Media Manager still broken in 5.0.3

[Samuel Frazier]

Getting back to the speed issues, I typically use Boris Red as a filter inside FCP to do my speed changes (it looks much better by the way). Does using Red like this still cause problems with the media manager? I was just thinking it might be a potential work around and you’d get a pretty good piece of software in the deal as well.

[Bill Russell]

I online other people’s feature length documentaries on FCP. The biggest nightmare is, you can’t force (and shouldn’t need to) the filmmakers to do the four thousand constrictive work arounds on stills, speed changes, file naming, on and on (which, by the way STILL don’t guarantee success), especially since the process of editing a complex story documentary can involve hundreds of hours of varied media and months or often years of editing, re-editing, finessing, changing, the same project — an long, fluid, painful artistic process — before it comes in for online.

I have onlined projects for HBO, PBS, Arte, BBC, Discovery, History Channel, more…. and NEVER once have I had a project come in that does not have at least a few time-consuming MM issues that need to be addressed. I’m not being dramatic. I. have. never. seen. a. successful. media. management. of. a. feature. documentary. (And only a half to third of the time, something like that, on every other type of project that comes in.) A problematic part is trying to sell the idea of onlining the native show, but being unable to predict how long it may take thanks to FCP MM.

But to get back to the point, it is apparent that the problem is database level. For instance…

I was on a tight deadline for an indy documentary to air on PBS.

Chapter One: The media managed show came in unusable. There was simply no way to swap in all the correct shots, fix all the graphics and speed changes, even working side by side with the editor. It was hundreds of problems, just too much. So….

Chapter Two: At 1 AM I drove from Santa Monica to Highland Park, awakened the filmmaker, raided her office and brought in all the original hard drives, a chain of about five firewire drives plus two internal drives, also copied over all the music and photos stored on the Desktop. No sleeping that night. I copied all the media to a Huge and commenced with an hour long re-linking process (good God, “all files in relative path” is only good downward, and only good for the moment FCP is in that directory. I’ve seen this many times: when FCP leaves — and it leaves after the one file it is looking for at the moment — then returns to that directory, it has forgotten it was there. VERY annoying, my Apple friends. Oh yeah, and of course, how come *I* can often find files using Finder’s search, yet FCP cannot seem to locate them?) And guess what? The re-linking was messed up in all kinds of new ways. Clips were simply wrong, others had edit points moved, the whole show knocked out of sync, a big mess. Not fixable — this was a complex, nearly two hour show, no time to laboriously repair. Anyway, without the editor anymore, I wouldn’t know where to begin. So…

Chapter Three: I hooked up all the original drives to my system, revisted relinking hell. No better. Interestingly enough, different again (why? I dunno, but its a bad sign). Unusable. I’m running out of time.

Chapter Four: So…. I returned to the filmmaker’s house. I took her computer. I restored the internal and firewire drives, installed our SDI hardware. Painfully slow machine, but thank God, I finally had the original show. I color corrected that, dumped to digibeta, delivered and passed tech. A very long expensive sleepless week that was.

Post Script. Yes, FCP 5 is better. But the fix seems to be a kluge. So many of MM’s errors in 4.x had to do with FCP not knowing how to handle keyframes when full media extents changed. In 4.x you could reliably expect a two hour movie (of picture only, audio tracks still often didn’t consolidate correctly, as FCP MM copied the associated picture of the audio used) to MM down to around 20 GB. Not so in FCP5. FCP5 seems to error on the side of keeping media extents. Shows can be three or four times or more the inherent size of actual media used in the edit, depending. Errors do occur sometimes. Much less, but not THAT much less. Geeez.

I love FCP. I accomplish grand feats with it. However, I feel about FCP5 the way I feel about 21st century Democrats. They have all the advantages; they reliably squander them. For all that grey matter the other side lacks, Democrats haven’t an ounce of common sense. Sure, Avid is an expensive, closed, awkward, proprietary, mobby, snobby system. But guess what…. I’m currently editing a DV25 down-convert of an HD narrative theatrical feature. No way I’d leave it in the hands of FCP MM — I’m just too tired. I’m cutting it on my Avid Mojo. If you don’t need to capture or output SDI (there’s big ol’ gotcha), a PC-based Avid system can be cheap, predictable, real-time, rock solid. Don’t ask me how I’m voting next year. But here’s a clue: it’ll be Sisyphean.

“THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” –

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