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FCPx in local TV
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No disrespect meant, Andy – I’m talking from experience as well – fourteen years at an ABC affiliate which could never get out of its’ own way in terms of organizing footage – stock or otherwise. The way they found all the years of stuff on tape? The chief photo had been there for 15 or more years, and could put his hands on any shot in the morgue. The tapes were somewhat categorized on the shelves, at least by year, then a label on the tape and a log inside, so there was always a good chance of finding what you needed.
What’s required of a keyword system is someone who manages, polices, and teaches that system, to the multiple users in the facility, who have neither the time, or often the desire, to learn anything new. Maybe Fox does things right – we had a system in place which would do exactly what you’re talking about – given the time spent to create keywords, then teach the “producers” fresh out of school why they should care whether you could ever find a shot again. We didn’t have “editors”, per se – that was a secondary job for the producers, photogs, and whoever else happened to be sitting around between newscasts. I’m glad the system worked for you – but it never can without a staff which is paid enough to care whether it does. Maybe in the major markets – we were in the Boston ADI – but that didn’t help. And we were a non-union shop, which meant that there could have been plenty of cross-training to teach the fine points of the AP automation system. The employees were too busy surfing the web, congratulating each other that a package made it to air, or reading the paper, to be bothered to improve their craft.
But bear in mind that in the world where the everything had be able to be digitized for several years, there were still tape ops on every news cast. The News department was deathly afraid of changing anything which showed a semblance of working.
I’ve been out of the broadcast industry for just over two years, and even in the years I was in broadcast, I used a keyword system to successfully track hundreds of thousands of graphics on our servers. I even created and policed the folder structure on our servers, but it was an uphill battle against those who always wanted the “Teds stuff”, “My Stuff”, and other inane nomenclature. On many shifts you had to know the folder structure of the graphic artist who was off to find the elements you needed. I’m saying there’s a perfect world, and there’s reality.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
My main concern for you is enterprise level DAM for your facility. I’m making assumptions here, but since FCPX is the editor they’re looking at, I suspect that this will likely be a fairly tapeless facility shooting on either cards or discs which means long-term archive will likely be some kind of server based system. Our station was switching over from tape to this when I left.
FCPX might be able to handle a simple stock footage library using collections for day to day editing, but keeping track of years worth of stories and airchecks will require separate management software. The question is, will the two databases ever be able to talk to each other, or will it be able to read metadata tagged by FCPX? Or vice-versa even?
It may not be entirely necessary to merge those workflows since you can use a DAM to find and access footage which can then be simply added to an event for editing, but it’s something to consider long-term as FCPX matures.
andy
https://www.timesavertutorials.com
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You can enable or disable a background transcode to ProRes.
One of the things that impresses me is how well it handles AVCHD on a reasonably fast system.
It’ll also handle DSLR H.264 files as well without transcoding.I do wish it could handle XDCAM EX without a rewrap to .mov. Sony is working on that.
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[Craig Seeman] “You can enable or disable a background transcode to ProRes.
One of the things that impresses me is how well it handles AVCHD on a reasonably fast system.
It’ll also handle DSLR H.264 files as well without transcoding.
“In my experience AVCHD gets rewrapped to mov, FCPX doesn’t use anything natively unless it’s already a .mov.
It’s just a rewrap, not a transcode. AVCHD files end up being h264 .mov.
You can still edit right away as footage is being rewrapped, though which bodes well for those 20 minutes edits that have been talked about here.
I don’t know how you would have done this with FCP7 as the transcode to ProRes is a time killer.
Jeremy
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People have used the term reasonably fast system a few times. Is 2×2 3Ghz considered reasonably fast in this context?
Ben
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Ben Edwards – Freelance Filmmaker
https://www.funkytwig.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “In my experience AVCHD gets rewrapped to mov, FCPX doesn’t use anything natively unless it’s already a .mov.”
True. If I look in Original Media, the files that came from AVCHD show as .mov.
But the files that were imported as H.264 .mp4 still show as .mp4 (these are recordings from live streams that I sometimes have to work with). -
[Craig Seeman] “But the files that were imported as H.264 .mp4 still show as .mp4 (these are recordings from live streams that I sometimes have to work with).”
Very true. You could also change .mp4 to .mov and they’d still work.
I guess its hard to define AVCHD as theres a couple of iterations.
The one I have is af100 footage which is in its own MTS structure.
That needs a rewrap in my experience.
I really really hope FCPX allows non rewrapped media in a future update, and also allows the simple hires/lores transcode feature. Best of all worlds, that would be.
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Yeah make sure you have approved OpenCL graphics cards. I’m using ATI 5770 I picked up at Frys in a 2.1 MacPro (old) and it runs great. Card seems to be doing most of the work while editing.
Also re-wrapping XDCAM stuff to .mov goes pretty fast using the Sony software as a stand-alone app. I did a bunch of XDCAM 422 and it went very fast and runs great inside FCPX.
Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Irvine, California -
If we are talking UK, then Ofcom are specifying quality assessment for DVB-T as defined by the ITU for digital broadcasting (e.g., the 5 point assessment scale and various technical things). So to do fast turnaround you really need to have scopes/PPM/full quality monitoring in the edit. Is FCPX sorted for those things yet?
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Hi Ben,
Is this for one of the new Local TV channels in the UK?
What people are asking is what are you going to play it out from? i.e what format is your transmission suite working in?
FCP X can delivery Quicktime mov files which can go directly to some servers but if you want to play out to tape etc that’s a different ball game.
FCP X in this environment could work well as its very cheap and runs on cheapish computers (iMac’s etc).
For US cousins: The Local TV channels in the UK are the brain chilld of our culture secretary James Hunt, have extremely small (even by UK standards) of coverage and viewers and thus very low budgets and running costs.
Michael Sanders
London Based DP/Editor
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