video drive to do a get info thing to see if I had enough room to capture some stuff a friend wanted me to work on. I've got a few projects going and wasn't sure if there was enough space left. I accidentally hit eject instead. Now it's gone and I have no idea how to get it back. I didn't delete the drive right? How do I acces the files that are on there. Please help...anyone? I'm running 10.2.2

Just restart you computer and it will remount all your drives that are attached.

It sounds like you're still over 80% capacity on your drive. Optimum performance is obtained by capturing to a separate physical drive (not a partition of the main drive). It is not uncommon to have crashes or freezes, etc when capturing to the system drive.

converting NTSC to PAL via quicktime?
 

I have a NTSC project in FCP and I need to burn it on PAL for DVD... Ok, so I understand I can do this from FCP into quicktime, then to iDVD... what settings should I use on my quicktime. 25fps, right? what about the audio? 48? Then do I just drag it to iDVD and go from there?
Thanks guys and gals, you rock!
-Kyle

Thanks -- That's what I ended up doing. I wasn't sure what it would do, but I figured it couldn't get worse.

Kyle, is it an important paying project or some personal stuff where resolution isn't super critical? IF it's a paying/distrubition job then I would have it converted professionally as going from NTSC to PAL there is a resolution difference of nearly 100 lines. Many people have said that footage that originated on NTSC and then "upconverted" so to speak to PAL looks very soft and washed out. There is also the problem of what to do with the extra 5fps, as they are simply discarded by some software conversion functions the footage can appear jittery, especially in fast motion sequences.

Most, if not all, PAL DVD players can play NTSC DVD's. You may be OK with regular NTSC. But, like Adrian suggests, if it is a paying client get the conversion done professionally. Quicktime conversions are only fair quality, in my opinion.

Thanks guys,
Yes, this is a paying client, but they ordered 4 DVD's of their wedding. They didn't say anything about NTSC or PAL. The Brides parents live in India, so I thought I'd give them a PAL version in addition to the NTSC version. Mostly as an experiment to see if I could do it. If they want it convereted professionally, that's up to them. I'm not being paid to do it.
If the PAL version doesn't look good enough, the parents will have a NTSC version as well.

Mac Fonts
 

I need to purchase a new font to add to a project I'm editing, and one thing I've never understood is the difference between TrueType and PostScript fonts. I looked through my current system font folder and it looks like all of them are TT.

What's the difference? Are PostScript fonts okay to use?