Recapture Nightmare. Is 5.02 still beta?

[John Pale]

If you are trying to uprez a sequence in FCP (and not on a linear GVG style system) dont mess with EDL’s. You had the right idea with the Media Manager, but I think your workflow sounds incorrect.

Try reading this article (especially the final paragraph). Its written for FCP 4, but the workflow still applies.

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/FCP_4_trim_dang_it.html

The Media Manager is still problematic with FCP, but I find it usually works correctly if I follow this procedure.

Good luck.

[Bob Roberts]

Try reading the manual (Chapter 7 – Overview of the Media Manager). It’s a good place to start.

[Dan Riley]

The manual doesn’t do anything about all the ridiculous
errors with FCP and uprezing. It’s a real problem.
Still frames sometimes follow…sometimes not.
Speed changes….never.
I have to hold my breath everytime I’m coming in
the next day to do an uprez from an offline project in FCP.
IT HAS NEVER BEEN FLAWLESS…..EVER.
Which is a real joke if you ask me.
The only thing that is changing is the codec.
What is the big deal here.
If AVID can do it, why not Apple?

If Final Cut Pro wants to be a grown up app,
they had better stop being pussying around and fix the
media manager section of the app.
Also Log and Capture. It’s like amateur hour.
Where are audio meters? Where is timecode ?
We have to QUESS what’s going on?
Where is the ONE WINDOW, that says
how many audio tracks, how many video tracks,
timecode etc. is happening with the capture?
Do these people at Apple NOT do any PRO editing?

Sure, if you are doing your brother’s wedding,
who the heck cares. But this is not how Apple sells FCP anymore.
Any of us who have used AVID Media Composer for 15 years
knows this is crap, but we hang on hoping someone
will get a clue at Apple. I’m not so sure anymore.

YES, we all like being independent of AVID.
YES, we all like Apple, in theory.
YES, we all like FCP for basic editing.
But to finish a job…to output to tape at uncompressed,
with all your effects….IT’S NOT WORKING.
Who is LISTENING ????
ANYONE at 1 Infinite Loop?

Dan

[Robert Brown]

I’m sorry if I was a bit angry and thanks to the people who sent info on how to make this work but everything I tried should have worked. And like Dan said they are marketing this to professionals as a professional product. I couldn’t believe the amount of different errors I got. An edl with totally wrong source timecodes? You got to be kidding me. It seems FCP has some weird issue with how it timecodes the frames. I’ve seen this when match framing, it will go to a totally wrong part of the clip occasionally. The way it deals with slo-mos is also hard to understand and it cannot keep proper track of timecodes in slo-mos. Call me old fashioned for still using edls but they are simple and they work. And they still are an accepted method of data exchange and should be dead on accurate – and it is hard to understand why that would be a problem.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Robert Brown] “Call me old fashioned for still using edls but they are simple and they work. And they still are an accepted method of data exchange and should be dead on accurate – and it is hard to understand why that would be a problem.”

EDL’s and Media Manager especially are incredibly weak points in Final Cut Pro. For years I’ve asked for the simplicity of Media 100’s Re-Capture tool. Simply select the timeline and Batch Capture in the new media settings. No Media Manager, No EDL, just simply select and capture only the media in this timeline. It will probably never happen and we’re stuck with a very weak Media Manager tool.

Final Cut Pro is an outstanding professional editor so long as you’re just performing full rez edits all the way down the editing process. It’s the offline / online procedure that is a real downfall of FCP and always has been. You need to be very careful and methodic when editing offline and then planning to re-capture at online. The Ken Stone article posted above is certainly a good start.

My basic rule of thumb with the MM is to use the ‘Copy’ function so all the media that’s in my timeline gets physically copied to the new project. This gives me the most accurate re-captures when using the MM.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Now in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

Now editing “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Walter Biscardi]

[Bob Roberts] “Try reading the manual (Chapter 7 – Overview of the Media Manager). It’s a good place to start.”

