On-lining in FCP: Fine Cut to Picture Lock

[Mark Raudonis]

“I struggle to see the advantage of uprez’ing the entire clip…”

That’s because you’re not thinking through all of the possibilities. You’re assuming I’m suggesting uprezzing the ENTIRE tape… I’m not. I am only suggesting uprezzing a complete clip (timecode start to stop). That will reduce the amount of time digitized to a more manageable size.

I chuckle at your suggestion that this may only work with “small sized projects”. What you don’t know is that we are regularly using this method on multiple hour long shows, referencing THOUSANDS of hours of media. Our SAN is BIG (over 300+ TBs) and that’s still NOT big enough to go full HD start to finish. Most people who suggest staying at full rez fail to consider the bandwidth required to have a dozen editors pulling 20 streams of multi cam media simultaneously. Even if you have the storage space, the bandwidth requirements will stop you from using the “all HiRez all the time”.

In our case,our acquisition format is XDCAM-HD which makes the uprez process a breeze. It’s faster than real time, so we pay a very small time penalty for digitizing extra media. In a perfect world, I’d definitely try to stay full rez all the time. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and the workflow I’ve suggested is the best compromise between efficiency and cost that we’ve been able to devise.

mark

[Matt Doe]

I suppose I should have phrased my “small sized projects” comment more as a question, my apologies.

We did a large facility upgrade about 2 years ago, at the time I was asked how much storage we should ask for. I (only slightly) jokingly said “ask for a petabyte and work your way down.” We ended up with 150TB, and what I’d give to have that extra 150 on top.

We are still primarily a tape based offline/online production company (80/20, tape to file based). As is always the case, everyone always wants their footage ingested in some impossible amount of time. For shows not shooting TOD code, we end up digitizing the entire tape as one long clip usually (DVCPro HD anyway, HDV we do in roughly 10 minute chunks). That’s where my objection to digitizing the whole clip came from, as we rarely are given the time to log into clips before we digitize.

For TOD coded tapes, we let FCP do the work and create new clips at each timecode break. Will have to do some tests with our current workflow and see if your method of the whole clip allows for faster changes in the off chance they come in after pix lock; and what amount of time it adds to the uprez process for us.

It’s funny that no matter what your workflow is, all it takes is one or two “little changes” from the network to throw it all out the window. Also, how one workflow can seem so familiar and easy, and how another can seem so foreign.

Oh the choices…