Basic questions re: movie window

[jimjacobsen]

Folks, I used to do a lot of tv/film work (2 macs ago), haven't in years, now work is coming up again. This stuff doesn't seem to work as smoothly as it used to. Here's the thing: When I open a movie window (in DP 7.2) and set the movie start time, when it gets to the movie start time DP's counter freezes and the movie takes about 2.5-3 seconds to start. Then it jerks forward and works OK. During this messiness the audio/MIDI stuff is, thankfully, working fine. Surely people who use DP for scoring are not putting up with this sort of lousy functionality. Please advise as to: What am I doing wrong, or...?

[sprout]

taking a wild guess here, but what codec is the movie file in? I have no problems working with Motion jpeg A or DV. Some codecs require a lot of CPU power to decompress the image for viewing, which could slow things down.

resizing movie window to non-standard sizes can also slow things down.

good luck!

step

[jim jacobsen]

Thanks, how do I find out what codec this particular movie is in. It's a 25 second quicktime movie sent to me by the music supervisor. Patience appreciated.

[sprout]

No worries Jim!

If you open the movie in quicktime, then do a Command-I (show movie inspector), you'll get a bunch of information. The codec is the first thing under format, something like H.264, DV, MPEG-4, etc.

If you've upgraded to Quicktime Pro (about $30 for a key via Apple's website, or included if you've ever purchased FCPro or Logic), you can also export the movie in other codecs, which is handy. QT Pro is invaluable if you do any film/video work, since clients have a habit of sending video in all sorts of strange formats.

Let me know what you find!

[bdr]

A great free alternative to QT pro is MPEG Streamclip
http://www.squared5.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Also anyone that deals with QT and other videofiles should download Perian
http://www.perian.org/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
which helps QT decode many non native formats.

[sprout]

A great free alternative to QT pro is MPEG Streamclip
http://www.squared5.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Also anyone that deals with QT and other videofiles should download Perian
http://www.perian.org/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
which helps QT decode many non native formats.

+1, 'mos def.