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FCP to Baselight workflow?
I’m cutting an SD project on FCP (using DV PAL anamorphic as my capture and sequence pre-set).
The company I am working for want to use Baselgiht at a nearby post house for the final grade.
The post house are telling me that they have to conform the project in an Avid before going to the Baselight, and in doing so, the Avid will lose all the scaling and cropping info that I put on to clips (there’s quite a bit of picture-in-picture/split-screen in the project).
They want me to create a new sequence pre-set (1024 x 576 square pixels) and re-create all the picture in picture bits in that pre-set to have them import seamlessly in to the Avid. Otherwise, they say that the info will not carry across.
That seems like a lot of extra work.
Does anyone have a better workflow for doing this?
Am I better doing the online and grade in FCP/Color and just forgetting about the Baselight? Only thing is that I am using a system without an AJA box or similar – I’m just on a software only FCP, digitizing by firewire.
A PDF that I found – https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/pdf/datasheets/FL-BL-DS-0256-Baselight.pdf – said that you can “Conform using AppleTM Final Cut ProTM XML EDLs” in the Baselight. Would this be the way to do it? Would that carry across all the split-screen info? Stills and video footage?
I’m based in Scotland!
Tim
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Tim Young -
3 Replies
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Hi Tim,
Is there any reason you can’t send a hard drive with an uncompressed quicktime of your locked edit? Feed an EDL into the Baselight as well (so it knows where your edits are) and begin grading.
Is re-conforming the whole show on an AVID really going to boost the quality? (it is firewire ingested SD DV, after all). If you change your sequence setting to DV50 before exporting, you’ll get a bump in image quality because everything will be rendered with 4:2:2 chroma sampling.
But if you have to do a conform on the AVID, have you tried using the Automatic Duck plugin to make an AAF?
I wish I could help more, but I don’t have any specific experience with finishing on a Baselight…
Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto -
The idea is to conform (some of) the footage at 1:1 (or equivalent). The post house set up is Avid-based, and I think that Baselight can read an Avid sequence, but not so an FCP one. Therein lies the problem!
The rushes are a mixture of DigiBeta, DV and HDV. It’s been digitized by firewire at either DV PAL resolution or the HDV. Oh, and I’ve got some XDCAM EX stuff for good measure too!
The problem that the online guys were having was that there are a number of stills in the programme that I have put in to split screen sequences along with video footage.
What they say is that Automatic Duck can’t take all of the keyframe information over to the Avid, unless I re-create all my split-screen stuff in a sequence created with a 1024 x 576 frame size in the sequence pre-sets, and I also have to put all of my still images in to a frame that is 1024x 576 in Photoshop and then crop them in FCP as I use them.
It all seems a bit “cart before horse”, when FCP does a pretty good job of importing stills and allowing you to move them about easily in the timeline. And the fact that my FCP won’t play back a 1024×576 sequence without rendering is a real pain.
Maybe I’m just plain wrong to hope for an easy path to outputting the programme, but there must be an easier way???
Tim
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Tim Young -
[The rushes are a mixture of DigiBeta, DV and HDV. It’s been digitized by firewire at either DV PAL resolution or the HDV. Oh, and I’ve got some XDCAM EX stuff for good measure too! ]
I didn’t realize you had all this mixed footage… now I see the need for the online!
IMHO, I think it is a little unreasonable that the post house wants you to re-create your material with a new sequence setting, just so the keyframes will translate. It’s THEIR job to do the conform, not yours. Unless they are giving you a freebie; in which case you should be bending over backwards to make their lives easier 🙂
In my experience, online editors expect they will have to manually recreate much of the graphics done in the offline cut. And isn’t this what we pay them to do: to bring an extra level of polish to the material?
But I suppose you could export just your split screen stills elements (with the video elements disabled) as a quicktime with an alpha channel, and they could drop it in their timeline. Might be worth a shot if they are at wits end trying to recreate your graphics.
Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto
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