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FCPX Came through in a big way
I wanted to share about my experience with FCPX, I’ve used it on a couple projects and have found it both frustrating and amazing…there are good things and bad things. I can’t wait to see where this software goes in the future.
Anyway, we have a project for a meeting that is going to have a screen that is 6:1 aspect ratio. The pixel dimensions are 6750×1080. We really want to run fullscreen live video (not motion graphics) over the entire width of the screen at one point during the meeting. We looked at what camera could physically produce 6750 pixels wide. Because of some other reasons, we were looking at the Alexa vs Epic. The Alexa doesn’t record as many pixels, but you can record ARRI RAW vs the EPIC, which records more pixels but from the research I’ve done, it’s gone through a debayering process which isn’t as “pure” as the RAW from the ARRI.
However, neither of these cameras can record the full resolution I need…so we have to scale.
RED EPIC – 5120 to 6750 is a scale of 132%
ARRI ALEXA – 2880 to 6750 is a scale of 234%Now, I immediately looked at these scales and was leaning towards the smaller amount of scale. But my team was discussing raw vs compressed and that we might be close if not comparable. There was a desire to use the Alexa if it would hold up.
SO – now I had recordings, but I had to render out 1920 windows at the scaled resolution to test these. I was able to use GlueTools to access ARRI RAW in FCP7, I could also access it in DaVinci.
My problem was when we needed to render out 5K and drop it into a 1920 window at a scale of 134. DaVinci won’t work in 5K without an extra hardware card. So in came FCPX. I was able to run my test on my macbook pro and ended up determining that the EPIC at a lower scale is higher quality than ARRI RAW at higher scale.
We now have our technical base behind us and we can now get creative with this bizarre aspect screen! I just wanted to share…it’s going to be an interesting project! 🙂
-Jason
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2 Replies
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Especially with the new R3D support in FCP X, I think it has become one of the best options of an NLE to work with R3D (having automated proxies made, that connect back with one click, exporting 5K, …).
Let us know how the project goes, seems interesting!
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More evidence that in the FCP-X original short list of software goals – Apples software team valued extremely high quality foundational plumbing over backwards compatibility and were willing to dump legacy compromises like the original “all QuickTime compatible” construction that was critical a decade ago – but not so much any longer.
Right now, X can be seen as very high quality “sports car” editing software.
Certainly not suitable for every transportation task. But great fun to take out when the weather and trip fits.
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