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4K Film Scans in Final Cut Pro 7
I recently had my 16mm and 35mm film from college and grad school scanned on a Scanity at 4K. The movies are encoded as ProRes 4444 with a frame rate of 23.98 fps. The 35mm movies have dimensions of 4096 x 3112 with a data rate of 1.66 Gb/s and the 16mm movies have dimensions of 4096 x 2480 and a data rate of 1.3 Gb/s. I had the finished QuickTime movies transferred on to a 4TB Lacie 7200 rpm Thunderbolt 2 drive and I’m running a 3.0 GHz 8-core Mac Pro with 32GB of RAM.
My question is that when I try and play back these 4K files in Final Cut 7, FCP doesn’t seem to be able to handle the files. I’ve tried lowering the RT, Video Quality, Frame Rate and other playback settings, but to no avail.
Do I need to use FCP X for this, or is there some other piece of gear that I need to work with 4K media? Can the Lacie drive not keep up with the data rate, despite being Thunderbolt 2? I also have a Thunderbolt 2 RAID, if that would be a better option?
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6 Replies
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You have multiple issues with the workflow you’re attempting. First FCP 7 does not support 4K, and there’s certainly no way you can play Pro Res 4444 from a single drive. How many drives does the Thunderbolt RAID have, because it too may not have the throughput required to playback Pro Res 4444 4K.
In case you’re not aware, every time you double the number of spinning disks in s RAID array you double the throughput, do by not offering the number of drives to readers here every time you mention having a RAID, you make it necessary for others to have to ask.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los AngelesDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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I have an Areca ARC-8050T2 8-Bay Thunderbolt 2 RAID, which is equipped with an 800 MHz Dual-Core processor and 1GB of 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM. Each of the eight bays has a HGST 6TB 7200 rpm drive in it. I copied one of the 4K 35mm movie files onto the RAID, imported it into FCP 7 and it plays back just fine. Problem solved?
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Excellent!!!
According to Apple’s own documentation, FCP is not supposed to support files wider than 2000 pixels, but if it does, that’s good to know.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los AngelesDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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David is correct, it is most likely down sampling to 2K.
Warren Eig
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I wonder if it is down sampling to 2K. The sequence settings are set to the full dimensions of the file
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“FCP is not supposed to support files wider than 2000 pixels, but if it does, that’s good to know.”
that’s what they say,
but in truth it does.i don’t think you can manually make a 4k sequence,
but drop a 4k file into a new sequence, and it will conform itself to the file.
of course there’s no RT, but the file will play if your drive is fast enough.nick
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