NLE Mac / Final Cut questions from 2004

[Peter Wiley]

What would be the proper FCP HD import and sequence settings for 16:9 footage shot on an XL2? Something I am doing does not seem quite right.

[Nicholi Brossia]

A friend of mine recently got a new job and inherited a FCP editing station (dual 1 GHz G4, 80 & 120 GB drives, 1 GB RAM). The previous user was VERY disorganized and the computer is an absolute mess. Unfortunately, some of the data on both drives is required for future projects, and we have been working on making something useful out of it.

Both drives (80 GB system drive, 120 GB video capture drive) were filled to the max, rendering the computer unusable. In order to preserve the old info and free up space for new projects, we used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the system and video disks to a new external 250GB drive, then erased both internal drives and reinstalled OSX Panther. So far everything is good to go and the external drive is bootable.

After getting Panther installed and updated, it was time to install FCP HD (all programs are 100% legal). When he got the computer a couple months ago, it was still running FCP3 so he purchased the full upgrade to HD. The upgrade works fine on the original drive (now the external) but the new FCP installation will not open, showing an error message when trying to start the program. The strange part is that LiveType and the others work fine.

When installing the new FCP, we just used the upgrade disks without having the old FCP3 installed on that drive. Is FCP3 required to install the upgrade even though we entered both the serial numbers (3 & 4) when prompted? Could this be a security function?

Fortunately, he doesn't have any big projects coming up this week and can utilize the bootable external drive for the time being. Unfortunately, we're at a standstill. If anyone has suggestions at solving this, they would be very appreciated.

[Stephen Schleicher]

You say you did a clean install and then updated the OS X software?

If you updated the software to OS 10.3.5, then you are going to have problems. Do a clean install of OS X 10.3.2 (minumum) THEN install FCPHD, then do an update to 10.3.4.

I went through this same problem a few weeks ago. There is something about memory bindings with 10.3.5 that conflict with FCPHD memory bindings.

Hope that helps

Cheers

[Yohann Kouam]

hey,

i'm about to move to spain and i was wondering how i could travel with my computer. anyone got any tips to do it safely?

peace

[Mark Sloan]

I'm assuming you mean that you just want to take your G4 tower with you on the plane? I'm also assuming you mean a tower, not a G4 laptop.

Is this right? Or do you just want to know the easiest way to ship it?

[Roman Dirge]

I never even thought to try that. Thanks bunches.

[Yohann Kouam]

yeah i wanna take the g4 tower in the plane. shipping a computer twice might cost me like 300 euros so i can 4get that. any tips? people say putting in a box with foam will do it but the company i'm flying with(iberia) doesn't have a glorious reputation on the way they treat the luggage...

[Nicholi Brossia]

Thanks Stephen,
I had a feeling 10.3.5 might be the problem, but was still concerned about what was going on. After browsing through the Apple Support discussions, it seems that this is a fairly common problem, although I didn't read any real solutions. I'm going to take your advice and see how that goes.

Thanks again.

[Stephen Schleicher]

There was something posted in the Knowledge base the other day that might solve the problem, but it requires you go into the unix app and type a few lines of commands. Not sure I am willing to do that. Would rather wait for a fix in 10.3.6.

If you are daring enough, you might try it, but if you do it wrong, you'll have to rebuild your computer from scratch again anyway.

Since you are just now beginning to use this new system, might as well reinstall 10.3.2, repair permissions, install QuickTime, then update it to 6.5, then FCPHD, LiveType, SoundTrack, etc. Then do the update for FCPHD (includes update to livetype and cinematools), then do the other system updates to 10.3.4.

If you need to find 10.3.2 - 10.3.4, do a quick search on the apple site. You can still download them.

Cheers

[Stephen Schleicher]

Me am do dumb things to sometimes.

One thing that MIGHT help is to make sure that the Photoshop layer with your text is set to best quality in the Timeline. That would be the little slash mark.

Scaling down "generally" doesn't much with the quality of the text, unless of course you are using really thin text like a seriff font.

An alternative would be to use Illustrator to create your text. That way you can scale them to anysize in After Effects since you are dealing with Vector information.

Out of curiousity, what size is your original Pshop file (720x480ish)? You might want to use a larger canvas size to create your title and then scale down. in this case DPI has nothing or should have nothing to do with scaling down. Only when scaling up - or so my experience has shown.

Hope that helps

cheers

[Stylianos Moschapidakis]

I am about to purchase a used iMac G3 to use it as my editing back-up. I have found a few good deals out there but none of these computers come with the original restore CDs. Does anyone know if there is place where I can purchase the restore CDs for, say, the iMac 600MHz Graphite? Do you think that the restore CDs that came with my eMac will work with the iMac, if needed?

Thank you.

[Nicholi Brossia]

I've considered playing around in the unix command line for other problems/fixes/adjustments, but always decided against it out of fear of screwing something up. I guess its really not such a big deal when, like you said, it can just be reloaded, but I'll still pass for now.

I'd planned on heading up to his office and getting everything lined out today, but can't seem to get ahold of him yet. Once everything is said and done, I'll post the results and how they were achieved.

[Tom Aellis]

Good Morning.

I own FCP Pro and am just now learning to shoot HD with my JVC 10u.

Should I puchase the FCP HD s/w or the Lumiere plug in?

Thanks for any advice.
Tom

[Steve Mims]

I have a dual processor G5.

When I view 'all frames' from the timeline out to my external Sony deck FCP crashes. If I view the same timeline footage on the desktop (without using an external firewire connected deck) FCP does not crash.

I did a test with iMovie and the timeline won't play through to the deck either.

So I think I have some firewire issue. (I've tried both the front and rear firewire ports, by the way...and other firewire devices like hard drives work fine via the ports.)

Thanks in advance for any advice about this.

Steve

[Christopher C. Murphy]

Without the FCP HD software the Lumiere HD app is pretty useless on a Mac. You want to get both, and FYI they just released a new updated version today. It's a good time to buy it...

Murph