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Show all posts by userYour basic troubleshooting and discussion forum for all things Final Cut Pro X. If you are having issues with FCP 7 and below, post it in Cafe LA.
Re: re: ProRes 422, 422 HQ and 4444 vs. Uncompressed HD - 13 years agoOriginal comment removed. I was puzzled by the "8 Bit Source" graph in strypes' 27 June report. It shows a staircase where every sixth step has double height. That can't be right and doesn't reappear in the curves showing the 8-bit source accurately transcoded to 10-bit. So that 8-bit source graph must have undergone an unhappy scaling. The danger in graphical based technical argumby dcouzin - Café LA Re: re: ProRes 422, 422 HQ and 4444 vs. Uncompressed HD - 13 years agoWhy is ProRes 422 which actually compresses to a higher degree than DV25 so successful on 1920x1080 material? First I'd better explain the comparison with DV25. DV25PAL 50i is just 25 Mb/s but that is just for the 720x576 frame. DV25PAL 50i, adapted to the 1920x1080 frame, would need to be 25*5 = 125 Mb/s. And DV25PAL 50i yields 4:2:0 chroma subsampling. If we further adapted it to 4:2:2by dcouzin - Café LA Re: removing digital noise - 13 years agoTo my eyes, grafixjoe's example with Magic Bullet Denoiser has an artificial, over-crispened look. Denoiser depends heavily on contraposing softening with sharpening. Red Giant posts an excellent Denoiser tutorial. Tellingly, the tutorial is almostly completely about techniques applicable to a single frame. Innobits' Video Purifier is a completely different animal. Its anti-noise processingby dcouzin - Café LA Re: keeping super-whites - 13 years agostrypes, to your point that "a common complaint in video is having too much standards", practically speaking, an overabundance of standards means no standards. I think this is where digital video is heading and I think that software can be made agile enough to eek tolerable images out of files without doing it "right". I understand that your example of CMYY' space is ironicby dcouzin - Café LA Re: New Display Recommendations Please - 13 years agoYou speak of "real estate" but for FCP work the monitor's inch size is probably less important than its pixel count. The good 30" monitors have 2560x1600 pixels. Your graphics card can support two of these. I bought a Samsung SyncMaster 305T and wouldn't recommend it. The new one died within two years and the warranty replacement unit has a bad pixel and the lamp buzzes.by dcouzin - Café LA Re: removing digital noise - 13 years agoInnobits' Video Purifier does wonders to noisy video, especially when it must be compressed for DVD release, etc. But I find Purifier to have two limitations in its treatment of video. One limitation is that it clips Y' values at 235 in 8-bit (or at 940 in 10-bit). The other limitation is that it doesn't maintain 10-bit fine gradations. It's as if Purifier converts the 10-bit to 8-bit, does iby dcouzin - Café LA Re: keeping super-whites - 13 years agoThanks strypes. Compressor doesn't always clip Y' values above 235 (100 IRE). For example, when sending an 8-bit uncompressed 4:2:2 sequence from FCP to compressor, to become 8-bit uncompressed 4:2:2 again, Compressor will preserve the Y' values up to 254. If Compressor clips at Y'=235 when making mpeg2 or h.264 compressions maybe this is required in those codecs, or maybe not. I'll try to fiby dcouzin - Café LA keeping super-whites - 13 years agoShooting (1080p50) AVCHD with a Panasonic HDC-HS700 and then converting with ClipWrap to ProRes 422 yields levels up to about 109% according to FCP Waveform Monitor. So whether this is a high dynamic range camera or not, I've got super-whites to deal with. I can clip the high Y' values at 235 which will be ugly. I can linearly shrink the [16, 254] Y' range to the standard [16, 235] range -- FCby dcouzin - Café LA Re: Ideal specs for making a pencil animation for projection? - 15 years agoSure, this guy's animination might look best on a cellphone screen, or projected onto a fountain. My suggestions were for the case where line quality mattered. Dennis Couzin Berlin, Germanyby dcouzin - Café LA Re: Ideal specs for making a pencil animation for projection? - 15 years agoPDC, as an artist consider the following. Your 11x8? drawings have format 1.29:1. In video they'll be modified to one of two standard formats: 4:3 or 16:9. 