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FCP-X for documentaries (with details)
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[Eric Santiago] “Maybe its a conversion thing cause I too converted a FCP 7 project over to FCPX and it too was a little sluggish at the start.
New this was over a year ago and havent had to do that again, but I do have a massive feature on Premiere and will test that soon.
“Unfortunately all of my long projects have gone through some conversion or through several versions of X. Regardless of the machine I’ve been on, I have not been happy with the performance on a 90 min. timeline.
In the example I gave, using my rMBP (which is fast) and no media connected, going from several clips visible to the full timeline (shift+z) in the window takes about 4 sec. That’s completely unacceptable. It’s instant in Premiere or Media Composer or FCP “classic”.
It’s experiences like these that continue to make me nervous about X, because it’s all great in the beginning. Once you get past the point of no return, the app gets very sluggish. The bottom line for me is that if the timeline isn’t lightning fast in how it responds, no amount of super-duper organizational features make up for it.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Shane Ross] “3) Still moves don’t translate to the finishing software. Which isn’t new. So one needs to either do the moves differently, or render those moves out as stand alone files and reimport and all that takes time. That was one of the biggest issues in the last online I had, going from Avid to Resolve…SO MANY STILLS. Reading this I see that in FCX, the issue remained. This is something else that needs to be addressed as stills are a big part of documentary cutting.”
That’s a strong point with Premiere. You have a render & replace function. This means you can do your move with a still or via AE and then replace this with a rendered media file. This is NOT a standard render file, rather it’s a new piece of media that’s created and imported into the project. It replaces the still (or AE comp) on the timeline. Through Adobe’s XMP linking, you can still select the clip and “edit original” to go back and change or update it. Then replace again with separate media. So you get the best of both worlds and the timeline doesn’t bog down.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
OK Herb, I’ll play.
Hit me with the top few aspects of Premiere Pro that have changed edit workflow for you in the last 3 years.
I’m ready to learn about how they have altered their approach to re-imagine how editing should be improved for the current, almost exclusively file-based era.
I’m ready to learn.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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[Bill Davis] “I’m ready to learn about how they have altered their approach to re-imagine how editing should be improved for the current, almost exclusively file-based era.”
Can we NOT? Not in this thread, at least. Because this topic is how it is used in DOCUMENTARY television, where yes, there is tapeless media, all the current interviews and b-roll, but a huge bulk of the work includes tape based footage…betaSP, S-VHS, all SD stuff. And the issues and solutions surrounding the need to capture that footage….and how to deal with getting digital stock footage (captured from tape) with TC burn, and replacing it with master stock footage, also tapeless.
Let’s try to stick to the workflow issues posed in THIS field of work, as that is the topic of this thread. If you want to discuss tapeless only workflows and compare FCX to Premiere…please do that in another thread.
What I’d like to see is how one would solve the issues facing me in my workflows…as this app was used in my field, my area of editing.
How would one deal with replacing temp stock footage with window code (a source reel say 20 min in length) when you get master footage with matching code, but in 5-10 second chunks? Is there any way to replace that other than over-cutting like we do in every other NLE?
Stills…how would you deal with doing the moves on the stills that would translate to the finishing app? Well, that was covered in the article…and a solution given, so there’s that. And I like how Oliver mentioned how Premiere solves that issue…and in a brilliant way, as I do most of my moves on stills in AE when I need to finish the show out-of-app.
How does the labelling of footage, keywording in ranges and all that, trump what Avid and Premiere does? Given the same prep time in all of them. I’m sure it does beat them…and Lumberjack helped GREATLY, as I saw.
But these are the issues I want to see discussed. THIS is the stuff that will convince me to make the switch. Not the “all tapeless” workflow, that I pretty much never ever see. Even in the reality shows I now cut, that are ALL shot tapeless, we still have stock footage that we integrate, still have tape masters because, yup, all the stuff I cut is still DOC based, and that means historical sources. Historical sources need a means of capture and input….
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
[Eric Santiago] “I do have a massive feature on Premiere and will test that soon.
“when you say “massive”??
Just curious.
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OK…a friend of mine pointed this out to me…and it’s a good point.
“The trouble with these sorts of articles is that they focus more on the fact that FCPX can edit features (with a whole bunch of third-party tools) but not so much on why it is better for this purpose than other NLEs. They seem aimed more at people already using it.”
Good point. But there were advantages…
When I started using FCP 4.5 to cut these types of shows, rather than using Avid…I had valid reasons. I used FCP 4.5 because it did a whole lot of things better than Avid did…it solved issues I had with Avid:
1) I could capture 720p from DVCPRO HD Tape, at 23.98 (from the 59.94 stream) over firewire. Avid Adrenaline, at that time, didn’t do 720p, only 1080i. And the only way to get the 720p footage into the system was via a terranex, and it would only come in at 29.97. I used FCP because it solved a huge expensive issue we had with Avid at that time.
2) I could capture the footage and work native…no offline/online needed. And no hardware for capture needed. Again, the previous show we cut that was DVCPRO HD 720p ran nearly $100,000 over budget in online due to Adrenaline not being able to do 720p.
3) Doing the moves on stills was easier and superior to how Avid did them. Retained quality, and the speed in which I could do the moves, and not needing Moving Picture…huge advantage.
4) During the editing process, the AJA Kona 3 came out and addressed an issue that we had (I happened to be in discussions with the product manager about this, as he was our consultant before we started production…before he went to AJA)…the issue of editing 720p 23.98 and needing to deliver 1080i29.97.
So when I made the switch to FCP from Avid…it was for a reason. it was to solve issues that Avid had. What I’d like to know is how did FCX solves issues that needed solving.
IN this case, the big one is keyword organization, and the ability to find footage fast. That is big…and that also required HUGE amounts of time on the AE’s part, and the implementation of a third party tool. So there was one advantage. The other is the ability to work native with some of the formats, instead of needing to convert. THAT’S the stuff I like to see. How this can be used to solve issues. WHY it’s better than the competition, under certain circumstances.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
[Shane Ross] “How would one deal with replacing temp stock footage with window code (a source reel say 20 min in length) when you get master footage with matching code, but in 5-10 second chunks? Is there any way to replace that other than over-cutting like we do in every other NLE?”
If you are using X or PPro *and* the stock footage contained audio you could try the following. When you get the temp stock footage make each clip a multicam clip and edit with it like that (multicam clips in PPro and X are basically nested sequences). When you get the master stock footage in, open up the corresponding multicam clip, drop the master on v2 (temp is on v1) use the sync by audio function to sync the master to the temp, then drop the master from v2 to v1.
Never done it quite like that but it should work.
I’m not sure if X has something like this, but if you are using the Pond5 extension in PPro you can automatically replace the proxy media from Pond5 with the master media. Obviously this only works with Pond5 footage.
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Might be worth a shot.
Pond5 is RARELY the supplier in these cases. ABCNews, Getty, CBS…news sources. All news stock footage, not generic mountain valley or city stuff.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
[James Ewart] “when you say “massive”??
Just curious.
“Over 1100 RED clips and WAV.
The rough cut finally got under 2 hours 😛
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[Shane Ross] “Pond5 is RARELY the supplier in these cases. ABCNews, Getty, CBS…news sources. All news stock footage, not generic mountain valley or city stuff.”
Right, just throwing it out there for the ‘man going over spread sheet in cubical’ crowd. 😉
It would be nice if more companies wrote plugins like Pond5’s, but I can’t imagine there’s enough financial incentive in the historical/news stock footage section to do so.
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