FCP use in Video Production Facility

[Jase]

[lasvideo] “1. When building complicated layering of text and video do most folks:
a. Make mutiple video & layers (similar to the Media Composer environment)”

Yes. layer away.

[lasvideo] “b. Do layering in a nest when multiple elements need to be associated together (similar to
Avid DS or Smoke)”

Yes. select layers and push option c to nest. Apple click to open the nested sequence. Find it a lot more logical than Avid myself.

[lasvideo] “c. Use AE for any layering situation that demands a high degree of complexity”

Yes. It is an editing program – so is limited with compositing features. Might want to buy automatic duck if exporting lots to AE. Or convince apple they should include it in FCP 6.

[lasvideo] “2. Due to storage issues, we employ the “offline” (lo res) and “online” (hi res) approach to
project creation. Keeping in mind we tend to do high end complex compositing of video and text…
is this stuff others have done with reliability and succes? (this relates to media management)”

Media Management is not as straight forward as AVID, and takes a little while to sort out with a given workflow. The drives are cheaper than Avid tho, so we save drum hours on decks (and time) by diging hi rez.

[lasvideo] “3. Can FCP handle multiple resolutions on the same time line?”

No Problem. Scale/de-interlace with various formats/codecs to various formats/codecs is a breeze (also imports VOB file from DVD if you in a hurry – instead of ripping to a codec) If you want to get really time savy, you can render those clips to the appropriate resolution in the background in compressor(which links up to a render farm via Qmaster) to save you rendering in FCP. Very handy.

Best thing about FCP is that is very fast for an AVID editor to get up to speed on. A very logical edit system unlike I first found with AVID.

Hope this helps,
Jason.

[Tom Daigon]

Thanks Jase, I appreciate your detailed response!

[Rennie Klymyk]

[Steve C] ” It is not for weddings and home movies anymore. “

Whoa… low blow! Granted FCP has come a long way since the last century but back then it was pretty impressive too compared to speed razor, premier, media 100 and the new toaster nt that were hot at the time. It’s main drawback in version 1 was the dv only interface but when the targa component cards came out it was well beyond weddings and home movies. With a $6000.00 targa card, a G3 and fcp (about $10,000.00) you were competing with the $80,000.00 media 100 which was what everyone who couldn’t afford an avid was using. Anyone who thinks fcp was ever only usefull for home movies and weddings is confusing it with imovie1 or never really looked at it as this was during the big migration to the pc and the windows nt platform that had made it possible to try to edit video on the pc.