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Offline Edit
Hi,
I’m trying to do an offline edit for a college project that was shot 1920 x 1080 25P on a Sony EX-1 camera. I am using XDCAM Transfer to bring the footage into Final Cut 6.
I have about 33GB of rushes that I have copied directly from the SxS cards to my desktop. The final film will be about 10 mins.Could someone please advise me on the best way to edit this footage? I guess the most sensible thing, considering that I’m using a MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Laptop with 4GB of Ram, would be to do an Offline edit first, then go Online when I burn the Bluray.
If this is in fact the best way to edit the film, how do I go about it? What export settings do I need in XDCAM Transfer, and what settings do I need in FCP?
Finally, how do I get the footage online again?Thank you for your help.
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6 Replies
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We don’t really do online/offline so much in today’s tapeless workflow. More often than not, we just buy more storage. You should not edit from footage on the desktop, you’ll need to copy it to an external drive (buy a 2nd external drive for backup, if needed). Set the Scratch Disk to the External in the Final Cut Pro > System Settings Menu. Go to Final Cut Pro > Easy Setup and Choose the proper XDCAM preset for your footage. Finally, open up File > Log and Transfer and import the footage into FCP.
Hope this helps.
Kevin Monahan
60 Blu-ray Templates for Final Cut Studio 2009
http://www.fcpworld.com
Author – Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro -
Thanks for your reply Kevin.
Surely with HD footage, you wouldnt edit uncompressed no matter how big your drive and powerful the machine, would you?
In any case it takes a very long time to render and playback isnt smooth if I edit uncompressed. Is there any other ways around this?Thanks a lot.
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XDCam is not uncompressed. In its least compressed form it’s still very compressed. Full raster 1080P with 4:2:2 color sampling is fewer MB/second than uncompressed SD.
All of the current tapeless formats from Sony, Panasonic, JVC, Red, etc are heavily compressed. There are uncompressed tapeless formats, but they are attached to cameras like the Panavision Genesis, the Arri D-21 or the Vision Research Phantom.
Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/ -
Right Arnie. Plus, 32 GB is not a whole lot of storage. Storage is so cheap these days! I suggest using a RAID 1 Array like the G-SAFE so your footage is always backed up.
Kevin Monahan
60 Blu-ray Templates for Final Cut Studio 2009
http://www.fcpworld.com
Author – Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro -
Your MacBook Pro should cut right through your XDCAM footage like butter, it is because you are playing the files off the computer hard drive that you are having trouble. Please, copy the footage to a FireWire 800 drive and you will never have an issue.
Also, set the timeline RT Popup menu to Unlimited RT > Dynamic Playback > Dynamic Framerate so you will not have to render when doing simple effects. Render > All at the end before your output.
Kevin Monahan
60 Blu-ray Templates for Final Cut Studio 2009
http://www.fcpworld.com
Author – Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro -
Great, thanks. I was planning on putting the footage on an external drive.
Could you tell me what export settings I should have XDCAM Transfer on, and how do I export the footage once edited so that I can bring it back to full HD, or is that not possible?
Thank you for your continued help.
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