NLE Mac / Final Cut questions from 2004

Rob Lohman · April 12th, 2004, 07:08 AM

My first suspect would be incompatible media. Please take a look
at the following site as well.

Kevin Burnfield · April 12th, 2004, 10:59 AM

the article that Travis mentions at Ken Stone's site is written by the person who wrote the CC section for the massive Apple FCP4 Advanced Editing and Finishing book... which he mentions in the end of the article and is WELL worth the price.

Graeme Nattress · April 12th, 2004, 12:02 PM

My G Levels in Set 1 www.nattress.com will do the s shaped curves you require. I also incorporated the code into Film Effects, which as the name implies does this and a whole lot more.

Graeme

Joe Gioielli · April 12th, 2004, 12:48 PM

Dear Rob,
Thanks, I'd begun to lose hope. I'll see what versions of OS amd Idvd I'm running.

If I understood the post correctly, the person upgraded the OS and than it stopped working, so he went back to the old version and it worked.

FWIT I'm running and AO6 and it worked fine with imovie.

It looks like I've go some digging ahead.

Thanks for giving me something to go on.

I'll post if I make progress.

Joe

Kevin Kimmell · April 13th, 2004, 08:53 AM

Hi... me again.

My partner is a MACette and I'm a PC person so I'm wondering if there's a longer term solution to our compatibility issues.

Can any of you MAC-ites out there confirm what file systems OSX can read? My firewire drive is formatted to NTFS and I thought I read that OSX MACs can READ but not WRITE to NTFS.

So I can convert it to FAT32 for READ and WRITE but then I'm going to get hit with the 2Gig file size limit.

Does this all sound correct?

Thanks,
Kevin

Gary Chavez · April 13th, 2004, 08:59 AM

ok, my uncle is a human factors research scientist for an auto maker.
his team used a static dash mounted lipstick cam to record the eye movements of subjects in a vehicle.

hundreds of subjects, 4 hour tests.

as you can imagine, they reeled at the thought of collecting and archiving all that tape. the purpose of the video is..get this.. to plot eye movement by a assigning a numeric value to the parameters set for each different eye position. this is done manually, frame by frame. those value are then charted on a graph that corresponds with the vehicle behavior at the exact same point in time. so actually the video is just a means to an end. after humans, yes humans, (students really) evaluate each test frame by frame to assign the values.

they recorded direct to a hard drive, bypassing the tape problem. as they recorded/digitized video it was encoded to MPEG 2. (no audio needed.)
in order to sync the eye movement with the vehicle behavior, they sync all vehicle behavior to 30 seconds a frame.

I have no idea what he was talking about at this point as to how they did that...something about recording tire movement at 30Khz...

Here comes the question-

they have discovered that MPEG 2 does not necessarily render 30 frames a second. not rendering each frame if the background does not change.
and it doesn't due to the nature of the study.

Is there any way to recode the video from an MPEG back to raw 1s & 0s so that they may re-encode in a more suitable format?

raw digital information is long gone. have only MPEGs at this point.

Jay Silver · April 13th, 2004, 12:47 PM

In AfterEffects, I often find it more effective to double the size of my footage when doing keying or other effects work and then reduce it by half afterward. The result is often better than had I attempted it at 100%.

My question: is it possible to use the interpolation power of RE:Fill or Twixtor (or is there some other product out there?) to smooth out that doubled footage? AfterEffects is really only turning one pixel into four but there should be some way to estimate curves and such to reduce the stairstepping, particularly with in-motion footage.

Handy Diagram

Any input?

-j

I apologize if this has come up before, I couldn't find it.

Graeme Nattress · April 13th, 2004, 12:55 PM

After Effects uses bicubic interpolation, as does Photoshop. This is good, but not best.

The type of interpolation you want is content adaptive, I have an example here of some R&D code I'm working on which, although not currently perfect, does show you what will be possible soon:

http://www.nattress.com/scaling_test.jpg

The project I'm working on should eventually produce even better results that you're seeing in my early test, but as you can appreciate, it's not easy to do - or everyone would be doing it!!

Graeme

Jay Silver · April 13th, 2004, 01:13 PM

Cool stuff.

Would this "new project" be a part of Set 3? Are you developing with only FCP in mind, or do you forsee any AE functionality?

