NLE Mac / Final Cut questions from 2003

[Glenn Chan]

Is there a mistmatch between settings? The AIFF should usually be 48khz to match DV footage (if the DV footage was shot in 16bit, which it should have been).

[Michael Botkin]

I'm using a buddies iMac to edit a wedding video I shot a few weeks ago with a GL2. I'm a PC guy with Premiere and Vegas, but I learned editing on Final Cut Pro 1 back in the day (really a few years ago) so I thought I'd try out this Final Cut Pro Express. The program seems very powerful for its low price. My only problem i've run into is when I am playing my capture tape I see the audio levels move up and down in FCPE, but no sound comes from the speakers. Now if I capture video, then play it, sound is fine. Any idea what the problem is? I went into the MIDI settings and the GL2 did not show up as a device for pass through audio. I'm trying to decide whether to switch to a G5 with Final Cut Pro for all my editing, and small gripes like these make me want to stick with what I know. Any ideas appreciated as usual. Thanks guys/gals..

Michael Botkin

[Marco Leavitt]

I figured it was something like that! I think I was doing it at 44khz. Thanks a lot!

[Glenn Chan]

http://www.dvdrhelp.com/autorun.htm
that should give you some information on making an autorun CD.

MPEG1 is about VHS quality. It's blurrier than VHS when played on a TV. 30-40 minutes of video should take up slightly more than half of the CD's available space. You could put 2 versions of your movie onto the CD. A divX or real player 9 version should give you near DVD quality (you'd have to fiddle around with settings to get the very best quality). More advanced users can figure out how to play the higher quality version. sorenson3 might give you quality close to divX or RP9. It may not be worth the time doing that though (it depends how picky your audience is about quality and and it might confuse people).

You can also make a VCD (encoded in MPEG1) that plays on nearly all standard DVD players. I think this might be the best choice, since you can make it autorun on computers too (haven't tried this, although I wish I did when I made my own VCDs for distribution). Having done a VCD myself, it was a pain to do (duplicated the CDs using the school's computer lab full of CD burners and did labels myself too). It's a learning experience though.

When encoding do small chunks first to get your settings right and to see the kind of quality you are getting. Encoding can take about a day to finish for 1 hour on a DP500 G4. Use TMPGENC on the PC side if you are looking for the best quality. You can get a free demo of that. You can emulate it if you need to. VCD making help can be found at vcdhelp.com (which is now dvdrhelp.com)

[Glenn Chan]

Go into device control or capture settings and turn speakers on. You will hear sound through computer speakers when it is capturing.

If you captured and you aren't hearing sound it's because FCE/FCP is playing sound out through firewire into your camera. Disable it by going into the settings and changing the external video settings.

The G5 is extreme droolage, and Final Cut Pro is better than Adobe Premiere in my opinion. Premiere has some quirks that are really annoying, such as allowing you to lose sync.

[Michael Botkin]

I may be dumb, but I don't see any audio settings in the FCE capture settings box. The only thing I see in FCE is the setup of the material being imported, ie: DV NTSC FW 48khz etc. I don't see anything to "turn speakers on". I get audio after I capture the clip fromt he speakers fine, just not during capture preview.

[Glenn Chan]

DOH! Final Cut Express is not Final Cut Pro. The developers took out some of the settings menus to make things easier. If you want to hear sound open up your camera's LCD screen or hook up headphones/speakers to your camera.

[Jeff Price]

DVD Studio Pro 2 is apparently shipping. I have yet to see any comments/bugs on it. There are some screen shots at various places.

[Jeremy Martin]

ive recently bought an XL1 and since im finding i want/need more and more equipment. but there a bunch of questions i need answered to determine what i really need and what is a pipedream at this point.

please forgive my ignorance:

1: first thing i need to get is a new monitor. i will also be using a G5 with it. so im wondering what kind of video card/capture card i need in order to use it properly with FCP and after effects and the like.

i was looking at this one:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=productlist&A=details&Q=&sku=252972&is=REG

it seems to have a nice resolution though its kind of big. which i dont mind.

here at work in the production department they have a firewire adapter for their monitor but that seems like it would be quite expensive and unecessary?

so what do i need to make that monitor work like in the production studios with a G5? pci video card or some kind of adapter?

also does the connection on the production monitor make a difference in viewing quality? like bnc vs. s-video or composite?

2: what can i get to capture at the highest quality possible. i want to make sure that on my machine it looks the same as it does on the monitor when reviewing the tape. so is firewire really good enough for this. or should i look into other better higher quality equipment to do this. would a card with s-video or composite or anything like that make any difference at all? also this ties in with going from my machine back to DV tape or VHS or something like that. people have also said i should look into buying a deck. i wont be doing any offline tape to tape editing. it will always be on my machine. so do i really need this? will it make a difference in quality? and do i need a separate card to hook it up to my machine to even use it?

i have other questions but dont want to ramble on too much. thanks for any help anyone can give.

cheers.

[Ivan Hedley Enger]

I can hardly wait to get my hands on this piece of software. I believe it will help me make DVDs in a much easier way than before.

[Jake Russell]

It looks really nice:

http://www.creativemac.com/2003/08_aug/reviews/dvdsp2030818.htm

Jake

[Jake Russell]

If you can budget for it you should really look at the sorenson suite or Squeeze for Flash MX on it's own maybe.

http://www.sorenson.com

Jake

[Jake Russell]

Extensis Portfolio

http://www.extensis.com/portfolio/

Jake

[Glenn Chan]

You do not need a capture card as there is already a firewire port on your Mac. If you want to work in uncompressed then you will need addition hardware which will raise the cost of your system by several thousand. If you are going back to DV or VHS then you will not see better quality (in fact it will be a little bit worse).

Getting a deck will reduce wear and tear on your camera. It also rewinds faster, has various inputs and outputs, and some other features. It may be necessary depending on how much work you do (and if you batch capture a lot). A deck will also allow you to record onto full-sized DV tape (for stuff 2 hours or over).

To have the monitor work you can hook it up to your camera if it supports analog-digital passthrough. Otherwise you'd hook it up to you DV deck if you have one. Otherwise you would get a video card with S-video output or the analog-DV converter from Canopus. S-video is higher quality than composite.

[Jeff Price]

I have a question about DVD compression, especially that done by iDVD 2. I have a problem with greens, especially in stills. For example, a title screen done in photoshop and brought into iMovie and composited with footage looks fine in iMovie (and on the passthrough TV). However, when I burn it to DVD and play it back it has jitters - blocky areas that pulse

Other stills that have a lot of leaves do the same thing, especially if there is a lot of contrast between the green of the leaf and the dark shadows. It is especially bad on some rainforest shots.

I've observed this on multiple DVD players on multiple TVs and with several different DVD burns.

Is this a compression problem? Is there anything I can do to make it go away?

Thanks.