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8 hour long single shot
I have to shoot an artist performance for a video to be presented at an art gallery.
The performance will be 8 hours long and the artist wants to make one single continuous shot.
I’ll be using a Panasonic AG-HPX170 connected to a continuous energy source (wall outlet plus no-breaker, just in case) and I have two P2 cards: one is 16Gb, the other is 64Gb. Shooting mode will be 720P/24PN, scene file “ALIGN”.
I’ll be hot swapping cards as they are full, and download content using an old PowerBook PCMCIA slot. Each card content will be saved to a separate folder in a Lacie 250Gb external hard disk. Then I’ll use P2 formatter software to reformat the card and put it back into the camera.
Then I’ll be using FCPX for post.
I have run a couple of tests:
Swapping cards is ok, camera automatically splits videos in more or less 4Gb files (around 10 min long). Downloading 16Gb while camera is shooting onto 64Gb card is ok. Downloading 64Gb while camera shoots onto 16Gb card is also ok, although I’ll be a little tight on time.
After the complete shot is done, I’ll have folders containing the raw “CONTENT” folder from the P2 cards.
Here is the tricky part: importing into FCPX.
When I import the first card, I have separate – let’s say – 4 clips which I then can seamless stitch in a timeline.
However, when I import the second card, because the first clip in this card is spawning from the previous card, FCPX treats the whole thing as one shot and puts everything together into one single clip. When I look into my drive, I see the 4 clips from the previous card, and then I see a 5th clip which contains the 4 clips plus the clip from the second card. This happens to the originals and proxies. Looks like a strange behavior.For safety reasons, I think the best thing would be to treat clips separately. But how to achieve this?
Is there a way to seamlessly split clips while shooting (pressing stop/record twice would do it, but I would miss a couple of frames)?Any advice/tips to optimize or improve my workflow? Is there anything I should know? Has anybody done long continuous shot using AG-HPX170 and FCPX?
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6 Replies
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FCPX is going to automatically see the span and assemble those into one clip. I believe (could be wrong because I don’t have a P2) that the single clip can be opened in timeline and the individual clips are inside. So the spanning might not be a problem at all.
However, regarding capturing separately P2, Michael Garber showed how to do this at the beginning of his Moviola webinar a few weeks back.
https://moviola.com/webinars/news-editing-in-final-cut-pro-x/
(Michael frequents the cow so hopefully he can chime in. If not that webinar is excellent. Michael know FCPX inside and out and has great tips for any editor. I would spend the few dollars and get it.)
FCPX should have no problem with an 8 hour timeline. FCPX will easily handle a timeline of several days. 😉
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
Hey Payton,
First of all, thanks a lot for taking your time to help me out.
I’m gonna buy and watch that webinar still today.
I tried to put the clip into the timeline and it shows just one clip. I also chose to reveal the clip in the finder and, again, the clip is just one piece.
Well, let’s watch the webinar. -
Richard,
Right click on the clip and choose “open in timeline”.
See what that does.
-T .
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
Hey Payton,
Havent tried that yet, I’m out of my office until Monday. However, I watched the begining of the video you recommended, and that was DEAD ON TARGET.
Here is his workaround.
When importing the first reel, FCPX treats the spanning clips separately. Then, when you import the second reel, FCPX understands that’s a spanning clip and, having kept in memory previous clips information, it treats all the split and spanning clips as one, merging them all. However, if you dont want this, you have to make FCPX “forget” about prevoius clips, i. e., you have to flush FCPX memory. To flush the FCPX memory, all you have to do is to restart it.
So, you import the first reel, restart FCPX, import the second reel, restart FCPX, import the third reel, and so on. In this way, you’ll end up will several different clips which can be seamlessly stitched together into one single long shot in your timeline.Thanks a lot!!!
Ps: i’ m gonna watch the rest of the webinar, seems to be pretty interesting and useful.
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Back to the office. I tried to right-click on the clip and “Open in Timeline,”, but the result is the same.
The workaround presented in the webinar works like a charm, that’s what I was looking for.
Thanks! -
I have a similar issue.. I record a long wedding and even with a 16gb card FCPX makes it into four, 4 min 55 second clips. How did you fix this? I can’t do multi cam with all these small clips? Did you just highlight them all and create a new compound clip?
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