4:3 is much closer to your paper format. If you cut off 1/8" along both long edges of your paper, that's 4:3. To use 16:9 requires radical recomposition of your artwork, or else black bars on the edges of the screen. 4:3 is generallby dcouzin - Café LA Re: bit rate again - 15 years agoThanks Jake Russell for the rich information. So the Premier users got the better software encoder from CinemaCraft. What does this say about the standing of FCP? Still it's good to know that CCESP2 exists. I did know of Digigami MPressionist. I need to do mpeg2 compression approximately once per year, so I can't realistically get either of these programs. Now to find a "high-end stuby dcouzin - DVD Studio Pro Re: bit rate again - 15 years agoThanks again strypes. I hadn't seen it and it seems very relevant. The hardware based CINEMA CRAFT Xtream Encoder, which provides the engine for the CCE-MP plugin, sounds great. It does something it calls Segment Re-Encoding (re-encoding just a segment you specify) which I think is essential. It's unclear whether the CCE-MP plugin offers this function. I don't see it in the CCE-MP User's Guiby dcouzin - DVD Studio Pro Re: FCP version compatibilities - 15 years agoThanks. I'll take Shane Ross's advice. (This is system changing week, while the "boss" is away.) Dennis Couzin Berlin, Germanyby dcouzin - Café LA Re: bit rate again - 15 years agoThanks strypes. Your diagnosis is plausible. Whatever bits are given to additional I-frames must come from somewhere, such as from color quality or resolution. The matter of player overload is different. Each I-frame, except in uncompressed formats, needs to be spatially decoded. Each non-I-frame, on the other hand, needs to be constructed from I-frames and some added data. I-frames certainby dcouzin - DVD Studio Pro FCP version compatibilities - 15 years agoSome versions of FCP, the first time they open projects created in earlier versions, say they need to modify the edit file. After the modification, the file can no longer be used by the earlier version. When I recently updated from v. 5.1.2 to v. 5.1.4, FCP 5.1.4 did not say it needed to modify the old FCP 5.1.2 edit files. (I assume this means it didn't modify them.) Then can I be sure thatby dcouzin - Café LA Re: sound frame lost to Compressor bug - 15 years agoGlad I included that parenthetical at the end of the original post. Thank you Scott Erickson. My latest reason for exporting using Compressor was to take advantage of its motion compensated deinterlacing. I think it's best to deinterlace before other format-changing operations. Concerning making 4:4:4 from 4:2:0 (or from 4:2:2 for that matter), it's interpolation and never perfect. But someby dcouzin - Café LA sound frame lost to Compressor bug - 15 years agoI'm using FCP 5.1.2 with Compressor 2, so this bug would need to be verified with later versions. Starting with a DV-PAL project in FCP, choose Export Using Compessor. In Compressor, choose Advanced Format Conversions and then choose, for example, DV-PAL. Submit. The output is a .mov file. Open it in QT and then open Movie Properties. Movie Properties shows that the soundtrack is one framby dcouzin - Café LA Re: Compressor's "best" deinterlacing - 15 years agoThanks Nick Meyers, for the Graeme Nattress tip, and your confirmation. What I meant by "every video that is projected, or played on a LCD, is deinterlaced" is that these devices would never output what a CRT outputs, with half the lines black at each instant. They could, but it would result in half-brightness projection or display, an unacceptable waste of light. So they're puttiby dcouzin - Café LA Re: bit rate again - 15 years agoHal MacLean, thanks for the MegaPEG.X tip. Compressor has its role for making a quick-and-dirty mpeg2. It's visibly better than Toast. But it sure would be nice to make scene-by-scene decisions on how to "spend" the 8 or 10 million bits/second. Dennis Couzin Berlin, Germanyby dcouzin - DVD Studio Pro Re: bit rate again - 15 years agoHal MacLean, I'm glad you emphased the importance of audio. Temporal perception is unusually sharp. If raising the bitrate from 8 to 9.8 were wasted on spatial resolution, I agree that you probably couldn't see it. (The 22% increase is in two dimensions, so the one-dimensional improvement, which is what can be noticed, is just 11%.) But what if raising the bitrate from 8 to 9.8 is used in theby dcouzin - DVD Studio Pro Re: Compressor's "best" deinterlacing - 15 years