Managing a feature lenghth project

[Andy Mees]

best recommendation would be to get a copy of forum leader Shane Ross’s Creative COW Master Series tutorial DVD entitled “Getting Organized in Final Cut Pro” … organizing FCP projects is his special ability !

https://store.creativecow.net/p/63/getting_organized_in_final_cut_pro

[David Roth weiss]

Is the project a feature length narrative project, typically with a shooting ratio between 3:1 to 10:1; or a feature length documentary, which could easily have a shooting ratio of 50:1 to as much as 500:1?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[David Mcgiffert]

Hey David,

Not to hi-jack the posts, but I’ve worked on theatrical release
features that shot a million, two-hundred thousand feet for
a two hour film…the assistant editor’s on that one had their
hands full.

Back to the thread; you are smart to ask at the beginning of your
project how to best organize it. Shane’s DVD which I own, is a great
start.

Another thing I have started doing is a basic split between all
recorded media, which I keep on a second (media only), drive,
and the rest of the Project material, which I keep in a Project Folder
on my boot drive…that one contains everything else in the project: graphics, sound files other then the sync sound etc. I
think I first saw this basic method from a Larry Jordan lecture and
so far it seems to be a pretty good way to start a project.

Good luck it gets interesting…

David

[David Roth weiss]

[David McGiffert] “I’ve worked on theatrical release features that shot a million, two-hundred thousand feet for a two hour film…the assistant editor’s on that one had their hands full.”

Of course there are exceptions to every rule, and of course there directors who are perfectionists who can get away with murder. But typically, 3:1 to 10:1 would cover the vast majority of narrative features. Meanwhile, a good wildlife doco can easily come in at 500:1.

However, that’s really besides the point, the real question is, does Crispy foresee having several hundred hours of material, or just one hundred hours?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Boyd Mccollum]

Apple has a couple of articles on Walter Murch’s and Sean Cullen’s workflow for both Cold Mountain and Jarhead. There’s even a newer one with Murch talking about working with Coppola on Youth Without Youth. You may get a couple of useful ideas.

Here’s the Youth Without Youth link:

https://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/coppola_murch/

Boyd
“Go slow to go fast”

[Christopher Tay]

Hi David,

At the moment I’m just gathering advise from experienced users like yourself so that I can feedback to my customers whom are planning to embark on projects of this scale in future.

I do have a customer at the moment and they are editing a 90mins animated feature film and their project size grew to about 90MB in size and it crashes often especially during rendering.

There are 5 reels in this single project and we’ve since split them into 5 different projects, which cut it down to 20MB per project. Each reel has a number of nested sequences as well.

However if we do a long render, it very often crashes. Another customer who was doing another feature film told me that when he tried to render the entire 1 and half hour sequence, FCP reported a “Out of Memory” error.

Is it a bad practise to set FCP to render a long sequence, say more than 1 hour long ?

-chrispy

[David Roth weiss]

Chrispy,

I think everyone has different experiences with long timelines and big projects, much of which I think has to do with different hardware configurations and different capturing and logging practices. The people I know who have the most problems use loads of daisy-chained firewire drives and simply capture their video assets to drives that have free space. Meanwhile, the people I know with good raid arrays and who have good project management skills, just don’t seem to have as many issues.

Personally, I’ve had very good luck so far cutting long-form projects without having to break everything down into multiple projects and multiple reels. On the other hand, some folks always work that way.

I have a suspicion that nesting can play havoc with bigger projects because of some FCP database issues that seem to be compounded as projects grow. Perhaps this is why your customer is having issues.

As others have mentioned, Shane’s DVD has some really great project management ideas.

I hope this helps…

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Boyd Mccollum]

[Christopher Tay] ”
However if we do a long render, it very often crashes. Another customer who was doing another feature film told me that when he tried to render the entire 1 and half hour sequence, FCP reported a “Out of Memory” error.”

You may want to delete all your render files and then rerender from scratch. You could also use FCP rescue to trash your preference files

As for the out of memory error (or the crashing for that matter), this is something that needs to be explored more in-depth and a simple statement about rendering giving the error message could have multiple causes so it really doesn’t say much without more information, including what system he’s working on, what his sequence and render settings are, or even how full his boot drive is and how he’s managing his files on his hard drives, etc.

I’m working with a 45 minute project that is close to 200 MB and I have 9 nests on the timeline, and while it takes a little longer to open, I don’t have any problems with it. I also recently did some online work for an 80 minute documentary on a single processor G5 with no issues, except for long long renders, as well.

One thing you need to check is to see what your render settings are. If you are rendering out at a higher codec for filters/graphics/color correction purposes you could suddenly be eating up tons of Gigs really fast.

Another suggestion, especially at a fine cut stage is to render as you go along. On the old G5, I worked in Safe RT and rendered as needed. Sped things up at the end.

[Christopher Tay] ”
Is it a bad practise to set FCP to render a long sequence, say more than 1 hour long ?
“

Not that I’m aware of or have experienced. I’d really look to make sure there aren’t any outside issues/bad practices going on before I would make a statement like that.

Boyd
“Go slow to go fast”