Movie length FCP

[David Roth weiss]

27-Mins. is nothing to sweat for FCP. 90-min. projects are actually doable. You evidently have some other issue(s).

What type of material are you editing and on what hard drive subsystem?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
http://www.drwfilms.com

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Richard Chenoweth]

Thank you Dave and David for responding.

The footage I’m using is archival old film footage. Project is set up at 720×540.
The archival b/w footage is all 4:3. Some of it was .flv I converted to .mov and
some of the archival was .mpeg 2 which I demuxed into .m2v and .aiff.

It all seemed fine until I got to a piece I got from from YouTube at about 9 minute
mark, then it suddenly got really slow.

Thank you for your help!

Richard

[David Roth weiss]

[Richard Chenoweth] “some of the archival was .mpeg 2 which I demuxed into .m2v and .aiff.”

That’s your problem. The .m2v needs to be something like dvcpro50.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
http://www.drwfilms.com

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Richard Chenoweth]

Thanks Dave and David,

I forgot to say, the “scratch disk” is a Hard Drive #3 in MacPro. The files and resources are
on Hard Drive #2 MacPro.

Would it help if scratch and files were all on same disk?

Thanks!

Richard

[David Roth weiss]

[Dave LaRonde] ” David mentions DVCPro 50, and that’s okay. You can also use FCP’s go-to codec, ProRes 422.”

DVCPro50 simply offers the smallest file size of any 4:2:2 codec. By the time video is squeezed at 25 to 1 compression just about any codec will do, but I will always choose one in 4:2:2 color space in case there are graphics and/or text elements.

ProRes really could be considered overkill, but I too use it much of the time because of it’s high-performance and because hard drive space is virtually meaningless to me.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
http://www.drwfilms.com

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Richard Chenoweth]

Hi Dave and David,

I used 720×540 because all this old footage was 4:3. And still be able to burn it into DVD format,
so maintained 720 in the horizontal.

Should I have stuck with 640×480? If I used 720×480 I’d have some black bar letterboxing.

[Richard Chenoweth]

Thanks again Dave and David,

I have changed the original archival MPEG-2 directly into DVCPRO50 using Streamclip.

This creates a MUCH higher quality clip than the .M2V but is 8 GB to the M2V file size of 1 GB.

I can bring this into FCP or were you referring to changing my Sequence Settings to “DVCPRO50”
as the compressor of choice?

Many thanks, guys. I really appreciate the tips…

Richard

[David Roth weiss]

Since we have no idea what your seq. settings are now, it’s difficult to tell you. Probably yes however.

And, there is a reason the DVCPro50 file is larger, it carries lots more information. Plus, it’s a realtime editing codec recognized by FCP, so loads less rendering.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
http://www.drwfilms.com

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Richard Chenoweth]

I was set on regular DV/DVCPRO-NTSC but have now switched it to the DVCPRO50-NTSC in Sequence Settings…

Thank you gents very much!

Richard

[Randy Lee]

Check your aspect ratio – you’ve got quite a few to choose from in Final Cut, but less that will play nice with your footage. If you don’t know what you’re doing there, it’s often easiest and best to go with the “default” ratios. If you think you’ve got a handle on what you’re doing, then the only thing I would advise is that you convert as much as possible to the same framesize, codec, and aspect ratio before editing so you’re not constantly rendering.

Good luck, and let us know how things are coming along, or if you run into more issues.