agoThanks J Corbett. The video was shot in DV-PAL, so it is 50i. Interlacing is even uglier at 50 fields/sec than at 60 fields/sec, so I think a good job of deinterlacing can help this work. I was planning to output a 25P (or is it 50P?) QT file from the FCP edit using Compressor. This QT file will serve as a master for later output. I haven't decided whether to leave it DV, or make it 8-bit uby dcouzin - Café LA Compressor's "best" deinterlacing - 15 years agoEvery video that is projected, or played on a LCD, is deinterlaced. From a quality standpoint, the producer of the video should do the interlacing rather than leave it to some unknown downstream device to do. The downstream device needs to do it in real time, generally with small processing power, and the producer, hurried as he might feel, has more time than that. Compressor's "best"by dcouzin - Café LA bit rate again - 15 years agoI took Strypes advice from 11 months ago to limit the DVD bit rate to 6.8/8.2 Mbps (well, he said 8.0). I burned about 80 Verbatim discs, and not one recipient complained of unplayability. But now it's time to make an mpeg2 master for pressing -- not burning -- DVDs. I believe that DVD players can all handle 9.8 Mbps from pressed discs. Isn't it reasonable then to grab the extra quality the hby dcouzin - DVD Studio Pro Re: Anyone using the LaCie 4 Big Quadra? - 15 years agoThanks to davidcheok for bringing the discussion back to sanity. A brand can make one line of lemons and a tight user community erect an exaggerated theory that the brand is junk. (Granted this wasn't helped by LaCie being a cheap outfit with unideal product support and whacky marketing -- witness the profusion of models and their confusing names.) Still, is davidcheok sure that even theby dcouzin - Café LA Re: Anyone using the LaCie 4 Big Quadra? - 15 years agoTo Shane Ross's "WHOLE HEARTEDLY" comment. Maybe we're just disagreeing semantically. By "dare to not back up" I meant no back up at all, no RAID, nothing. It is really wreckless to use even a first class hard drive with no back up. It is smarter to use two LaCie's. Do the arithmetic. Even if the LaCie's have a horrible 50% annual failure rate, the risk of two LaCie's faby dcouzin - Café LA Re: Anyone using the LaCie 4 Big Quadra? - 15 years ago"Objective evidence that LaCie's are junk" does not mean six guys' honest testimonials about their LaCie problems, any more than my good luck with my six LaCie's is evidence that LaCies are not junk. All informal surveys are prone to bias. Until some neutral agency does a thorough, controlled laboratory study with a large number of specimens, we don't know the answer to aquaimage's quby dcouzin - Café LA Re: Anyone using the LaCie 4 Big Quadra? - 15 years agoaquaimage, you've run into the anti-LaCie snob mob. They offer no objective evidence that LaCie's are junk. I intuited (based on specs) that the LaCie Big Disk Extreme series was better-built than the LaCie Quadra series, and I didn't need SATA, so I bought three of the former. They've worked perfectly. Also my 3 little (Porsche design) USB-2 LaCies have worked perfectly. Most hard drive faiby dcouzin - Café LA Re: how to convert the "subtitle track" to a text file? - 15 years agoAndreas, I just tried TitleExchange and it worked (unlike Belle Nuit)! The limitation to 50 titles is pretty easily worked around, after all. Thanks for this nice software. Dennis Couzin Berlin, Germanyby dcouzin - Café LA Re: how to convert the "subtitle track" to a text file? - 15 years agoAndreas, I just noticed your word "my" before "TitleExchange". Congratulations! Since there are 700 subtitles in the 80 minute movie, the 50 title per run won't make use of the free version fun. I think Belle-Nuit also imposes a limit on their free version. I'm sure your full program is worth 135 Euros, but... I opened the .xlm file in Excel and put the subtitles, thby dcouzin - Café LA Re: how to convert the "subtitle track" to a text file? - 15 years agoLoren, no success yet. Belle-Nuit hangs up during the xml import. What am I doing wrong? I've tried both xml version 1 and xml version 3. This on my IBM. I'll try using the Belle-Nuit for OS-X. But I'm not afraid of the job anymore. If necessary I can produce the .srt text file myself straight from the .xml file, using Excel or whatever. Dennis Couzin Berlin, Germanyby dcouzin - Café LA |
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