Some bugs that are crippling my workflow

Question

Hello
I've tried to search forums and didn't find anything or too little about these bugs, so I'm starting a new thread. Still I'm curious nobody encountered these or hasn't bothered to tell.
First, export from FCP to TGA sequences (using QT conversion) got broken in February or maybe March - yes, I'm installing Apple updates as they come, my fault
Since then FCP exports image sequences using aspect ratio but the resampling is nearest neighbor, therefore unusable in serious production. Before that, you got nice 720x576 images from a PAL sequence, now you get ugly pixelated 768x576 ones. If I missed some preference where to set this could you pls tell me? Or could you please do anything with this? Only workaround is to export MOVs and then use QT player which exports correct images (real pain if you have multiple exports). We work with image sequences a lot, so this would definitely help.
Second is rendering of image overlays and motion effects in timeline. We completely stopped using FCP for gfx overlays, because the render output is totally unpredictable. Sometimes it works ok, but quite often we get one of there bugs:
2a) Blue dots on the alpha edges of titles (imported TGA images, not titles from FCP generators)
titles are mostly orange since orange(mobile operator) is our major client, maybe with other titles you get other dots this happens very erraticaly and depends from case to case, sometimes everything works and sometimes you get one or two shining blue dots
2b) bright 1px frame around edges of images resized/cropped using motion effects. This happens on captured video or imported stills without alpha.
This is mostly visible if you use a white background. Problem shows itself always when I crop/resize/move a clip. Sometimes it helps to use a luma key on the image and the border disappears.
Funny thing both these problems have in common is that they don't show until you render. RT preview looks ok, but after render or export the dreaded dots and/or white lines appear.
Doesn't matter if I use ProRes codec or uncompressed 8bit or 10bit codecs, if I set rendering to RGB, YUV 8bit or 10bit, motion filtering quality to anything. To me this seems as if it was an encoding problem.
Also I'd like to join ranks of people who have been hit with the good ol' bug of bad EDLs created from timelines with speed changes. After a week of little sleep, our timing was absolutely packed as always and after we put the EDL from FCP to smoke, all clips with speed changes had wrong TC. So we spent whole day writing down timecodes by hand and manually re-editing them in smoke, a day we missed dearly during the next long nights :((
so, I just call for help to all you hard-working people at apple, if you could contact me I can explain more or send you examples of where things have gone wrong.
Michal

Answer 1

Since we have a smoke(linux), many desktop compositing and 3d Wintel boxes and two PowerMacs with FCP our typical workflows are:
a) ingest and edit on macs -> online on smoke/combustion/shake/whatever ->put it all back to macs, make broadcast master tapes from macs.
b) Create animations and gfx on PCs(3d/AE/comb/...) -> edit them together on macs, make broadcast master tapes from macs.
so we almost always need to trensfer footage between systems. For smoke we usually use SDI for sending PAL material, but when working with HD or other exotic formats, there is nothing better than good old tga sequences. We also must render to image sequences from 3d rendering farms for obvious reasons. Even when not farming, tgas give us the best speed when reading/rendering on the wintel boxes and the best compatibility around all software/hardware. Also, we have already experienced the joy of an hour-long render crashing after 58 minutes, leaving a corrupted mov. There's nothing like it. Even the mov is ok, you still have problems with codec compatibility/color shifts, etc.
Sometimes you just need a quick still export form the edit suite. Was easy a few months before, but now you must do stupid workarounds if you don't want ugly corrupted pixelated crap.
That much for the need of exporting tgas.
p.s.: it would make our life a bit easier if we could make FCP import TGA sequence straight on as any other editing application.(WINK apple developers ) Not that converting them in QT player would be so hard but anything that eases the strain on your mind in front of an important client is good.
P.S.2: sorry, this was meant as reply to andy, i'm new here
Message was edited by: miskoluxak