Compressor is taking way too long, even an overnight compression will give it insufficient time and I can't miss my computer for a month

Final cut seems to re-render all frames during compression instead of using the render cache. The combined rendering and compression may take too long. Furthermore the time estimations are made based on the already compressed part and if the first part if much harder than the rest these estimations may be way off.

You might just give it a go and see how far it gets overnight. If it does not finish in just one night, you can split the process in two steps by rendering first to an Apple ProRes file (or another low-loss format) in one night, using File/Export/Quicktime Movie, and compressing that file in the second night.

After a night compressing, Compressor seems dead, remaining time is increasing instead of decreasing.

Bug in compressor preventing the final rename from m4v-1 to m4v

The m4v-1 file usually works as expected! Just make sure that you copy the file from the root of the System disk to some other disk before you kill compressor. And, do NOT rename the m4v-1 to m4v, it appears Quicktime then will not recognise it anymore. Only rename temporary, for upload purposes.

Compressor crashes on overnight compression

Target or scratch disk may have insufficient space

Check available space and make sure plenty is available

Compressor compresses to the root of the system disk only.

Lazy programmer at apple?

No workaround... make sure you have enough disk space available and copy compressed files to another disk ASAP.

Time Remap does not respect the interlacing. Time remapped footage looks shakey, not smooth, and reversed footage looks outright ugly.

Instead of picking the right fields and re-interlacing them, time remap just picks a full frame for each time step. I am really puzzled by this and why apple has not done a proper job with this.

Unfortunately the workaround is pretty involved.
1. de-interlace the footage to 50p.
2. do the time remap in the 50p footage.
3. re-interlace the 50p footage to 50i

How do I de-interlace footage?

b

(1) create 50p project (create new project; right click on the sequence and go to 'settings'; set the editing timebase to 50)
(2) put 50i movie on timeline. DO NOT change the clip settings, this willl crash FCP
(3) export using quicktime conversion, Apple ProRes, no interlace,

How do I RE-interlace footage?

I think this should have worked by just dropping a 50p(60p) clip onto a 50i(60i)fps timeline. Unfortunately, not so.

(1) Get the 50p(60p) source on a 50p(60p) timeline
(2) Apply my custom Interlace filter. Select the right field dominance for your target (upper first except for standard definition DV). (3) Export using Quicktime, Export as 50fps movie using a high quality compressor (eg Apple ProRes). Explicitly set 1920x1080 resolution, and turn frame reordering off. Key frame every 24 seems OK.
(4) Place the created clip in a 50i(60i) timeline.

What does apple mean with "native HDV editing"?

I think 2 things:
(1) In FC6 you can use the m2t format (the native HDV format) more or less directly on the timeline. More or less means that you still have to capture with FC (or convert) but at least there is no recompression being done.
(2) IF you do only simple edits like some cuts, FC can play back the resulting video to tape without doing recompression of the unaffected video (far enough from the cuts)

How do I convert raw m2t to something readable for FC?

b

c

How do I properly convert HDV to DV?

The only way to do this is to start with interlaced HDV. So make sure you start out with 1080i50 or i60, not progressive.

(1) Make m2t file (as usual: stream back to tape, capture from tape...)
(2) Open m2t file in MPeg StreamClip 1.8, export as DV25, PAL 720x576, 25fps, 16:9, Interlaced Scaling, Reinterlace chroma, nothing else selected and click "make DV".
(3) Pull the resulting DV file through Anamorphicizer (otherwise iMovie won't recognise the 16:9 format....)
(4) DragDrop the resulting "Shell.mov" into iDVD.

How do I create a final m2t file from my final cut project?

Strangely there seems way to do this directly...

Export the project using the File/print to video, to print the project to tape. Then use AVCVideoCap (from the apple firewire tools) to capture the just taped video to harddisk.

How do I properly play back HDV on a computer screen?

Again strange but Final Cut does not properly deinterlace when playing back HDV. Quicktime does a lousy deinterlacing job, it either plays half of the fields or blurs both fields into one frame. And, it can play the source mov files captured from tape, but not directly captured m2t.

Create an m2t file of the final project as described in the other tip. If possible, set the screen's refresh rate to the video rate, so 50Hz if you have 50fps video etc. Then use VLC to play back the m2t file. Set Video/Deinterlace to BOB.

h264 does not allow deinterlacing in Quicktime?

I think that this is a Quicktime issue. Quicktime's deinterlacer is lousy anyway (see my tip 'how to properly play back HDV')

Use VLC instead.

Smoothcam takes an eternity to analyze a small clip

The clip is part of a larger source file and smoothcam analyses the entire source file

Create a source file containing the right part, and use this smaller source file instead of doing the crop in Final Cut. Make the cut large enough so that you can still fine-tune the cut in Final Cut without needing to re-edit that smaller source file.
To make the cut, open the source file in Quicktime, and set the in- and out points as you want the cut. Then choose Edit/Trim to Selection and then File/Save As/Save as Reference Movie. Then import the new movie in FC. Do NOT throw away the source file, the reference movie is referring straight to the original source file.

Motion runs out of disk space while doing optical flow computation

Motion uses excessive amounts of disk space. Every pixel in the video will take 5 bytes in the motion analysis file. That is roughly 7 GBytes for every 10 seconds of HD 50p video (!!)

Attach an external HD and use the Preferences/Cache/Optical Flow Retiming menu to set the cache to the external HD. Make sure that there is PLENTY of space there...

Motion exports much more than the selection when using File/Export Selection. If you have set in- and out-point but not selected filter or clip, File/Export Selection even has no visible effect whatsoever.

If you select a filter, motion seems to ignore the actual length of the filter. It seems it uses the entire clip that the filter is applied to.

No workaround

Motion: Most frames look very blurry, but once in a while you get a sharper frame.

This effect typically occurs when you have selected Frame Blending in the Properties/Timing field of the clip. If you have speed to for instance 20% (=1/5), you will have 4 blurry frames and 1 sharp frame. The sharp frame seems to be the original, un-interpolated frame, the four blurry frames are the interpolated frames. This is typical for the "Blending" setting.

Make sure you have the "Properties/Timing" to either "None" or "Optical Flow".

Motion ignores the Properties/Timing/Frame Blending/ Optical Flow setting in the Properties setting of the Clip. Instead, it is seems to be using the Frame Blending/Blending setting. This is not just a quirk of the motion preview window, the Optical Flow setting is ignored also when doing an export.

This seems to happen after you quit and re-load the project. In fact Motion seems not to even recognise its own settings, as it start re-analysing the clip if you re-select "Optical Flow" in the combo box (again, it already has been selected!!)

Do not close the project until you have exported the final result as quicktime movie... That means, this can often not be done in week days unless you take half a day off...

Optical flow compensated clips jump back and forth, instead of getting a smooth look. One of the frames looks sharp and displaced to the right. Multiple frames look like a blend of two frames, blurry, and are displaced to the left.

This hapened to me when I changed the speed of a clip that has the Frame Blending after reload issue (see above).

No workaround

Audio does not obey the Time Remap curves in the Motion panel. Instead it plays at constant speed from start to end.

Bug or feature?

No workaround