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FCP X destroys my audio
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[Oliver Peters] “Not to mention that the timeline with all the freaking connected clips for audio and video is a complete embarrassment!!!!!!!!!!! “
Can you post a screen shot?
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
[Oliver Peters] “Actually, I’ll probably do the next job of any complexity with Media Composer.”
Now Oliver….does this have anything to do with being on the advisory board of the Avid Customer Association? Did you have to drink the purple Kool-Aid?
😉
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
[Jeremy Garchow] “Mmm. No. This is FCPX specific, and it’s not the FCP7 crackle, this is blast you out of the seat, WTF was that? type of noise. It’s just like you are describing, but it’s in real time over hardware, not in the export.”
Wow. I’ve never had *that* in live playback. Sheesh! FWIW – here’s a screen grab of the waveform.
[Jeremy Garchow] “Color isn’t doing it for me anymore. I was hoping for Speedgrade, but that’s still a moving target for now. It has to be Resolve for the moment.”
Well, for real surgical corrections, Resolve is the best, but most feature and basic spots and corporate projects don’t need a zillion nodes. In fact for most of the latter, I’ve been happy to stay inside FCP X and use the Color Board or Hawaiki or something else.
The last feature I graded was shot on Alexa and edited in FCP 7. The client wanted a definite “look”. Between director and DP, I ultimately went through 4 processes: Color, Resolve, Color again and FilmConvert.
I find that the “rooms” design of Color is easier and faster to quickly move up and down the timeline and apply adjustments, than doing this with nodes in Resolve. I can look at the timeline and know precisely which Secondary was used to create a part of the look and simply slide those around very quickly. The Resolve UI is a mess if you don’t work with a control panel and definitely not optimized for dual displays. Plus if you are working on a system using an AJA card, it’s useless.
There’s a lot about SpeedGrade CC that I like, but some far, the whole Direct Link thing with the Lumetri filters is a total performance dog. Maybe after a few updates it will be optimized. However, operationally, SGCC is a lot closer to Color than Resolve.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Scott Witthaus] “Can you post a screen shot?”
Sure.
I will ultimately clean this up after the cut is locked by the client. By “clean up” I mean, remove the disabled clips and overwrite most back to the main storyline.
I know some here like the magnetic timeline and connected clips. I don’t. I’ll take tracks any day over this. I dislike the whole “move out of the way to make room” paradigm. The lack of ability to overwrite a connected clip creates this vertical clutter. To avoid it, you have to use a workaround of secondary story lines. Plus when you move chunks around, you have to pay extra attention to the connections and often move connecting points to avoid inadvertent moves.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Scott Witthaus] “does this have anything to do with being on the advisory board of the Avid Customer Association? “
LOL. Actually it’s the other way around. There’s a lot in X that I’d like to see Avid embrace.
The truth of the matter is that since the intro of X, I’ve approached every job weighing whether to cut it in 7, X, PPro or MC. Most of the time I’ve gone with X. The same is true of this project.
Unfortunately, every time I feel like problems with X have settled down, I hit some sort of roadblock that boils down to problems, performance, etc. This is one of those. There is absolutely no reason this distortion should be occurring. The fact that it does, points to some sort of engineering defect in either FCP X or AV Foundations. I’m sure Apple will figure it out, but it doesn’t give me warm and fuzzies about doing more “road testing” when clients are involved.
On top of that – and even in spite of all the 3rd party utilities – X still doesn’t check off the “plays well with others” box. 😉
None of this means I’ll stop using X – just that I will have to be more careful and less trusting in the future. The bad news is that the options aren’t great. I don’t like projects sitting with a subscription-based product and Avid needs to modernize. So, like someone else here said the other day, we are left with choices of “stodgy, subscription or WTF”.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
I agree, we all make those choices.
Did you create a new user by any chance? I know there was that thread over on the FCP-L where a user was tearing his hair out over X doing a lot of strange things and it turned out to be a corrupt user setting. Everything is running smoothly for him now. Just a thought.
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
I see.
You know me, just love those Compound Clips. I would have CC’ed the hell out of that one!
🙂
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
[Oliver Peters] “Wow. I’ve never had *that* in live playback. Sheesh! FWIW – here’s a screen grab of the waveform.”
That is so weird that it’s in one channel. I have never seen this problem, but I guess I will look out for it.
[Oliver Peters] “Well, for real surgical corrections, Resolve is the best, but most feature and basic spots and corporate projects don’t need a zillion nodes. In fact for most of the latter, I’ve been happy to stay inside FCP X and use the Color Board or Hawaiki or something else.”
Me too. I hear you, I don’t want to complicate anything more than it needs to be, but Resolve does help. For primary/secondary without and keying/tracking FCPX works well. Resolve allows us to go a bit deeper.
While Color is supper straight forward, it has trouble with 4k sources, the LUT implementation is all or nothing (not clip based), and making changes are a real pain as keyframes are very hard to edit. The tracking is just OK, and matte creation could be better.
I also think that while the rooms make sense, it is really hard to rearrange the stacking order once something is done. Since you can’t copy/paste room information to the next room (like a secondary to another secondary, or primary out to primary in) it makes things more complicated and very time consuming. If you don’t have a super set plan going in, or something changed midstream, Color has some rigid handcuffs without starting a whole new Grade, where in Resolve I would be able to simply start other nodes and connect it all back up in the order that I need.
Plus the XML jockey in and out of Color is getting old.
[Oliver Peters] “There’s a lot about SpeedGrade CC that I like, but some far, the whole Direct Link thing with the Lumetri filters is a total performance dog. Maybe after a few updates it will be optimized. However, operationally, SGCC is a lot closer to Color than Resolve.”
I really like the 12 different control levels (master/shadows/mids/highlights, and then the shadows/mids/highlights on each of those). The keying methods are pretty good, and I like the widget.
The workflow is stodgy, though, I agree. I hope it can get a little better. I also like the layers in Speedgrade that can be rearranged, and also you can control the strength of each layer. This is much more control than Color gives, but I know what you’re saying. Where Ae is layered compositor and Nuke is nodal, Speedgrade is layered with Resolve being nodal. These are both valid, just different.
Jeremy
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[Scott Witthaus] “I know there was that thread over on the FCP-L where a user was tearing his hair out over X doing a lot of strange things and it turned out to be a corrupt user setting.”
Nope. I posted stuff about that in an earlier thread. It’s related to user pref lock files. It can be fixed without a new user setting by deleting the contents of the User/Preferences/ByHost folder.
But, since you bring that up, this is another problem with FCP X. No other apps seem to have this same issue. And since no one can pin-point the reason for the original corruption, who’s to say you won’t corrupt the new setting a week later?
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Scott Witthaus] “I would have CC’ed the hell out of that one! “
CCs are evil. There is a CC at the head, though. CC do not correctly pass through many of the translations.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
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