Frustration with FCP and Canon MOV transcoding

[Bob Flood]

Hey Alf

I have been pulling my hair out about similar issues. I have a project that three people have worked on prior to my involvement and guess waht? I am dealing with three different codecs in my timelines!

Workflows are relative to the application. the FCP workflow isn’t the same as the Avid workflow etc etc. Workflows are also filled with little foibles i like to call “gotcha’s!” ie for example, the default conversion in Log and Transfer (which I hate) for Canon is Pro Res 4444 and if you dont check that? GOTCHA! you will have Huge files unneccasirly. (sic)

With the medium of text ie this forum, the emotional tone of a post is lost. I guess thats why there are “emoticons”. From my experience no one responding to you was meaning anything like you were interpreting, and belive me I have seen some nasty flying around here! Even though this is an FCP forum, many of us are “platform agnostic” ie we dont care who makes what, as long as it does the job efficiently. Many are the days when I KNOW an Avid would suit me better.

AS for this whole transcoding hub bub? with FCP you have to do it sometime, whether its when you start the job or when you finish is up to the user. Also I am not surprised that the Original estimate from Compressor was some 13 hours. The estimation capacity of most software is pretty lame. you are better off either doing some time tests yourself, or looking for time results on the Internet.

Hope this helps. and as my old bubbe used to say “it could be worse!”

“I like video because its so fast!”

Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc.

[Al Bergstein]

Thanks to David and Bob for the responses, as I hadn’t turned off my email notifications I saw them.

Bob, I totally get your points. I did download the EOS plug in for L&T, and noticed the 4444, but hadn’t yet used it (I worked on Vegas yesterday instead of FCP). I didn’t see that I could change the setting so that is good to know. I’ll try today.

As to compressor, it finally got down to less than 4 hours, so I think I would have to say that it is a *tool* but one that is worse case scenario in this instances, this said for the sake of anyone searching for a similar answer on this forum in the future. Given that I did manage, as mentioned, to get the whole job completed on a different platform in far less time than compressor took to convert, I didn’t try the EOS plug in. But I have clients and partner filmmakers that will require me to work with them in FCP, so knowing the shortcuts is worth the time online. But not the frustration. (G).

having worked in the computer trade for many decades, I’ve seen flame wars on email since the beginning (it was actually much worse then). And I know that given the partisan nature of any forum the mere mention of alternatives makes some people see red. I’ve got a thick skin but having been on this forum for almost a year, I thought it was better than that. Sigh…

Anyway, thanks for your rational post. I’ll continue to choose the right tool for the right job, given that I am fortunate enough to be able to do that. Now I’m going to view a seminar this morning online on “Killer Titles in FCP” by the Boris crowd, led by Larry Jordan, a person I regard as having one of the necessary books for FCP (Power Tools), it’s saved my bacon on more than one time, and saved me enormous amounts of time. I’m not sure why Apple doesn’t include his information into their documentation. They certainly seem to be the leaders in 3rd party tools like this on both FCP and Vegas (I assume others too). Maybe one of these days I’ll try Avid, or the new ‘supertool’ that is due out as shareware this month..

As an aside, we had a monster wind storm here last night, and my battery backup saved my bacon, and my systems. Worth remembering that mother nature doesn’t wait for you to save your work.

Alf

[David Keslick]

Alf,

You may want to check out DVFilm EPIC plugin. There is a version for FCP and a version for Vegas. It allows you to start editing while it builds realtime files in the background. No waiting for transcoding to finish. A real time saver.

https://dvfilm.com/epic/index.htm
https://dvfilm.com/epic/mac/index.htm

Dave Keslick
DVFilm.com