6hrs into first major FCPX project

[Jeremy Garchow]

shhhhh

shh

*whispers* you’ll never work at a pro level in this industry again. fcpx is evil.

I’m kidding of course. Glad you are off to a good start!

[Steve Connor]

Yes, keep us updated, great to get a fresh (and less jaded) opinion on here!

[Jeremy Garchow]

Less Jaded. That used to be my radio name.

[Steve Connor]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Less Jaded. That used to be my radio name.”

I was going to use it for the name of my next band!

[Jeff Markgraf]

As long as you weren’t part of a “morning zoo.” That would require some kind of after-the-fact punishment (said a guy who used to do a morning show, years ago).

[Oliver Peters]

Tom,

Can you tell us a bit more about what type of project this is? Thanks and good luck.

Cheers,
Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Tom Sefton]

It’s a project for the Holocaust Centre in the UK. We are filming survivors of the holocaust with a stereo rig setup and 2 Red Dragon cameras at 4K. Each survivor tells their story for an hour, accompanied by keynote presentation (which will be added later) and we film them in our studio. The rest of the week is a series of Q&A sessions from questions harvested from schoolchildren that have met the survivor in the last few years.

We have 6, 40 minute sessions per day for interview and all media is backed up after recording, along with a side camera closeup view from a BMCC and audio recorded via our audio desk.

The media is edited down so that only responses are seen and the survivor appears to look direct at the cameras. Over 900 questions are asked over the week and each question has a unique question ID tag which both streams must be named.

The agency in charge of the project – a hugely creative and ambitious company, are working with some specialist programmers to create a speech analysis tool that can hear what someone asks the 3D projection after they present, and then bring up the most relevant response based on metadata tags.

There is also a 3D CGI model of the character to handle the transition of movement between clips, so that for years and years to come at the holocaust centre, people will be able to speak to a survivor of the holocaust and hear what they have to say. It’s a project we have been planning for over 18 months and we are really proud to be involved.

https://www.itv.com/news/calendar/update/2015-01-22/films-to-be-made-to-preserve-auschwitz-memories/

[Walter Soyka]

Tom, that sounds like an awesome and important project with some really cool creative. I hope we can hear a few more updates as you work through it!

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Tom Sefton]

Thanks Walter – I will do!

We’ve encountered a lot of hiccups with Resolve, and quite a major one with audio but have lost a lot of faith in getting it sorted – after seeing what was possible in FCPX it became clear that it was not just a capable professional tool, but one that could save us time, which is valuable with a project of this size.

I’ve got some audio files that show the issue, but can’t seem to get anyone to acknowledge what is happening…weird.

2 things that would help us streamline further – if we could batch render a full timeline of clips without going through the export command line and rename function for each one, and if we could get past the laggy nature of FCPX after a couple of hours of editing.

We’ve finished filming the first week and other than some procedural stuff with logging clips/clapperboard names we have come through really well. The next week of filming starts this Monday, but we are hoping to get to a state of being able to deliver finished files within 24hrs of them being acquired – doesn’t sound fast but with the amount of files and accuracy required with naming it needs a lot of QC.

At the moment, the next step is to invest in another couple of Mac Pros to help with encoding r3d to ProRes HQ – kind of holding off as long as possible until we know when the next update is coming.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Tom-

That sounds like an amazing project. Can’t wait to hear how it turns out.

[Tom Sefton] “and if we could get past the laggy nature of FCPX after a couple of hours of editing.
“

I find the biggest way to speed things up is to turn off all unused audio components on any clips you may have in the inspector. This may not pertain to your workflow if everything is sync and linked, but we routinely work with cam files that give us 8 channels of audio, and most of the time, 6 of those are silent. Turning off all the extra channels speeds things up considerably. If the clips are MOS, I turn them all off. I try to remember to do this in the browser before editing.

Also, periodic restarts help clear the memory. I keep Activity Monitor open and watch the “Memory” usage. When it starts getting up there (like over half of the 64GB available) I find time to restart the app or sometimes the whole computer. I just finished an r3d project not long ago (no where near as big as yours) and it went very very well.

Break a leg out there!