FCP Legend/FCP 10/Personal Use/Facility Use

[Chris Kenny]

[Craig Seeman] “2K ProRes4444 23.98fps 90 minute length is something like 230GB. That could fit on a small rugged HDD
FedEx can deliver it just as fast.”

Alternatively, a 65 Mbps (upstream) FiOS connection (I pay $100/month for one here) can move 230 GB in less than nine hours.

As William Gibson said, the future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Michael Gissing]

Early days for me Jeremy and totally fair questions. So far stability has been good. I found one thing that made the system crash but otherwise the first testing has had me import a DSLR H264 folder, do a basic edit, XML round trip with Resolve and back with only one wipe effect being swapped to a dissolve. Immediately noticed the improved real time performance and da Vinci grade speeds thanks to a GTX680 card grunting away for both apps.

That said I am on a Win 7 machine that I have just built and it seems rock solid so far. FCP7 would also have the odd crash. I have the legacy MacPro system available if I need ProRes and managing FCP7 projects to deal with any weirds. Autoduck is also there as a fallback for AAF weirdness.

As I stress test I will report on any issues. Lots of searching various da Vinci & Adobe forums has me intrigued if I can reproduce some of the reported issues. Given the need to do a lot of management of FCP7 projects before grading, I just wonder if many of the XML round trip issues are not management issues and false expectations rather than real bugs. Just as I learned to deal with getting editors to strip out plugins that weren’t common or warn me what font they used before FCP7 just changed all the text fonts without warning, I will have to develop notes for editors to avoid the querks of CS6 & da Vinci. But so far it seems a step up and also many clients are either converting to Pr or at least have Cs6 in house anyway so they can pretest in house before coming to me which is something the AVID editors couldn’t do in the past.

[Jeremy Garchow]

I’d be curious about the results of your stress tests.

Be sure to throw dynamic links in there as part of your tests.

[Michael Gissing]

Certainly will. To be fair, the amount of plugin, speed and codec management that was required to round trip FCP and Color means I don’t just expect complex layered highly effected XMLs to work perfectly anyway. I am encouraged that Wes from Autoduck is in house at Adobe so I do expect it will get better.

[Jeremy Garchow]

I say the same about fcpx, hope some things get better.

See, we all have our wishes! 😉

[Keith Koby]

Jeremy,

Is there a way to export an XML out of x with offline info and feed that back to Aja vtr xchange so that files get captured back to where they were deleted? It would require that reel info made the trip into fcpx initially and then came back out through the XML. Also, it would require a means of parsing the XML and presenting the relevant info to Aja vtr xchange.

kk

[Trevor Asquerthian]

“an insert edit, something I remember dreading anyway… even from Avid”

Hmm NEVER had an issue with insert editing from avid.

FCP yes (underlying QT inherently incapable as the quantising to frame edge was 50:50)

[Craig Seeman]

[Trevor Asquerthian] “Hmm NEVER had an issue with insert editing from avid.”

I’ve seen it. Not common but often enough. Sometimes it was user error at the facilities I worked at but it did happen.

[Trevor Asquerthian] “CP yes (underlying QT inherently incapable as the quantising to frame edge was 50:50)”

Amazing how some people complain about no direct tape in/out in FCPX when this was something Apple never could get right. I think it’s smart they left it to third parties.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Keith Koby] “Is there a way to export an XML out of x with offline info and feed that back to Aja vtr xchange so that files get captured back to where they were deleted?”

Not super easily.

With X, relinking files has to be the exact same length as the original, at least for now.

AJA VTR Xchnage doesn’t seem to work with inputting FCPXML quite yet, and the software AJA announced a while ago called Control Room, seems to be MIA.

I haven’t tried it, but I’d bet using the third party EDL exporter (https://xmil.biz/EDL-X/EDL-X.shtml), you might be able to open that with VTR Xchnage.

Alternatively (and this is probably obvious), you could use the Xto7, import the FCPXML and export a batch list from FCP7 for VTR Xchange or just use FCP7 to capture.

Also, reel numbers are currently strange in fcpx.

[Chad Brewer]

[Craig Seeman] “[Trevor Asquerthian] “FCP yes (underlying QT inherently incapable as the quantising to frame edge was 50:50)”

Amazing how some people complain about no direct tape in/out in FCPX when this was something Apple never could get right. I think it’s smart they left it to third parties.”

Hey Craig, is what you guys are talking about here with frame edges basically referring to the same thing as “frame accuracy” in terms of editing with machine control?

I ask because if so, it’s perhaps the issue I’ve been dealing with for years regarding device control with FCP being sketchy – as in edits to tape can be dead on frame accurate over and over and then without changing anything to the same VTR they can be randomly 1 frame early or late. I was over this many times with AJA and Blackmagic over the years and finally thought it was probably an FCP issue that was never developed properly. I have never used AVID, but heard it had more reliable device control than FCP.

Is frame accuracy (or lack thereof) essentially what you guys are talking about here and how Apple could never get it right or is this a completely different discussion than the issues I’ve had that I was describing?

Chad Brewer
Senior Videotape Operator
TeleVersions, LLC – Chicago