NLE Mac / Final Cut questions from 2002

[John Locke]

Hey Jeff,

Thanks for the input. Adrian called me right after posting and informed me that Premiere includes the countdown as one of its plug-ins. You just drop it in the timeline. Interesting that FCP doesn't have that option, too.

I forgot to respond and say my query was solved (almost immediately!).

Thanks.

[Jeff Donald]

FCP has a generic countdown built in. I don't remember where it is. It might be part of the print to tape option.

PD150,

I'll try to find my count down clip. If I find it I'll post it on my iDisk. The count down I use now has my company logo as a background.

Jeff

[John Kaye]

Ooooooooh FCP has a generic countdown built in it! Goo dto know. And thanks for posting your countdown in advance Jeff:) Let us know where and when by posting a reply on here. Thanks :)

Here's a short DV film 5:05;15, that 3 buds and I did.
We scripted in 2hrs, did location scouting, blocking and shooting in 8hrs and I've got about 6hrs of editing in Final Cut Pro.
We used 3 cameras (VX2000) so we could shoot coverage at the same time and have the 3rd camera document "The making of".
We still need to add some narration and titles, but you should get the basic idea.

This short film shows the VX2000 in a variety of lighting conditions, and with different shutter speeds. Most of it's shot on a tripod, but there's some handheld work as well.
I think it shows the versatility of the VX2000 quite well.


http://homepage.mac.com/midwestmotorsport/iMovieTheater2.html

it's about 20mb, so it may take some time to download.

Let me know what you think.

- Chip

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Hey all,

I would love to avoid using totally uncompressed video and wonder if anyone has some advice to what lossless codec is good to use. Pref one without the need for dedicated HW. frameaccurate 25fps playback is not an requirement, i just need it to do final fixes and save some space.

/Henrik

[Jeff Donald]

The SMPTE countdown in FCP is under the print to tape option. Print to tape also has options for a slate, bars and tone, black trailer etc.

Jeff

[Jeff Donald]

There are lossless codecs, but how will you play it back? The animation codec is one of the best. File sizes are very large in comparison to DV, so you won't be saving any space.

Jeff

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Playback is not an issue. The workflow i have now is as follows:

* Edit in OfflineRT or DV (fast, and good playback).
* Recapture everything into a lossless environment, do final render from fcp. This means that i will have minimum loss from the source DV material.
* Bring it through AFX for any compositing or added effects and render out the "master" as lossless again. If im mastering to DVCAM then i can output the final DV here. Otherwise i...
* Take the lossless to a mastering environment and output to DigiBeta.

This way i have minimal loss of quality all through the process, something that is important if you do a lot of tweaking of the DV material. (Evident in my last project where i did some very harsh flashfades to white. =).

It is a little cumbersome but its basically the only way i can do maximum quality without investing in a more expensive system.

My main drawback here however is that the uncompressed format i use now is very very disk consuming. So a lossless compression would be ideal for me.

I'll give the Animation codec a shot.
/Henrik

I've seen in a lot of music videos how there is a sort of camera shake or jitter effect where everything seems to be shaking. I've seen this in rock videos where when someone jumps and hits the ground, everything shakes. Is this done in production or post? If in post, in FCP or after effects, is this effect possible, and how would you do it?

[Rik Sanchez]

I downloaded some free Eureka plugins for FCP, check out this webpage and I think the "Jiggler" filter is the one you are looking for.

http://www.digitalfilmtree.com/Eureka.html

I went to http://www.kenstone.net and looked around and found this link. I got the plugins from another site a long time ago, I think the dvcreators.com site

[Thomas Berg Petersen]

I am looking to buy my first Mac very soon. I am going to use it primarily to edit digital video.

Here is what I am looking at:

Dual 1.25GHz PowerPC G4
- 256K L2 cache & 2MB L3 cache/processor
- 167MHz System Bus
- 512MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM
- 120GB Ultra ATA drive
- SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW)
- ATI Radeon 9000 Pro
- 56K internal modem

Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 74 (17" CRT) - Black

My questions are:
- Is 512 MB RAM enough or should I add some more RAM?
- I know that you are using a lot of hard disk space when editing digital video, should I add one more hard disk?

Can a 'green' Mac novice install RAM and a Hard disk himself or should I get it pre-installed??

I really want a studio display, but I don't have the money for it right now, so I guess I will have to wait.

Thanks for your feed-back!
Thomas

Get a gig of RAM. It's worth it. Actually, get the base RAM and order extra RAM from http://www.crucial.com
RAM is literally the easiest thing on a computer to install. You turn it off, open up the chassis, stick the RAM in the RAM slot, close the chassis, and turn the computer on. Voila!

I think you ought to have enough HD space to hold you down for a while w/ 120 gigs. How often do you plan on importing footage? You get 4 minutes for every gig. You will use about 20 gigs on OS, applications, and some files. If you do a lot of graphics or audio work, that eats up space. Try and calculate about how much space you will have left dedicated to DV, then figure out whether that will be enough for a long period of time.

Have fun, that is one *hot* computer yr gettin' there.

[Barry Goyette]

I agree on the ram...check out ramseeker.com for daily pricing...ram is sold like a commodity on the net, and the price changes daily...apple's prices are about 4x what you'll find from a variety of dealers here. A gig will be plenty for FCP ( it doesn't see big changes after that....although photoshop will).

I'd recommend getting the extra drive now, as apple's price is decent on it, and there occasionally can be problems when adding them later. I think FCP would prefer you store your media on a drive other than the startup disk, and typically things like dvd encoding will work better and faster if your files are on another disk.

If you need to save some cash, step down to the dual 1gig and get the 17inch studio display...the price difference is huge for only a modest performance bump and the difference will just about pay for the monitor.

I believe you get 5 mins of DV per gig.

Barry

[Adrian Seah]

Hi again guys,

I've recently shot my short film and I'm in the process of editing it at the moment. However, I've come across a problem which I hope you guys can help me make some sense of... I've shot my footage in 12bit audio (4 channels) channel 1,2- built in mic, channel 3- via MA100 with my AT815b. I'm editing with FCP3, what I do is I capture the video and channels 1,2 in one pass, and channel 3 in another capture pass. I manually line up (using the timecode as reference) V1,A1,A2 and A3 on the timeline and nest it as a sequence.

This seems to be working so far but for a couple of my tapes, the 3rd channel of audio doesn't seem to sync with the video and A1,A2! I mean this is extra weird because the sync seems to 'drift'. At an earlier portion of the footage, A3 (via MA100, shotgun mic) seems to be a few frames 'early' and later on, it seems to be a few frames late! Which means that I can't just shift the whole track back or forth a few frames to line it up.

Now, what I'm wondering is if this is typical... I mean, is this a product of DV (with its non- locked audio, as opposed to DVCAM) or did something go wrong somewhere?

Also, is there anyway of fixing this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!

Adrian

[Rik Sanchez]

If you want to install your own drives then here's an article that's explains how.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=31292

Eventually you will out grow the drive you have and will have to add more. 120 gigs sounds like a lot but hopefully after a while you'll be filling up the drive with all the video you are shooting.

For more info on your mac, also check out

www.kenstone.net