Known Issues. Enough is enough already! Wake up Apple.

[Aaron Neitz]

You’re probably going to get flamed by some diehards, but I’m totally with you.

Makes me wonder – Color is great and all, but I would rather spend the $500 upgrade on some improvements to the core app that Studio is all about.

Media Manager has been completely broken for YEARS.

I said it before, I was at a “special event” at NAB for AICE editors where we sat with Apple “techs” and previewed the new Final Cut. When I presented problems that us editors deal with, I got a lot of “uh, uh… hey look at this Color program! You can even work in 32 float!” Great…. but what about Media Manager, any improvements?

[Walter Biscardi]

[Cre8inator] “It seems simple enough.
Why isn’t it happening?”

Because of the file structure built into this product. Apple laid their bed when they set up the file management structure and in order to actually completely fix the Media Manager and give us something that would work much simpler (See Media 100) would require a complete overhaul of the software from the ground up.

So it’s not nearly as simple as it sounds. Trust me, I’ve been complaining to Apple about the Media Manager since the first time I used it. It’s something we avoid here at all costs.

Here’s how it should work. Edit your offline. Duplicate your Offline timeline. Select your new online resolution. Batch Capture all the video in your timeline to the new online resolution. ONLY the video in your timeline, not the other four hours of material you captures. Color Grade and Master to Tape.

This is how it worked in Media 100, quite simple really.

The only thing you can do now is fill out a Feedback form on the Apple site, which they do read. Apple also follows this very forum and all the other Apple forums on the Cow because they do get a lot of a good feedback from everyone here.

But unfortunately because Final Cut Pro will most likely never change its file structure, we’ll probably always be stuck with Media Manager. My only hope is that they will give us some sort of alternative Offline / Online procedure like I described above as an option.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Jamie Pickell]

Walter,

What is your offline to online strategy? Due to the short turn around of the show I cut, I do everything in 10-bit and never offline so I haven’t had to deal with these headaches. But now I have some editors working off site and in the facility that are doing offlines on other projects and we are running into headaches in the online process because we’ve been using the Media Manager tool. Right now everyone is on local storage, but the facility is thinking of taking the few FCP edit stations and giving them shared storage ala XSan and FinalCut Server and adding more FCP stations to replace some of the Avids.

The current model they run in the Avids is to offline on MediaComposters or Adrenalines and then online in a Symphony or DS system. Supposedly the process is “flawless”, or at the very least they know how to avoid potential pitfalls. If they switch over to FCP, what is the best model in order to do the offline to online process?

Yours and anyone else’s thoughts are much appreciated.
Thank you.

Jamie
Dual 2.5 G5
10.4.9
FCP 5.1
Kona 2
XRaid

[Walter Biscardi]

[Jamie] “What is your offline to online strategy?”

We don’t. We simply have very very large hard drive arrays and simply capture everything to online.

If we have a massive project come in, say 40 – 60 hours for a documentary, then I would bring in everything at DV, then use the Media Manager to Copy everything in the timeline to the new project and use it.

But ONLY then.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Aaron Neitz]

I’ve done loads of offline to online’s with FCP in the last couple years from editors outside my company. Here’s my method:

I typically ask for a copy of their FCP project file. I’ll go through their edit and pull all the problem clips to a high video layer. Then dupe that sequence and delete all those problem clips. These are typically freeze frames, speed ramps, titles, etc…. Then I’ll do a Media Manager on that sequence and it PROBABLY does a good job at creating a new project with unused media deleted and ready for a batch digitize. As soon as you hit “batch capture” you can usually see if there are missing reel names, or if it wants to digitize 30 hours for a 10 minute sequence…. at which point I go through the bins and try and locate the offending clip. Keep doing this until I’ve got a sequence which I can batch capture. And then go back to those original problem clips and bring them over by hand.

and sometimes when it just gets too rough, I make layer by layer EDL’s and bring those in. You lose a lot of data that way, but it’s faster to recreate things sometimes than spend hours trying to get Media Manager to bring things over properly.

Having said that, an offline which is straightforward cuts and dissolves will typically Media Manger OK right off the bat.

Time consuming as all get out. But it works and I haven’t pulled any hair out in the last year.

[Jeremy Garchow]

People will flame the media manager. The media Manager actually works. You have to hold it’s hand through it’s little text journey, but it does work. What’s busted is the XML can’t really hold/decipher/translate the speed changes. IF you don’t have any speed changes, the media manager works and works well, you just have to know what buttons to push and boxes to check and leave unchecked.

The work around, if you do have speed changes, is to copy paste the normal clip (with no speed change) into another timeline, or at the end of your current timeline. That way, you will have the proper ins and outs of that clip and you might have to rebuild the speed change in your online timeline. If you do decide to paste them in another timeline, be sure to media manage that timeline as well.

I constantly go from native formats (dv50, dvcproHD) to Uncompressed 10 bit (and now I have been folding ProResHQ into the mix). I really never have any problems due to a media managed sequence. It’d be nice if I didn’t have to make a whole new project when I recapture, but that’s the way it was designed and intended to work so that’s the way I tend to use it, I guess.

Jeremy

[Chris Borjis]

as far as someone recapturing say 30 minutes of selects and getting all 10 hours capturing again, isn’t that what “make independant clip” is for?

[Zak Mussig]

Freeze fames have been jacked up forever in FCP. Is there a real reason, from a workflow standpoint, to have a freeze frame be independant from the source clip? Making them a product of the sequence and locking them at the resolution of the sequence when they were made seems to make their use pretty limited.

With re-timing built into FCP and Motion, it makes more sense to me to have the freeze frame command give you a re-times clip whose start and stop frames are the same. It could be whatever length you need and would play nice with Motion and the Media Manager.

Maybe speed / re-timing support is on deck from FCP XML Interchange yada yada version 5. It sounds like the issue isn’t the Media Manager so much as how FCP handles some of these things and some missing features in the XML format.

Zak

[Herb Sevush]

Borjis –

Yes, I guess that’s what it’s for … but it doesn’t work that way unless you then drag the now “independent” clips into a new project and then run media mangler from there. Otherwise “make independent” is a wee bit useless.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Sean Oneil]

It’s a huge problem. There are tons of know issues and they don’t fix them or even acknowledge them. The worst are the simple design errors they don’t fix. Like the idiotic design of what happens when you put 486 clips on a 480 timeline (it scales it instead of cropping it).

I’m with Jeremy on Media Manager. I think it’s great You can do anything and everything with it if you know how it works. They can fix whatever they want in it. The choose not to. Simple as that. There is not some weird XML limitation. They just haven’t spent enough on development and QC.

The worst aspect of it all is that the problems aren’t acknowledged by them. If you use MM and the clip has speed changes, it shoudl warn you “Speed changes cannot work with this process, press OK to continue anyways, or press Cancel”.

When you nest a sequence that has a multiclip, it should warn you of possible problems. When you export to Color, it shoud say “Sorry, Multiclip sequences cannot be sent to Color”.

Instead, it lets you do all these things that don’t work. It’ really annoying. It’s like they don’t want to admit bugs or limitations. I honestly wish Final Cut Studio was a product of a 3rd party developer.