key clips
 

howdy all,

My tutor left about 4 hours ago teaching me how to key and matte video shot on a green wall. well I just went to open my project and all of the effects are gone!

Now starting from scratch, follwing his/my notes yet i keep getting the green wall behind my subject everytime i use the oval mask in Matte.

I am doing something backwards but i dont know what.
end result is backgorund as hoped for except behind subject, then background is green.

The tolarence level is also much different than when he was here. I get much less of my subject before the green in the screen becomes overwhelming.

any thoughts?

oh yeah, he brought over for me to borrow a really cool CD, "Secrets of Final Cut Pro 2."

However, it loads up on my OSX g-4 using classic OS9 fine except for the audio. scrambled. how can i fix that?

Best External Firewire Drive
 

Hey everyone--So I'm looking for recommendations on an external firewire drive. It should be Mac/PC compatible, which it seems most are. I'm looking for something in the 150GB to 250GB range. Durability/reliability is most important, and as long as it's fast enough to handle video I'll be happy. It's very difficult to find anything halfway conclusive on the web as to reliability etc. Anyone have some solid recommendations? Thanks!

Peter

A firewire drive is made up of an enclosure with an internal ATA drive.

Good internal drives are IBM deskstars and Western Digital Caviars with the 8MB buffer.

A good enclosure should be durable and have the oxford 911 bridge chipset.

Lacie makes firewire drives with the oxford chip and WD drives. Many people report sucess with them. Or you can build your own.

I have both the IBM Deskstar and a Western Digital Caviar 120s. They haven't failed me yet.

I believe the new Oxford 922 chip set is available. It will give you greater options for future expansion and compatibility..

In OS X open QuickTime, File>Open in New Player. Click on CD Icon, the files are usually in a folder labeled Video, click on files and they'll play in new player. This may be adjusted in the Info window, depends on the type of files you're watching.

Sounds like a problem with old tapes. Analog deteriorates over time and you may be having problems with the quality of the signal. But if one tape works fine and the other doesn't, and nothing in the setup changed, it points to the tape.

Monitors are very forgiving instruments. You can feed them signals way out of spec and they'll still display them OK. A capture device is much more picky and I have a feeling the tape is old and out of spec. The sync signal has deteriorated and the device doing the conversion is losing the phase of the color signal. Just a guess, a scope would be need to correctly analyze the signal and diagnose the problem.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=13937
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=12502

Thanks
i figuered out the key clip problem. I was keying the darkest part of the screen, leaving about 80% of the lighter green show thru.

man, this is a process.

I've got a nice set of Levels filters for FCP at www.nattress.com that allow you to see the curve you're generating. They even have a special mode for S-shaped curves.

Graeme

<<<-- Originally posted by Tim Tonner : Thanks for the info...however, will the VHS deck record with such a configuration? In other words, does the DV deck simply just have to be turned on, with outputs leading from it to the VHS deck, to get a successful VHS tape to record the project? I guess I'll give it a shot... -->>>

Tim let me first say, I wish I where in Stowe right now. SoCal is nice, but I miss New England seasons.

The DV deck should (hopefully) have a setting someplace for electronic passthrough. This allows it to be teh middleman between your computer and VHS deck. Also make sure the settings on the dv deck ar set for the proper input (dv) and output (ntsc video or whatever it is).

Thanks for the help guys. I will look into the LaCies.

Peter

Experience with LaCie Porsche Drives
 

Hi everyone--So I'm researching external firewire drive solutions and am leaning towards one of these drives:

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10096

The new LaCie drives designed by Porsche. Especially appealing is that they are supposedly very quiet, and of course they look great. Does anyone have any experience with LaCie drives, or these drives in particular? I noticed they only had a 2MB buffer, which seems pretty low, but they also run the Oford 911 chipset, which I hear is good. I'm trying to find out what harddrives are actually in the enclosures, I heard Western Digitals. Anyway, any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

Peter

AVI files?
 

Help out a Mac only guy! I have a lot of video edited in FCP and compressed with the QuickTime DV codec. What would I need to do to convert this to AVI files? We are using some presentation software called "Dataton Watchout" to drive a big DLP projector. This software runs on both Macs and PC's and can use Quicktime, but according to the user manual AVI files are preferred for the best DV output.