FCP 7 to Color roundtripping

[Steve Macmillan]

I just installed Final Cut Studio 3 on a fresh drive. I was really looking forward to trying out the improved round tripping to Color.

I have a standard def uncompressed 10bit sequence which I sent to Color. The first problem I noticed was that my Kona 3 card displayed the 4:3 sequence correctly in FCP, but Color showed it as a 3:3 squarish aspect ratio even though the Kona 3 output settings were the same.

When I round tripped some graded and rendered clips back to FCP, the round trip file came back with half the clips offline and many others too short.

I was able to successfully round trip the project by saving out a XML from Color and opening that in FCP. This gets old fast.

Since I have some real work to do tomorrow, its back to my original Final Cut Studio 2 drive.

I would not recommend blowing over your Final Cut Studio 2 drive with the new update until a few bugs are squashed.

STeve

[Joseph Owens]

>Multiple layers?
Multicam clips?
Nesting?
Multi-level nesting?

Compositing inside FCP: Scaling/Distort/Cropping/Masking/Overlay modes? Does any of that make it into color? and back from color?

Speed effects seems to be sorted but can somebody actually test and confirm?

Boris Title3D; Livetype; Motion composited clips – what happens to those clips? Do they come back from color unscathed in the XML?

I’m speaking out of school as I don’t have the upgrade package yet, but from what I gather:

COLOR has always been able to do multiple layers, as long as they are independent media, not nested sequences.
They SAY Multicam clips.
I don’t know how they could support sequence nesting.
COLOR has always grabbed the last motion setting and put it up as a preview… then ignored it and rendered full frame without any settings… and then letting FCP screw it up when the aspect ratio gets converted on the return trip.
Speed? Don’t know. But beware of mixed base framerates, as always.
Generators should be ignored, but Motion decompressor as it resides in FCP may still be viewed as a foreign codec — the knock-on is that you may not be offered Original Format as a render option. In any event, anything with an alpha channel will have to come back in 4:4:4:4.

jPo

This IS my blog!

[Cory Sheldon]

Just installed FCS 3 and I’m feeling much better about color roundtripping. I was a bit concerned at first as Color itself doesn’t preview things such as speed changes, effects and ‘motion tab changes’ correctly. The clips are visible and play but not with the changes made in FCP. However, when sent back to FCP all color changes are there WITH the changes originally made in FCP intact. For example, normal speed changes, a framing size/rotation edit, and even a twixtor speed change all played as they should when sent back to FCP. Although it’d be great to have everything show up properly in both programs I’d say this is a very workable solution as opposed to having only hard cuts make the round trip correctly.