FCP-X for documentaries (with details)

[Tony West]

[Andrew Kimery] “I do know the clean up is a hot button issue in the area.”

Indeed, it’s a hot button issue in many areas. I shot the film in St. Louis because I live here, but I could have easily told the same story in many states across the country.

I think you will find the film interesting Andrew and see our story in your story. I’m taking it to Dayton Ohio this weekend. Another area of the country I could have told the story in.

[Darren Roark]

Hi Shane,

I came in on this project at picture lock to do the finishing, what we ended up doing regarding the Ken Burns effect was to remove any color corrections and old schooled it by exporting master ProRes QT’s of the photo montages.

We overcut them back in the sequence so the finishing place would have the original photo in case they wanted to tweak the animations for any reason.

Not ideal but it got done.

[Darren Roark]

The slowdowns were mainly due to the limited storage speeds.

The server was hooked up via the gigabit ethernet ports on the iMac to the shared storage server as production didn’t budget for 10GE. It worked impressively well considering the limited bandwidth of around 120mb r/w.

When I hooked my Mac Pro up via a 10GE thunderbolt box it was getting 800mb read and write. I didn’t get any slowdowns even when exporting, I was able to work ahead on the next task while it was rendering without issue.

The slowdowns I did experience was when optical flow was enabled for the upscaling and frame rate conversion on the two hour long deposition tape clips as FCP X analyzes the entire clip regardless of how much you are using. The analysis files for one tape could reach 100GB! That had to be turned on before leaving for the night.

[Hendrik Martz]

“But the UI performance simply isn’t there.”

That has definately to do with 7tox. Every time I used that,the performance was awful.
Best practise:

Export from fcp7 xml > open in resolve> export from resolve as fcpx.xml (version 1.6)

Perfect translation of xml into fcpx without lag.

Note: You won’t find the source clips, just a project. You have to select the the clip in project > rightclick:”Show in browser”. Then you’ll be able to see the source clips.