Friday, February 20, 2009

Exports From FCP Fail in QuickClusters

Surprise! From Apple's TA1099 Knowledge Base article.

You will not be able to successfully export from Final Cut Pro using Compressor if your computer is set up as a Compressor QuickCluster, or a "Virtual Cluster." If you attempt to send an item from Final Cut Pro to Compressor in such a case, some segments in the job may report "Failed" and processing of the batch will not complete successfully.

What can you do?

You can work around this issue by first exporting a self-contained movie from Final Cut Pro. You can then use a QuickCluster in Compressor to transcode that self-contained movie.

Alternately, you can export from Final Cut Pro directly using Compressor, but use a single-service instance of Compressor instead of a QuickCluster.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Video Purifier $400 vs JES Video Cleaner FREE

Video Purifier is $396 dollars.

JES Video Cleaner is FREE.

I've used JES Video Cleaner before and it's not bad at all. It is something that's definitely worth having in your toolbox. For nearly $400 I don't even need to try Video Purifier especially when the last version had:

"...a serious bug, which under some circumstances could cause start and stop commpands in playout mode to fail. It could leave both the user and the application in a state of confusion."

And the latest update mentions that the "PPC code has been optimized" although it's listed as just "Intel" under the platform category at Macupdate.com. That leaves me in a state of confusion.

Soundtrack Pro doesn't like 32 Khz Audio, sometimes

Apple has officially acknowledged a known issue for Soundtrack Pro.

Soundtrack Pro sometimes displays the message "An Unexpected Problem: Uncaught exception." This may happen when you process audio with some third-party Audio Unit plug-ins.


The fix is to resample your audio file.

This may occur when you process audio files with a 32 kHz sample rate with these plug-ins, or when you export projects that use them to a 32 kHz file format. When working with Waves, Universal Audio, or TC Powercore plug-ins, if you see this issue, convert any 32 kHz files in your project to 44.1 kHz