Various questions FCP3

[Jeff Donald]

Make sure sleep is set to never, hard drive spin down is unchecked. Make sure the get time from internet is unchecked. It wouldn't hurt to have 1 GB of ram. I consider 512mb as the bare minimum. Did you mix down the audio? How full is the drive. Make sure the drives are formatted HFS+.

[Michael Martin]

Hey Jeff,
yeah, made sure all sleeps/spin down/ "put hard drisk to sleep when possible" are all unchecked. The audio was/is again mixdown and I got a drop even earlier on my last attempt. (though at least it was less wasted time)

the 160 drive is at 20 gb right now, so perhaps clearing more off that might make a difference? It's pushing the 90% mark. Maybe defragging the drive? I just bought the drive in July and have done three small projects with it, so I wouldn't think to defrag it yet, but I might be wrong. I'm using 10.2 and the drives are HFS+.

I don't even have an internet connection on the mac (it's strictly for editing)

I rearranged the daisy chain having the camera in the back of the drive, reversing the order on the back of the g4, to no avail.

So from what your saying, I should be thinking of upgrading the ram and probably defrag?

Again thanks for any input on this.

[Jeff Donald]

Are you saying the drive is 90% full? That is probably your problem. Drives over 80% full may exhibit dropped frames and other undesirable effects. Defragging usually doesn't help a great deal. You really just need to free up some space. More ram will help in many areas, but drive space is your real issue.

[Mark Argerake]

I posted this on LAFCPUG but noone responded.

I've got a fairly old VHS tape I transfered to miniDV and then to my computer. Running FCP3. I need to take this and put it out to DVD. It's very old, grainy and all the colors are muted.

I'm trying to do some kind of color correction, but I don't seem to be effecting the media at all.

Wha's the best way to approach this and what wuold teh steps be. Also, any ideas why I'm not seeing any changes I make? I've changed contrast all teh way up and all teh way down and it doesn't seem to make an effect.

Any help would be great

[Jeff Donald]

Try to see if the color corrector works at all. Try using it on a normal clip and check for changes in contrast, brightness and saturation.

[Ted Springer]

I have noticed this when trying to adjust color on old 8mm footage (the tape format, not the film format). It just can't do much if there isn't much color information in the image to begin with. I ended up not color correcting any 8mm footage because it didn't make much, if any difference. When I started transferring Hi8 tape that were recorded with a better camera, then the color corrector started making tons of improvements. It all depends on your source.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Well you might not like the results but SOMETHING should be happening. You don't list your procedure. Are you doing all this?

1. Create a new sequence and open it
2. Drag the clip to the timeline
3. Open the effects tab in the browser and drag the color corrector filter on top of your clip ON THE TIMELINE
4. Double-click the clip on the timeline, it opens in the viewer.
5. Go to the color corrector tab, make some changes

For some reason, the changes don't always seem to show when you first do this in FCP3. So try moving the cursor to a new point on the timeline. Now you should see something change as you play with the controls in the color corrector.

You will need to render your sequence to see the final results. And the color corrected version will only be in that sequence you created. The original clip is not affected in FCP is a non-destructive editor.

[Rick Banfield]

I have read many letters on the apple users site, and many people are going nuts, and I think the common thread is FCP3 OR F, using OSX and the update to Quicktime 6.3. Seems Quicktime 6.3 has caused the problem.
There are users tearing their hair out, and getting nowhere. All ok in os9.
Can you offer any suggestions? I am running osx1.5 but others have same problem with later versions.
Regards
Rick

[Jeff Donald]

My suggestion is to update to a more current version of the operating system. I haven't used 10.1.5 in more than a year. But it was one of the more stable OS's to use with FCP.

One of the more common causes of problems is updating one software component and not others. So, if you're using QT 6.3 with an older version of FCP and OS X it is not uncommon to cause problems.

I've not heard of any major issues with QT 6.3 In fact Apple has a downgrade to QT 6.3 from 6.4 (which has caused some known issues) available. The QT 6.4 issue is a stuttering on playback.

[Boyd Ostroff]

I'm using QT 6.3 on MacOS 10.2.8 with FCP 3.0.4 and it sure seems rock solid to me. After working exclusively under MacOS 9.2 in FCP I made the switch to 10.2.8 in October and was a little scared of the unknown. But I must say it was an easy transition.

I agree with Jeff, you really need to get a newer version of OSX, and if you're still using FCP3 make sure you've downloaded the newest version (which I believe is still 3.0.4).

[Ted Moores]

Have a G4 400 sawtooth running FCP3 and OS9 w/1gig ram. Had it doing an overnight render, this morning when I checked it the screen was fozen. I could'nt get the program to quit so I restarted w/small button on the front. Light gray screen filled monitor w/verbage in upperleft corner. Verbage was somthing like -G3 firmware installed...type Mac-boot to start...type shutdown to shutdown.... Anyway I typed Mac-boot and about 1/2 of my desktop came up. The top of the screen was darkblue.
I completely shut of power to the G4 for a couple of minutes and powered back up. Gray screen came back up w/same verbage.

They was an odd sound coming from box, hard drive maybe?
(OS is on it's own drive.)

Every experiance anything like this?

Thanks, Ted

[Jeff Donald]

Do you have a repair disk like Disk Warrior or TechTool? If not I would go to a nearby Apple retailer (Apple Store or CompUSA) and purchase either. I'm not a big fan of Norton and would only use it as a last resort.

Boot from the install disk that comes with the software and run the repair program. This should fix any OS issues. If it's a hardware issue TechTool may also troubleshoot that as well. If the computer won't boot off the disc, hold down the C key at startup.

Have you installed any hardware or software recently? If so, disconnect the hardware, remove ram etc. Then try to boot your machine.

You could also try to install a copy of your OS on the other drive. Boot off your OS install disk and install on another drive (not just a different partition, a different physical drive). Then boot from the different drive and run basic Mac repair routines (Zap PRam, rebuild desktop, Apple Disk Utility). You still may need TechTool or Disk Warrior.

Errors on long renders can also indicate defective Ram. Try removing all ram except the stick that originally came with the computer and see if it boots.

[Boyd Ostroff]

This sounds a lot like what happened to me, but with a newer G4/1.25Ghz. It died while doing a backup of 100GB of DV files overnight to an external firewire drive.

>> They was an odd sound coming from box, hard drive maybe?

Same thing; it was my dead 80 GB primary internal drive (only a month old). I was able to boot off the install CD, but the drive was dead. Not having the time or patience to deal with warranty service in the middle of a big project, I picked up a new 80 GB drive, dropped it in, and was back up and running a few hours later.

[Ted Moores]

Jeff,Boyd
The problem was my startup drive(IBM deskstar 37 gb 5400rpm).
After 3 years it crapped out. I'd heard it make odd noise a couple of weeks ago but had ignored it. Did'nt know which of 4 drives it was anyway. Next time I run into this I'll check it out before I have complete disk failure. I partitioned a former media drive (60 gb deskstar) and have got 9.2.2 back on, will add Panther soon.

Should be back in buisiness soon, Thanks for the help.
Merry Holidays!

[Michiel van der Zeeuw]

hello

Is there a way (in FCP3) to give typewriter text an outline? Right now, I'm adding a drop shadow but I'd prefer to have a proper outline.

Many thanks in advance & best wishes for 2004 to everyone on this excellent message board!

Michiel