FCP7 Best strategy for creating subclips with head/tail

[Tom Wolsky]

That’s exactly what the extend marker function does. It creates a tail to the marker to mark an end point. When you make that into a subclip, the subclip runs from the head of the marker to the end of the tail and not to the next marker. Again remember to keep markers very loose.

Am I right in thinking you’re shooting continuously without stopping and starting the camera?

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Andy Johnson-laird]

Check out Singular Softwares Pluraleyes. It syncs everything up like magic!

As I understand it, it uses the audio data to move video into sync. Unfortunately for me, one of the three cameras is on an eight foot boom and, to minimize the counterbalancing required, I remove the electronic viewfinder and on-camera microphone so there is no audio.

Regards
Andy

Forensic Software/Internet/Image Analyst
Portland, Oregon

[Andy Johnson-laird]

but where does the subclipping you originally described come into this workflow?

Usually I chop out large chunks of “dead air” on the original camera clips just to keep the timeline shorter before I let sequenceLiner “do its thing” — so that’s where I first encountered the problem.

But it seems to occur more often when I’m doing short form editing with one or two cameras and want to position clips at places on the timeline different from the embedded time code.

But then I kept wondering how on earth can you make subclips with head/tail if you use markers and you have, say, three markers in a row, delimiting two contiguous clips? So I kept searching the fora and reading the FCP manual, with the nagging thought that it must be me not understanding FCP.

Regards
Andy

Forensic Software/Internet/Image Analyst
Portland, Oregon

[Andy Johnson-laird]

That’s exactly what the extend marker function does. It creates a tail to the marker to mark an end point. When you make that into a subclip, the subclip runs from the head of the marker to the end of the tail and not to the next marker.

Aha! Now that’s something else about which I was completely ignorant, Tom. (There’s an ever increasing number of things about which I’m completely ignorant, these days).

Thanks for that. I’ll experiment with markers some more. What I’ll need to try is something like this where I extend the Marker 1 to form a tail that actually overlaps the start of Marker 2 (see below where “TT” is tail and “===” is the marker extension:

………. M1====TT
…………………….M2====TT
==========================
Not sure whether FCP will allow an extended marker to overlap with the start of another marker. Nevertheless, you’ve given me some ideas to try — for which thanks!

Again remember to keep markers very loose.

Understood. The issue, as you can doubtless see, is where the are two subclips, one right after the other in the master clip.

Am I right in thinking you’re shooting continuously without stopping and starting the camera?

For the long form work I do, yes. The Canon FS-CV allows for about six hours of recording. I typically run the cameras non-stop except when there’s a break of more than five minutes.

For the short form work, I’ll stop more frequently, usually so that we can tweak the set, etc.

Thanks for the ideas.
Regards
Andy

Forensic Software/Internet/Image Analyst
Portland, Oregon