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media manager mania
Hey Folks,
(Please forgive the long explanation… but it kind of needs it.)
I’m prepping an edit to send to DaVinci. Timeline is ProRes 4444 1080 23.976. But the timeline itself is quite a potpourri! I’ve got h264, DVCPRO HD, AVC-Intra, graphics in ProRes 4444, 720p stuff, and ALSO a bunch of stuff shot at 59.94. All of it is quite mixed together and almost impossible to separate out.
DaVinci is of course going to be much happier (and so will my colorist!) if it gets an xml linked to nice tidy ProRes 4444 source files all at 23.976, all at the same rez.
So, I thought I’d use Media Manager to cut things down to size. But if I select “recompress media” and select ProRes 4444 so that the new source files will all be consistent, I’m afraid that FCP will ALSO re-render the stuff on the timeline that is ALREADY ProRes 4444. High-end graphics stuff so I’d rather not do that.
The crazy thing is, with my timeline all rendered right now, technically everything has ALREADY been rendered in ProRes 4444 1080p 23.976. Is there way to get Media Manager to just snag the files from the Render folder, and then snag my footage that is already ProRes 4444 with out re-rendering?
Sorry for the big long explanation. Any thoughts would be much appreciated!
thanks,
Tom
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13 Replies
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The media manager will not locate files that are already ProRes 4444, and ignore them. It will recompress them as well.
Nope, this is quite a mess you have here, and it all could have EASILY been avoided, if you did things properly in the first place…meaning convert all the footage to a uniform codec BEFORE you started editing. Or at least color coded all the ProRes 4444 footage so that you could easily separate it out from the rest of the herd. Editing with H.264 native? For shame…
Nope, you have a lot of prep work to do here. Or you pay the colorist to do it…whichever you deem is cheaper. I suspect you are.
Shane
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Totally agree with Shane. Not only that, you are going to have to conform the 59.94 to 23.976.
How much of your timeline is 444? Is it only because you need the alpha channel for graphics?
Bringing all of the rest of the footage to 444 seems a bit overkill to me, but perhaps I’m wrong.
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Yes, this project has been fraught with madness. 🙁
Might one possibility be to export the whole monster as one big ProRes 4444 beast and let DaVinci use the xml to chop it up?
thanks again folks
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Sure, or you could chop it up and then send a movie and XML. This isn’t ideal, though.
Still doesn’t help your 59.94 to 23.976 problem.
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Fortunately, after much pain and anguish, I’ve been able to edit the 59.94 stuff onto the 23.976 timeline starting with the proper A frame for each clip. They play like a charm and with the right pulldown. So when I do export the timeline everything actually looks pretty good, with the whole big movie file at ProRes 1080 23.976.
It will be a bummer to to not be able to exchange updated xml’s back and forth with the colorist, but I guess I’ll have to sacrifice that and be 1000% locked!
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So the 59.94 stuff is 24p with pulldown? Is it 1080i or 720p?
Why not do it right and remove the pulldown?
Do you have an external monitor that you are watching this on?
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It would give me great joy to do the pulldown right! I was here on the cow years ago when the project started to try and do just that.
Some is 24p and some isn’t. But here’s the problem… It was captured from directly from DVCPROHD tape and digitized without the flags and at 59.94.
I could discover absolutely no combination of tools that would properly do the pulldown. If you have any ideas on that, I’d love to hear them! CinemaTools thinks the files are SUPPOSED to be 59.94 slomo, even though basically every other frame is a duplicate, and for the life of me I cannot get it to pull out the duplicates, even when I specify which frame is the A frame, etc.
I just got lucky in FCP when I noticed that if put my in-point on the right frame, it played with no stutter! Nuts!
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So it’s 720p?
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Yes, bumped to 1080 on the timeline. Some is AVC-Intra full raster and some is DVCPRO HD anamorphic. Much of the rest of the project is 1080 native.
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Any idea how the 720p tape material was captured? Was it via FireWire? Capture card?
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