FCP 5 first impressions

[Andy Edwards]

As a certified FCP trainer, I would like your input on the following:

Have you been able to make FCP 5 to Sound Track Pro multi-track exports actually work?

Andy

[Oliver Peters]

[Andy Edwards] “Have you been able to make FCP 5 to Sound Track Pro multi-track exports actually work? “

Andy,

I can’t speak for Sean, but I’ve tested this and it works fine. Use the new “Send To” menu in FCP5 to send your FCP audio timeline and a ref video track to STP. Do your mixes in STP and export/bounce/render the mixed stereo track (no pix) to the desktop as an AIFF file. Import the mixed AIFF into FCP, sync to picture and output to tape. Or send from STP to Compressor 2 for output via encoding. Two limitations: your STP project does not show up back in FCP like a Motion project and you cannot do surround mixing.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Andy Edwards]

Oliver,

Thanks for chiming in. I used the new menu in FCP to export from the FCP 5 time line, by right clicking on my clip, choose send to Multi-track. What shows up in STP is my various clips as it should be.

Do you find the save feature takes a long time to resave your work? I’m working on a 60 minute project and it would take almost 10 minutes to resave the changes I applied to the audio in STP.

When I send a single clip from FCP 5, STP references the whole FCP sequence. If I am just working on a 10 second audio clip for effects, it takes a minute or two to save the effects as it is referencing the whole sequence back in FCP.

I gave up on STP and have to export my audio (make a QT movie) single clip by single clip. This not only doubles my work, but it also takes up a lot of hard drive space.

I am not alone in my issues with STP. If you browse the Apple STP discussion, you will see other people are having the same issues I am.

I would like to talk you more about your success as this would be a big time saver if I am not going through the right steps. Could you give some examples of the work you are doing to make this work.

Thanks
Andy

[Oliver Peters]

Andy,

I’m afraid I didn’t work with any STP project on anything longer than a minute or so. Also this was on a dual 2.7GHz unit, so the machine was generally pretty fast. I did note that the ref picture was “base layer” only, i.e. no attempt at any Dynamic RT on effects.

The problem might be that it simply isn’t optimized for long-form. What happens when you do this without picture? Any faster? Remember that STP creates a new type of STP Multitrack Audio Project file format, so that all the history of the non-destructive changes are saved. This means that there’s a ton of info saved with the file than can be a burden.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Andy Edwards]

[Oliver Peters] “What happens when you do this without picture?”

I also attempted sending a small amount of audio only, but it still referenced the whole sequence of audio when you saved. So it was just as slow.

One issue with this project that might be the problem, is it is one long capture, even though my timeline is sliced up at every edit. We have already locked picutre on this doc, so I just recaptured the video and audio from a Digi-beta Master. I even went as far as slicing up my timline and putting audio on different tracks. As this might be the problem, you would still think STP would allow for a single audio track to be exported from FCP without referring to the whole base layer clip. It is starting to make some sense to me why this takes so long to save, but you would think if you just wanted one 10 second clip sent to STP, it wouldn’t care about the remaining timeline. I thought in one of my tests, I clicked on a clip and told it to be an independent clip. You would think FCP saw that as a single clip without reference to the long base clip….but that did not work in STP either.

I’m going to assemble another quick project with lots of clips from different tapes and see if it does the same thing.

Thanks for your input. As usual these type of errors turn out to be operator error. Hopefully with a little more testing, I’ll wrap my mind around how this is supposed to work in Apple’s mind.

Thanks
Andy

[Michael Horton]

[Andy Edwards] “ne issue with this project that might be the problem, is it is one long capture,”

This is a known issue/feature with STP. Send a 10 second chunk of your sequence and it references the entire clip. If its a one hour clip then you are screwed. Send feedback to the STP team

Michael Horton
lafcpug
https://www.lafcpug.org

[Oliver Peters]

[Michael Horton] “Send a 10 second chunk of your sequence and it references the entire clip. If its a one hour clip then you are screwed”

Michael,

This is generally how OMF export works as well. If you export OMF with media it includes the entire clip. This is the same in Avid or FCP or others. The first step to avoid this is to consolidate the media, which is why it would be great if FCP had a better Media Manager. In Avid, you would consolidate and export with embedded media, so you only get the timeline clips plus handles.

Since the Send To STP uses the FCP timeline, there is nothing that can be done differently other than to grab the ENTIRE source media clip (unless an additional consolidation step were added to this subroutine), since you want to be able to make trims inside STP. Of course, performance shouldn’t be any slower than inside FCP, but that’s a different issue. I noticed that when you have an hour-long sequence, the scale of the tracksheet also doesn’t shrink enough to display the entire timeline in STP, so my guess is that 10 minutes is probably the optimized length. There really is no reason why on most projects you should actually have an hour-long clip as source media. This is really playing pretty close to the edge for any NLE. In the case of even DV, one hour-long clip of video+audio would be around 12GB as a single QT file. Not a good idea.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com