I'm going to try a couple of your free ones for FCP and see how they work for me. I can think of one suggestion right off the bat - a plug-in that will inpret the footage with the LAB colour model and allow separate blurring of the a & b channels to reduce the blockiness in DV footage.

Nice pics of Halifax, by the way!

-j

Graeme Nattress · April 13th, 2004, 01:23 PM

No, the new R&D project is a stand-alone app, utilising cocoa, quicktime and open-gl acceleration of my unique algorithms for image upscaling and sharpening. It will hopefull do a lot more than scale up video, but that's the major component of it.

As for your plugin request - check out G Nicer as part of Film Effects - it's an intelligent chroma upsampler and works wonders with 4:1:1 footage, producing excellent results. I'll include this technology as part of the stand alone app mentioned above.

BYW, there's no need to convert DV to LAB because it's YUV native, with U & V being the downsampled colours. I work in YUV space to do the chroma upsample and it works a lot better than a blur!

Yes, that was a great trip to Halifax - really enjoyed it! Nice city and great fun.

Graeme

Rob Lohman · April 13th, 2004, 01:47 PM

A little disclaimer: I don't have a Mac or have ever worked on
one (yeah yeah, I know). That link was basically the only thing
that came up when I did a google search on your problem.

On the PC different types of media can sometimes generate
burn errors. That's why I suggested trying a different brand.

Bill Furner · April 13th, 2004, 02:43 PM

I am trying to put in sound from my Mini Disk. Earlier it worked but now I can't get a complete sound, it stutters. Now whenever I turn on my mini disk I constantly get stuttering. It could be in Garage Band, FCP, SoundTrack etc. But can't get a flowing sound. I am working with a USB audio interface, it is the US 122- by Tascam. I phone up their tec support and they said that it might be that their interface is not compatible with the Dual G5, maybe less powered duals but not the Dual G5 2 gig like mine. Their not sure. Any suggestions would greatly be appreciated.

Bill

Rob Lohman · April 13th, 2004, 03:39 PM

MPEG2 was definitely the wrong choice since MPEG2 works on
storing the individual changes between frames instead of full
frames (yes it stores full frames every so often). So looking at
individual frames is very hard (as you / they've found out). It
might even be that some information is lost if the compression
was high enough.

The best way would be to convert the footage to some other
format like DV so you can access it easier. There might be some
other Mac codecs you could use as well. Since I'm not a Mac user
myself I cannot tell you much more then this I'm afraid. Sorry.

Jonathan Posch · April 14th, 2004, 09:29 AM

I'm currently running a Adobe premiere on a G4 400 with a 20 gig hard drive, when I save video in premiere, it tells me it has dropped frames, does this mean my Hard drive is'nt fast enough? plus I only have 6gig left, I think it's time to install a second HD dedicated to video, how do I do this? what do I need? is a 7200rpm fast enough or something faster?

Thanks for any help.

Jon Grimson · April 14th, 2004, 11:36 AM

On a typical project we get a mixed bag of .JPG, .TIFF files, 72dpi, 300dpi, you name it. Is there a standard file format and resolution to convert to that displays all the image quality for standard res DV projects. In many cases the large .TIFF files stall in the timeline, as well as causing noticeable moire patterns and bad jaggy edges. Anybody have a "rule of thumb" format, resolution that they convert import images to?? Thanks.

April 12th, 2004, 07:08 AM	#466
Rob Lohman RED Code Chef Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Holland Posts: 12,514	My first suspect would be incompatible media. Please take a look at the following site as well. __________________ Rob Lohman, visuar@iname.com DV Info Wrangler & RED Code Chef Join the DV Challenge \| Lady X Search DVinfo.net for quick answers \| Buy from the best: DVinfo.net sponsors

April 12th, 2004, 12:02 PM	#468
Graeme Nattress RED Problem Solver Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Ottawa, Canada Posts: 1,365	My G Levels in Set 1 www.nattress.com will do the s shaped curves you require. I also incorporated the code into Film Effects, which as the name implies does this and a whole lot more. Graeme __________________ www.nattress.com - filters for FCP

April 12th, 2004, 12:48 PM	#469
Joe Gioielli Regular Crew Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: New Port Richey, Fl Posts: 142	Dear Rob, Thanks, I'd begun to lose hope. I'll see what versions of OS amd Idvd I'm running. If I understood the post correctly, the person upgraded the OS and than it stopped working, so he went back to the old version and it worked. FWIT I'm running and AO6 and it worked fine with imovie. It looks like I've go some digging ahead. Thanks for giving me something to go on. I'll post if I make progress. Joe __________________ Why ask me? I thought you were in charge!

April 13th, 2004, 08:53 AM	#470
Kevin Kimmell Major Player Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Akron, OH Posts: 209	Filesystems on OSX Hi... me again. My partner is a MACette and I'm a PC person so I'm wondering if there's a longer term solution to our compatibility issues. Can any of you MAC-ites out there confirm what file systems OSX can read? My firewire drive is formatted to NTFS and I thought I read that OSX MACs can READ but not WRITE to NTFS. So I can convert it to FAT32 for READ and WRITE but then I'm going to get hit with the 2Gig file size limit. Does this all sound correct? Thanks, Kevin

April 13th, 2004, 08:59 AM	#471
Gary Chavez Major Player Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: San Antonio Posts: 355	got a doozie for yall (long) ok, my uncle is a human factors research scientist for an auto maker. his team used a static dash mounted lipstick cam to record the eye movements of subjects in a vehicle. hundreds of subjects, 4 hour tests. as you can imagine, they reeled at the thought of collecting and archiving all that tape. the purpose of the video is..get this.. to plot eye movement by a assigning a numeric value to the parameters set for each different eye position. this is done manually, frame by frame. those value are then charted on a graph that corresponds with the vehicle behavior at the exact same point in time. so actually the video is just a means to an end. after humans, yes humans, (students really) evaluate each test frame by frame to assign the values. they recorded direct to a hard drive, bypassing the tape problem. as they recorded/digitized video it was encoded to MPEG 2. (no audio needed.) in order to sync the eye movement with the vehicle behavior, they sync all vehicle behavior to 30 seconds a frame. I have no idea what he was talking about at this point as to how they did that...something about recording tire movement at 30Khz... Here comes the question- they have discovered that MPEG 2 does not necessarily render 30 frames a second. not rendering each frame if the background does not change. and it doesn't due to the nature of the study. Is there any way to recode the video from an MPEG back to raw 1s & 0s so that they may re-encode in a more suitable format? raw digital information is long gone. have only MPEGs at this point.

April 12th, 2004, 10:59 AM	#467
Kevin Burnfield Major Player Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Princeton, NJ Posts: 363	the article that Travis mentions at Ken Stone's site is written by the person who wrote the CC section for the massive Apple FCP4 Advanced Editing and Finishing book... which he mentions in the end of the article and is WELL worth the price.

April 13th, 2004, 12:47 PM	#472
Jay Silver Regular Crew Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada Posts: 112	Doubling and smoothing footage In AfterEffects, I often find it more effective to double the size of my footage when doing keying or other effects work and then reduce it by half afterward. The result is often better than had I attempted it at 100%. My question: is it possible to use the interpolation power of RE:Fill or Twixtor (or is there some other product out there?) to smooth out that doubled footage? AfterEffects is really only turning one pixel into four but there should be some way to estimate curves and such to reduce the stairstepping, particularly with in-motion footage. Handy Diagram Any input? -j I apologize if this has come up before, I couldn't find it.

April 13th, 2004, 12:55 PM	#473
Graeme Nattress RED Problem Solver Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Ottawa, Canada Posts: 1,365	After Effects uses bicubic interpolation, as does Photoshop. This is good, but not best. The type of interpolation you want is content adaptive, I have an example here of some R&D code I'm working on which, although not currently perfect, does show you what will be possible soon: http://www.nattress.com/scaling_test.jpg The project I'm working on should eventually produce even better results that you're seeing in my early test, but as you can appreciate, it's not easy to do - or everyone would be doing it!! Graeme __________________ www.nattress.com - filters for FCP

