Any workflow for “media manage” trim to used + handles? Willing to go way outside the box for this.

[David Parker]

Noah, not only are you responding to a need not being discussed here, you are way off base as well (psst. trimming files is not a generation, and no one wants to archive TBs of useless media; even if the tapes are cheap, the time and physical space to store them is not).

Jeremy, compressor is cool, but can’t do what I need. Even if I wanted to throw computers at the problem to parallelize my fix up script, there would need to be a lot of workflow glue to compensate for an extra step at the most crucial part of the edit workflow, which really demands a tight coupling to ingest. So I’m inclined to keep it at the end.

So, I had a look at the FCPX xml. The good news is that it is very readable and well documented. The bad news is that when a clip changes duration, that change apparently has to be rippled all the way through the document to every place that it is used. I was hoping I could just change the duration when the reference is declared, but for reasons I don’t understand at the moment, this isn’t the case.

So any munging script would have to keep the whole state of the document, and be pretty darn smart about what needs to be updated, which is a bit more of a project than I had anticipated. I have some ideas for how to do this, but not sure I have the time available to implement. Any developers out there interested in taking on this project?

In the meantime I’m going to consider finishing in resolve, if the one way trip in is solid I’d be ok to finish there . . .

[Jeremy Garchow]

That makes sense, David.

I had a colleague start several Projects at 24.0 instead of 23.98.

Getting the projects back to 23.98 and keep the proper timing was a painstaking and manual process. Fcpx kept adding extra frames to the clips, but only if the clips were moved from connected clips to the primary. That is to say if you moved a clip in to the primary, it would add a frame and move everything down a frame. I had to match frame every clip and replace to shake loose the weird behavior, and of course, remember to copy all effects/retimes before replacing and then pasting them on the replaced clip.

I imagine going from 59.94 to 29.97 would have similar repercussions. It was not a fun couple of days getting those Projects conformed.

If you are looking for development help, I’d suggest starting with Andres Kiel at Spherico Film Tools and see what he thinks about it. https://www.spherico.com/filmtools/

[Noah Kadner]

Well ‘way off base’ is a bit melodramatic for free advice isn’t it? But I’ll try not to take it personally.

My question is why are you creating TB’s of unusable footage? Is the creation completely outside of your control?

Noah

FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
FCP Exchange – FCPX Workshops

[Gary Huff]

[David Parker] “(psst. trimming files is not a generation”

Well, that really depends on your source files…how do you think trimming works to begin with?

[David Parker]

[Gary Huff] “Well, that really depends on your source files…how do you think trimming works to begin with?”

In any rational software, aka not Premiere, it will copy anything it can’t losslessly trim. See page 484 of the Resolve manual for example, which I can’t copy and paste due to it being “secured”.

[Andreas Kiel]

Hi David,

I really can understand why you need this kind of functionality.
And you’re right XML is the way to go. But as mentioned it’ way more complicated than it looks at the first glimpse.
My biggest concern are key-framed effects/data.

You can contact me: kiel (at) spherico (dot) com

– Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[Gary Huff]

[David Parker] “In any rational software, aka not Premiere, it will copy anything it can’t losslessly trim.”

Then it’s not actually trimming those files, now, is it?

[Roger Bolton]

Hi David, I think CoreMelt could probably help you with this problem. Could you please send me at email to roger at coremelt dot com?

[Oliver Peters]

I’m a bit confused here. To my knowledge almost no software will trim the original media. The exceptions are systems that internally turn media into image sequences, like Quantel. These can simply delete excess image files at the head and tail of the clip.

Everyone else creates a copy of the media where the copy is trimmed if possible. As long as it is truly a copy without recompression, then there is no generation loss or degredation. So copies that are ProRes, DNxHD, AVC-Intra, uncompressed, etc. do not lose data in this copy/trim function. If recompression is required, like long-GOP media, then there is technically a generation loss and slight degredation in the copy.

Oliver

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

[Andreas Kiel]

[Oliver Peters]: “I’m a bit confused here. To my knowledge almost no software will trim the original media. The exceptions are systems that internally turn media into image sequences, like Quantel. These can simply delete excess image files at the head and tail of the clip… “

Finally there is no need to re-compress any file format.
Once you know what you are doing just copy a part of a stream, place it into an empty container and save that part as a physical copy. Only thing which might happen (GOP files) is that the first frame of the file is different from the original file since it could be a new I-frame.
The result is a 1:1 trimmed file.

Any serious software should behave like this – at least the apps I build behave like that.

– Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil