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Preferred work flows in FCP?
For those who do not know me, I’ve been in the business for a quite a while, was an early adopter of HD, and worked as a beta tester for Apple when they bought Shake (and then killed it >shakes fist<) worked for Discreet as an application engineer, have worked extensively on several feature films and have made more ads than I can count.
I know IRIX, I’m fine in a few flavors of LINUX, solid in Windows, know OSX very well. I know After Effects, Shake, Nuke, Combustion, Avid Illusion, Jaleo, Piranha, Digital Fusion, Commotion, Quantel IQ and probably 5 or 6 more compositing and editing packages I can’t think of right now. I started out in this business when a 36 gig RAID cost more than a luxury automobile. I also know a boatload of audio packages fairly well, having gotten my start in DAWs with Digidesign’s Session8. Yes, that long ago.
I say this not so much as to toot my own horn, but to give you an idea of the kind of person I am- namely that I have no problem learning new technology and am not particularly hung up on working one specific way.
So why is it that working in Final Cut/Compressor is such torture? And why do I seem to be the only one who seems to have a problem working in it?
I have never seen a more cryptic file conversion interface- not even on the old versions of Compressor, back when Discreet owned it. In fact, that old version was remarkably clear and easy to use.
Why is it so hard to take a 1080i29.97 HDV file and convert it into a 720p24 clip? I was able to set this up (MOS, of course) in a copy of Shake that has not had an update in 5 or 6 years. I had several options for deinterlacing, which I was able to preview on the frame. When I ask Shake to show me the file at 100% (or a 1:1 pixel ration) it does it- it doesn’t give me some horribly scaled 96.4%, artifact laden uselessness.
In seconds I could select which type of deinterlacing I wanted to use, scale and crop to taste, and rendered out the file. It was a 45 minute clip, and rendered in about half real-time on processors that the code had never been tried on.
Compare this with Compressor. The viewer will not, no matter how nicely I ask it, show me the image at 100%- it will only scale to fit the available space, which is some god-awful, horribly aliased 96-99% on my iMac at home.
Trying to deinterlace and scale the same video footage took more than 45x real time- meaning that each second of footage took 45 seconds to render. I am not exaggerating.
And, of course, the final product looked not quite as good as the Shake render.
I will not get into how it must have taken a team of scientists months to make a file format conversion tool so difficult to understand while at the same time eliminating most of the option that I have, over the course of 15 years, come to think of as standard.
When I talk to other people about the difficulty I have with it, they look like I’m crazy. No one seems to be able to get it to work, though.
Now, fortunately (I had thought) I am working on a project where all of the footage is 1080p24, so there are no interlacing or scaling issues to deal with. I though all i’d have to do is drop the footage into Compressor, drag and drop the preset for ProRes on it, and it would render it out in Apple’s preferred format.
Now, of course, I’m getting error messages saying that it can not find the ProRes codec in the library.
Phew. I feel better now.
Not saying that I have not been able to get things done in FCP. If the machine is hooked up to one deck, and all of the footage is captured from the same deck, and everything is a preset, it will work fine. My complaint is that anytime you deviate from the one working approach, the whole thing goes kablooey. Which gets really, really old. Especially when you are the guy who gets called in because you can deal with all weird stuff.
Is there really an excuse for a piece of software to not be able to play back 44.1 and 48k in the same timeline? I mean, it’s 2010.
And if you have to render out the clip, because it is the wrong format for the timeline, do I have to rerender it because I moved it a frame forward? Does it really have to take 10 minutes for a 2 second clip?
I mean, I understand that in order to have multiple streams of video playback in real time, you have to optimize, but I mean, there is space on my hard drive- why not render out a conversion of the the clip, and swap it in for the incorrectly formatted clip? Go ahead! I’ll go make a sandwich. In fact, why not let me drag everything into the timeline, and you can, Mr Computer batch convert the whole thing to however you want it. I’ll take the rest of the day off.
Alternately, you could just make Compressor work. Maybe it would help if all of the actual controls for it were not jammed into 15 submenus wedged into a little box
And I mean, seriously- deinterlacing? Should this be a problem to deal with anymore? Likewise with frame rate conversions. We’ve had tools that have dealt with these issues for years, decades even. Why is this stuff that I could easily deal with in the 90s such a problem now?
Phew. Guess I wasn’t done.
I have a friend who uses DV Kitchen, and says that it works wonderfully, but I am not going to open the precedent of me spending my own money to get software on my employer’s machines. They paid for Final Cut Studio and Compressor. I don’t think it is asking too much to have it actually work.
This post was originally going to be called “Preferred work flows in FCP?” but once I started detailing my troubles with using multiple formats in the same project, I sort of lost my mind and went full on rant-o-licious.
I’m not interested in a flame war (new Discreet product?). If you think I’m a dope (which I’m not- please see above qualifications), just give me a pass. If anyone out there has had similar experiences, solutions on how to work with several formats at different frame rates, etc etc, then post up, and let’s commiserate.
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1 Reply
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Totally agree with everything you said. Video workflow, especially with Final Cut, is not user friendly (or should we say format friendly) at all. The number of road blocks that the average user will run into is staggering.
As a result of my poor experience with FCP, I feel that I should start looking for other video editor solutions that could be more flexible…especially with various video formats. Why do I need to know everything there is to know about codecs, interlacing, frame rates, pixel aspect ratios, etc when I just want to be creative? Bummer.
I come from a similar, hi-tech background and have been amazed at the difficulty that creating video with FCP has presented. I’m not afraid of learning new things and routinely am expected to overcome technical challenges but this is ludicrous!
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