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a few questions and problems … editing DVCPRO-HD full res vs. offline, batch export bugs, markers, working with DVCPRO-HD720p50 vs. 720p60 compression, and more!
Hello from New Zealand,
This is my first post so hopefully throwing a bunch of questions together fits in the etiquette. Thanks in advance for your patience. I’ve been an FCP editor for several years, mostly on smaller projects, but have been largely working professionally with Avid for the past few, and now I’m editing a very large HD project on FCP so stretching my knowledge quite a bit.
Our setup: FCS Studio 2 (FCP 6.01), MacPro, 2×2.66 Dual Core, 4 GB memory. We are working with mostly internal drives for the project but our internal drives (2 500 GB and 1 750 GB, plus the system drive which I’m not putting any footage on) are almost out of space and so we’re probably going to add a 1 TB eSata external. (My understanding is that a RAID 5 array would be better, but it doesn’t look like that’s in the budget. At any rate, I’m trying to avoid FireWire external drives entirely.)
The project: A mix of footage shot on the Panasonic VariCam and the HVX200 on P2, all shot at 25 fps (except for the off-speed stuff, obviously – thankfully, only one tape of off-speed VariCam footage to contend with thus far). In order to capture the VariCam footage, we’ve got a BlackMagic DeckLink HD Extreme card and a Panasonic AJ-HD1400. The footage is captured through HD-SDI and we are re-compressing at DVCPRO 720p60. This seems to keep the timecode link, after much frustration and experimentation.
The final deliverable is a 25fps 1080i master. Our only 1080i footage at the moment is about a half hour of 16mm film that we had telecine’d at 1080i. I am assuming that it’s better to edit the whole thing at 720p and find the most elegant way to cross-convert at the end, since converting on capture seems to take up twice as much disc space and I suspect that will be a problem regardless of what I do.
We’re working with a graphics company as well that’s generating titles, etc. Unfortunately, they don’t have the ability to work with DVCPRO-HD footage. So after some trial and error, I’m sending them uncompressed versions using the Blackmagic 8-bit (2Vuy) codec, they’re doing whatever they do, and then returning them in that codec, which I then transcode back to DVCPRO 720p60 using FCP. Cumbersome, but it seems to work apart from a slight chroma shift.
Overall, we have about 100 1/2 hour DVCPRO-HD tapes and a terabyte of P2.
So, my questions:
1. We’re capturing the VariCam footage compressed at DVCPRO 720p60, but the P2 from the HVX is compressed at DVCPRO 720p50. Almost every sequence I cut will be a mixture of the two, I believe. For sequences, does it make a difference whether I use the 720p60 or 720p50 codec?
2. Since I’m often exporting lots of shots for the graphics company, I’ve been using Batch Export. After working out how it behaved, at first it seemed a treat. But since using the Blackmagic codec, it exports some (but not all) of the clips in a batch export as pure white video. Is this a problem with using this codec with Batch Export, a bug everyone knows about, or a setting somewhere I need to tweak?
(Also, a related question: can you somehow create new default export settings in FCP? Or should I really be spending more time getting to know and love Compressor and pretending Batch Export doesn’t exist?)
3. This is probably simple, but I haven’t found the right words to look it up: how do you put markers on a clip while you’re capturing it with “Capture Now” (similar to how you would put locators on a clip while capturing in Avid)? Or is this even possible?
4. An overall question: am I indulging in wishful thinking to believe that I can edit this whole project (2 1 hr. shows, mostly quite cutty and effects-y) at DVCPRO-HD resolution with my setup? I’ve already run into trouble when I try to speed up footage 1600%, and it won’t play unless I export it as a Quicktime movie, re-import it and play it at normal speed. I don’t have a lot (well, any) experience working with multiple resolutions in FCP, and I worry that it’ll be a very big mess … but I also worry that trying to cut 100 hours or so of HD will be its very own kind of mess.
5. And a personal question for any Avid/FCP dual editors out there (if any of you have read this far): how do you manage your keyboards? Do you run entirely different keyboards in each application, or do you try to map your keyboards as closely as possible? I have a lightly customized Avid keyboard setup; so far, I’ve basically avoided customizing FCP’s setup, but every once in a while I go for the Avid key instead of the FCP key. This is exacerbated by the fact that the system I’m cutting on actually has an official Avid keyboard (!).
Thanks in advance for any thoughts (and, before anyone mentions it, I’m going to order the DVD tonight … I’m pretty confident I’ll be well down the road by the time it gets to New Zealand, tho!), and I look forward to contributing!
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2 Replies
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I can’t answer all your questions right now, but did you know the “German hack” for 50p? I don’t think it’s a good idea to mix the codecs.
Have a look, there’s a PDF in English here:
https://www.aulich-adamski.de/perm/panasonic-ag-hvx200-720p50-p2-workflow-mit-final-cut-proRegards,
Uli
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I didn’t know about this, thanks for the heads up. I’m only starting to deal with the P2 side of things so I don’t know if much footage is actually shot at 50fps (vs. being compressed at DVCPRO 720p50 at 25fps, which it appears is the standard for most of it), but this will be good to know.
I guess I scared everyone away with the large subject line or otherwise violated netiquette … whoops.
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