NLE Mac / Final Cut questions from 2004

[Shawn Mielke]

It's a simple enough thing to do, I'm sure, but I just can't figure it out.

How do you get one HD to act as scratch disk (where all of the capturing material goes) instead of the other HD?
And isn't the second HD supposed to kick in and take on incoming video, etc, when the first HD is full? The second HD is recognized by the computer/OSX, it's even recognized as a scratch disk, and yet, this isn't happening...

I'm really wanting to put a very large project on just one HD.
There is a page or two in the FCE manual about this, but...I don't get it!!!

Thank you for help!

Shawn

[Les Wilson]

For FCP 4 HD:
Select System Settings from the Final Cut HD menu
Click Scratch Disks tab
In the Video Capture Column, uncheck the current disk
In the list of disks, check Set for the new scratch disk
Uncheck the Limit Capture Now To box

If it supports think the rollover operation, I'd expect it to go down the list from top to bottom. To add the 2nd drive as the capture rollover:
Click Set for the next disk (labelled <None Set>
specify the 2nd disk
Click Video Capture

[Joe Calalang]

While the 3 day course was $1299, I took the first day's class for only $300.

All I can say is that you guys who can run Motion are in for some fun fun fun! However, it's a RAM hogger and really needs a powerful video card! Our instructor had 2 gigs of RAM on a dual 2gHz G5 and depending on the particles and behaviors used, it brought the system down to as low as 5 frames per second. I wasn't sure what type of video card he had but I doubt he had more than 126 megs of RAM. He may have had only 64.

The Mac I had was a dual 1.8 gHz with 1gig of ram and 64 megs of video ram. It certainly affected our lessons coz Motion would sometimes just shut down.

Overall, this is going to be an excellent graphics tool that will compliment FCP and Photoshop. It's rather easy to use, IMO. I'm glad I took the one day course.

Sorry for the brief message with the lack of info. I'm still new to Macs and I'm supposed to be working. =8^)


PS - expect a lot of really over the top cable ads by next spring! 8^D

[Gary Chavez]

Upgraded to 4.5
lost all my fonts in the generator.
what to do?

[Richard DiBona]

Would you mind posting a brief overview of what you can do with Motion?

Thanks.

[Vic Owen]

Check out this excellent article -- it should be required reading before you do your first project.

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/ambitious_fcp_4_x.html

[David DKim]

I've been having this problem with luminance changes occuring in Final Cut Pro 3 when I import After Effects files with alpha channels.

Basically, I'm editing a talking heads piece with animated name slates on the bottom of the screen. I create the animated name slates in After Effects 5.5 and export as an animation file with alpha.

I bring in this exported file into final cut pro and overlay it on top of the edited footage. I then render the seqence and play it back on the monitor (SONY PVM 14M2U). When I hit the portions of the sequence with the alpha channel after effects overlay, the screen gets lighter. When it ends, the screen gets darker. Why is this luminance shift occuring? It doesn't happen on my computer monitor? The only thing I can think of is that it has something to do with the YUV/RGB difference but do not know how to solve it. I'm aware that After Effects works in the 0-255 RGB color space and that YUV is 35-235 equivalent. How do you resolve the 2? I've had to resort to overlaying transparent alpha over everything to prevent the luminance shift. I know it's probably not a good thing, but, I figured consistency was better than having all these luminance jumps throughout.

The footage that I am overlaying was captured through the Cinewave 3 Card from a SONY DSR-20 deck off DV CAM tapes.

I'm still using Final Cut Pro 3 with a G4 Dual 1.25 with Cinewave 3 card.

Any help would be appreciated and I'm sure somebody in this forum knows what to do.

Thanks...

[Joe Gioielli]

Worked Great! Thanks again Jeff, you came through again!

[David Bermejo]

WOW!!
My eMac will not handle that. Its only got like 384 mb ram!!!!

[Rob Lohman]

Is this after effects on the Mac as well or is this footage coming
from a PC? Since there is a gamma difference between PC's and
Mac's.

[Joe Calalang]

Originally posted by Richard DiBona : Would you mind posting a brief overview of what you can do with Motion?

Thanks.

You could animate layers of video or even 2D graphics.

Example at class :

We took a 2D design of a reel and placed it on the upper corner of the canvas. The canvas had an animated background of sun beams over a dark screen. On the lower third of the canvas, we created a film reel that had the title of a movie and its synopsis which we typed in.

Then we made the reel in the upper corner spin, we added some particles on the film reel to make it look reflective and made the film reel move from right to left.

That took no more than 10 minutes to do. Motion has a lot of self animated objects which you can alter in any way you want. It also has several dozens of templates like fire, water, light, clouds, ocean waves. It's truly amazing what you could do with Motion.

As I said, Motion will compliment FCP. Just remember though, technically, it will run on SOME G4 Powerbooks but it's truly built from the ground up for the higher end G5.

[Jonathan Lutz]

This happened on a dual 867MHz G4 with 1.5 GB DDR SDRAM.
I was using FCP HD.
Only other wildcard is the use of an external drive: LaCie 250GB FireWire 400/800.

Now I'm on a dual 1.8GHz G5 with 1.25 GB DDR SDRAM.
I'm switching over to WiebTech BayDocks (mirroring).

Thanks.

[David DKim]

No, everything is on a Mac based system.

[Gary Chavez]

bump

[Jeff Donald]

There is a setting in FCP to use Super White (255). I'm not at a computer with FCP at the moment, but it should be in the Audio/Video Settings>Sequence presets>Video Processing. You should find some options on how to render white and what color space to work in.