April 13th, 2004, 01:13 PM	#474
Jay Silver Regular Crew Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada Posts: 112	Cool stuff. Would this "new project" be a part of Set 3? Are you developing with only FCP in mind, or do you forsee any AE functionality? I'm going to try a couple of your free ones for FCP and see how they work for me. I can think of one suggestion right off the bat - a plug-in that will inpret the footage with the LAB colour model and allow separate blurring of the a & b channels to reduce the blockiness in DV footage. Nice pics of Halifax, by the way! -j

April 13th, 2004, 01:23 PM	#475
Graeme Nattress RED Problem Solver Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Ottawa, Canada Posts: 1,365	No, the new R&D project is a stand-alone app, utilising cocoa, quicktime and open-gl acceleration of my unique algorithms for image upscaling and sharpening. It will hopefull do a lot more than scale up video, but that's the major component of it. As for your plugin request - check out G Nicer as part of Film Effects - it's an intelligent chroma upsampler and works wonders with 4:1:1 footage, producing excellent results. I'll include this technology as part of the stand alone app mentioned above. BYW, there's no need to convert DV to LAB because it's YUV native, with U & V being the downsampled colours. I work in YUV space to do the chroma upsample and it works a lot better than a blur! Yes, that was a great trip to Halifax - really enjoyed it! Nice city and great fun. Graeme __________________ www.nattress.com - filters for FCP

April 13th, 2004, 01:47 PM	#476
Rob Lohman RED Code Chef Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Holland Posts: 12,514	A little disclaimer: I don't have a Mac or have ever worked on one (yeah yeah, I know). That link was basically the only thing that came up when I did a google search on your problem. On the PC different types of media can sometimes generate burn errors. That's why I suggested trying a different brand. __________________ Rob Lohman, visuar@iname.com DV Info Wrangler & RED Code Chef Join the DV Challenge \| Lady X Search DVinfo.net for quick answers \| Buy from the best: DVinfo.net sponsors

April 13th, 2004, 02:43 PM	#477
Bill Furner Regular Crew Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Calif Posts: 46	Stuttering sound problem with my G5 2 dual I am trying to put in sound from my Mini Disk. Earlier it worked but now I can't get a complete sound, it stutters. Now whenever I turn on my mini disk I constantly get stuttering. It could be in Garage Band, FCP, SoundTrack etc. But can't get a flowing sound. I am working with a USB audio interface, it is the US 122- by Tascam. I phone up their tec support and they said that it might be that their interface is not compatible with the Dual G5, maybe less powered duals but not the Dual G5 2 gig like mine. Their not sure. Any suggestions would greatly be appreciated. Bill

April 13th, 2004, 03:39 PM	#478
Rob Lohman RED Code Chef Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Holland Posts: 12,514	MPEG2 was definitely the wrong choice since MPEG2 works on storing the individual changes between frames instead of full frames (yes it stores full frames every so often). So looking at individual frames is very hard (as you / they've found out). It might even be that some information is lost if the compression was high enough. The best way would be to convert the footage to some other format like DV so you can access it easier. There might be some other Mac codecs you could use as well. Since I'm not a Mac user myself I cannot tell you much more then this I'm afraid. Sorry. __________________ Rob Lohman, visuar@iname.com DV Info Wrangler & RED Code Chef Join the DV Challenge \| Lady X Search DVinfo.net for quick answers \| Buy from the best: DVinfo.net sponsors

April 14th, 2004, 09:29 AM	#479
Jonathan Posch New Boot Join Date: Apr 2004 Location: England Posts: 12	New HD for a G4 I'm currently running a Adobe premiere on a G4 400 with a 20 gig hard drive, when I save video in premiere, it tells me it has dropped frames, does this mean my Hard drive is'nt fast enough? plus I only have 6gig left, I think it's time to install a second HD dedicated to video, how do I do this? what do I need? is a 7200rpm fast enough or something faster? Thanks for any help.

April 14th, 2004, 11:36 AM	#480
Jon Grimson Regular Crew Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: Nashville, TN Posts: 30	static image import problems On a typical project we get a mixed bag of .JPG, .TIFF files, 72dpi, 300dpi, you name it. Is there a standard file format and resolution to convert to that displays all the image quality for standard res DV projects. In many cases the large .TIFF files stall in the timeline, as well as causing noticeable moire patterns and bad jaggy edges. Anybody have a "rule of thumb" format, resolution that they convert import images to?? Thanks.