Animation delivery format

Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

Animation delivery format

Posted by Shannon Bedford on February 23, 2011 at 2:17 am

Hi, I have just tried to import some HD animation into FCP and received this warning:

“The following media files are not optimised for Final Cut Pro.
It is highly recommended that you either recapture the media or use the Media Manager to create new copies of the files to improve their performance for multi-stream playback.”

The animator has used Uncompressed YUV 8 bit 4.2.2 codec which I thought should be ok.
The files do seem to play fine.

Should I be concerned?
What Codec should I be asking for?

Cheers,

S Bedford, Western Australia
FCP 6.0.6, Mac OSX 10.6.6
2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-core Intel Xeon
6GM 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM

Matt Lyon replied 15 years, 2 months ago 4 Members · 7 Replies
7 Replies

Michael Gissing
February 23, 2011 at 2:35 am

Are they .mov quicktime files or AVI? Animation codec will work in FCP but usually needs rendering. If your animator has ProRes4444 codec available, that would be better. You will need FCP7 however at your end.
Shannon Bedford
February 23, 2011 at 2:43 am

.mov files.
Nope, they don’t even need rendering. I can’t see a problem which is why I thought the error message was strange.
Hmm, another reason to upgrade to 7. We’re almost sold.
Thanks

S Bedford, Western Australia
FCP 6.0.6, Mac OSX 10.6.6
2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-core Intel Xeon
6GM 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
Matt Lyon
February 23, 2011 at 3:09 am

This came up in another thread recently and the consensus was that the error could be safely ignored.

I did a bit more searching and found this in the manual:

https://documentation.apple.com/en/finalcutpro/usermanual/index.html#chapter=26%26section=3%26tasks=true

Hope this helps,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto
Shannon Bedford
February 23, 2011 at 3:23 am

Interesting and strange.

So, I’m about to make a request from another animator.
What is the BEST format to ask for given that we are using FCP 6?

Cheers,

S Bedford, Western Australia
FCP 6.0.6, Mac OSX 10.6.6
2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-core Intel Xeon
6GM 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
Matt Lyon
February 23, 2011 at 3:36 am

If disc space is not an issue, I’d go with 10 Bit Uncompressed 4:2:2.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto
Paul Jay
February 23, 2011 at 10:35 am

Not just diskspace, with that format your storage needs to do at least 130 MB/s (megabytes)

So a RAID 0 SATA system is the least ou need to play 1 stream.
Matt Lyon
February 24, 2011 at 5:17 am

That’s a good point Paul, but I’d still want the files delivered in the best format possible. Then you can convert them in-house to a lower bandwidth version if necessary — and retain control of the process.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up

Creative Communities of the World Forums