Pilot error is not always the case with the Media Manager. It’s the weakest area of Final Cut Pro and much more convoluted than it really needs to be. When it actually works, it works well, but more often than not, even the manual won’t help you get it to work.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Now in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

Now editing “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Dan Riley]

I use the below link as my resource for my uprez sessions.
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/basic_onlining_jordan.html

It just worked fine on my FCP5.0.2 session last week,
but I didn’t get all my still frames….some but not all.
It’s very stange. There must be some kind of order
FCP wants you to do so that it finds and recaptures
the still frames. My last session with FCP4.5 it got
all of them, but the one before it didn’t.
It’s such a pain to then have to go find those shots
and still frame them again and drop them into the
proper places in the timeline. Stuff like this causes it
to take much longer to uprez that it should.

Walter is right; FCP is a very fine editor as long as you
stick with your original codec. But if you are like me
and you have to input around 30 hours of footage
per half hour infomercial, that takes up way too much
space at 10 bit uncompressed, thus the uprez approach.
I start with DV and this looks good for the client and
only takes up about 1/6 the space.

Dan

[David Battistella]

Ahhhhhhhh AVID edia management:)

When I think of the days when you could select a sequence, put it in a new bin, strip away the audio, select decompose and recapture the darn thing at what ever AVR resolution was highest at the time, I can only sit back and smile :).

FCP has always had cumbersome language in teh media manager and it you can not create a sequence that does not contain audio.

THis is still the weakest point of FCP by far. not even close to the quality of media tracking an AVID has.

David

[Rich Rubasch]

And one of the reasons for this is the unusual way Avid handles media…it always creates new clips, tags them with a bunch of info and keeps track of them with a sophisticated database management system working behind the scenes. The media management part of the Avid app is part of what made it the longest single piece of code for any application back in 1995. Quicktime has many faults in the managing of clips department. That is why Avid decided using Apple’s own media was not going to work for a sophisticated editing app…they built their own media format and then packed in with it the metadata to tell the app if it was a still from a source tape and at what timecode, or a slo mo clip, or a reverse clip, etc. Quicktime was not capable of that level of media tracking in a multi-track video NLE timeline.

It truly seems that Apple actually thought we would all just upload our entire tapes, cut them together and output them back to the same format tape. It truly looks as if that is what they were thinking when they developed it.

I recall when the IMix from Accom used standard Quicktime clips and naming conventions for their media. Same problems were happening on those systems, but because of compression, there was less of an offline/online workflow. But with Avid and products like Symphony, Avid users like myself were quite used to, and very happy with, the offline/decompose/online workflow. It was a brilliant implimentation of the process. Apple, on the other hand has really dropped it on this area, which for us pros, is a very big friggin deal! We look like dunces when it takes 2 days to upload a show full rez because we have to redig and recut our slow mo and reverse clips and stills into a new sequence. Nothing like doing things twice to help the bottome line, but who feels justified charging for the shortcomings of your NLE?

Apple might be backed into a corner with the limitations of the Quicktime metadata wrapper…at least that is what Avid claims. They have stuck to OMF and a very robust XML implementation. I would be paying more attention to Apple’s Quicktime site and not the FCP update site…I think you will learn more about what might be around the corner in media management from the Quicktime guys…it is in their lap now.

From an old Avid guy who uses FCP to offline/online, that is my perspective. Avid is simply better…WAY better, in this department.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.

http://www.tiltmedia.com

[Dan Riley]

I didn’t know it was more likely a Quicktime limitation.
But it now makes more sense that AVID would have come up with
and stuck with their own media file types. It seems like Apple
may just be waiting for storage to keep going down in price
so editing your offline at uncompressed wouldn’t be as big a deal.
And it certainly is going that way. However now we have HD
to contend with. It will probably be a while before I could afford
to purchase enough drives to load in all 30 hours of HD uncompressed
footage for an offline.

Thanks Rich for the interesting history and perspective.
Dan