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Redigitizing process still dumb
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[Mark Suszko] “Automatic Duck perhaps?”
No. This is fundamental “under the hood” stuff that needs to be addressed.
I know how everyone loves “car analogies”… so here goes.
If you’re not happy with the engine in your Lexus, would you go to Mercedes and ask them to install
a new engine in your Lexus? Doesn’t make sense.That’s the case here. Digitizing and batch capture are fundamental aspects of the program. You can’t look to an outside party for a fix.
Mark
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Bare in mind, for all the projects we do, the method we’ve come up with works, but will not work for everyone. Basic info: We work mostly with SD but some HD comes along | we don’t work on anything longer than a 30 min show | our projects are constantly being tweaked and changed even after the initial delivery.
For the very reasons Walter described, and the nightmares and all-nighters Media Manager managed to give me, we adopted buying drives for each project or client depending on the length, future projects, etc. We capture full rez from the get go and we never, ever have to worry about re-capturing. We have backup DVDs of Final Cut Studio project files, graphics, audio etc that can’t be captured from tape just in case the drive fails. I swore 3 years ago to never use Media Manager and with one exception (a project that came back from the dead previous to my declaration) I haven’t.
As far as I’m concerned, Media Manager’s relationship to me, is like Fredo to Michael at the end of The Godfather Part II.
Winston A. Cely
Editor/Owner | Della St. Media, LLCMac Pro 3GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
4 GB RAM | Final Cut Studio 5.1.4 | Aja Kona LHe“If you can talk brilliantly enough about a subject, you can create the consoling allusion it has been mastered.” – Stanley Kubrick
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Walter
Been a big fan for a long time, and you are someone i respect and listen to on this forum.
However
did you do it this way?
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/basic_onlining_jordan.html
Its been a little while since i did this, but the last time i used it, it worked pretty well, especailly with a VTR with decent ballistics, like a beta sp or a sony 1500.
It takes a little longer, and it makes it tricky if you have to change the cut after the fact, but i sure had a lot less media to recapture!
hope this helps.
And if not, tell me why“I like video because its so fast!”
Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc. -
[Bob Flood] “And if not, tell me why”
Hiya, bob,
Larry’s suggestions are sound but they’re still silly. Just look at the interface and the language Apple uses. “Make offline” what the heck does that mean? Make is a verb suggesting work is going to be performed. Offline is either a noun describing a type of media compression or it is a state of physical being.
Delete unused media from duplicated sequence? Puh-leeze.Include master clips outside of the affiliated subclips as long as they’re not nested? Ho, yes, gimem some fo those.
Media Management just is NOT that hard to write. The fact that it’s never worked and has never been addressed speaks volumes about the priorities Apple assigns to the FCP team.I’m sure they’re over wokred and have to answer to the usual sets of dumbass second-guessing bosses we all have but they spent years working on that stupid autoselect monster but can’t spare an afternoon or two to make media management part of the success story?
I’m bitter.
bogiesan
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[Bob Flood] “However
did you do it this way? “
There’s no reason to do it “this way” or “that way.” Should be Media Manage your timeline to a new project, then capture.
In fact it SHOULD be Select the Timeline you want to recapture and FCP will just capture your ins to outs.
That’s how it SHOULD work and always should have. That’s the whole point of my post.
The Redigitizing process is, and always had been, dumb. Workarounds are nice, but something this simple should just work.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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I was complaining about this just a few days ago: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1024056#1024094
I am truly amazed at how horrible the Media Manager is. I mean come on… this is simple stuff – it’s just time code numbers! How difficult can it be to make this work? Avid and Media 100 have been doing it perfectly for at least as long as FCP has been in existence. I worked on an Avid for years, and when you “decomposed” a sequence it just worked.
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I totally agree! I don’t understand how they could not spend more resources on fixing Media Manager. FCP is simply the first NLE (with the archiving function available) for me that just won’t do it properly even thought I make sure all clips from tape have timecode and are labeled correctly.
It is really tiring for sure every time you have to bring an old project back to life.Shame on Apple!
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I had a four hour sequence I needed to re-capture. Media Manager informed me that it was going to capture ELEVEN hours of footage. I called FCP support and they said they would need to charge me $199 to “give you an answer you are probably not going to like”. I asked why they were going to charge me if the fault was with FCP? So I hung up the phone and went out and spent $600 to purchase larger drives for my RAID instead of giving them $199 to tell me that I am basically screwed.
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I had a four hour sequence I needed to re-capture. Media Manager informed me that it was going to capture ELEVEN hours of footage. I called FCP support and they said they would need to charge me $199 to “give you an answer you are probably not going to like”. I asked why they were going to charge me if the fault was with FCP? So I hung up the phone and went out and spent $600 to purchase larger drives for my RAID instead of giving them $199 to tell me that I am basically screwed.
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I’m going to use the work recaptured not re-digitize and we’ve left digitize back with analog.
I think recapturing in FCP has not been fixed because it probably cannot. I’m not entirely sure of this ‘cannot’, but its a theory nevertheless. Based on what I remember having read somewhere sometime.
FCP stores clips as Quicktime movies when you first capture them. Quicktime stores timecode in a clip, not on a frame by frame basis, but only for the first frame. It also saves the clip’s frame rate. From which an NLE like FCP can calculate and display a clip’s timecode.
So if you have a clip called ‘Clip 1.mov’ which is 25fps and 15000 frames long, starting at TC 02.33.41.05 then the last frame is 02:43:41:04. Which FCP ‘arrives at’ by the math of adding 15000 frames to the decimal equivalent of 02.33.41.05.If you use a 15 sec clip from this master clip starting at 02:36:14:00 and ending at 02:36:28:24, then FCP is defining this clip in the timeline as a timeline clip that is
part of a movie called ‘Clip 1.mov’
starts 3820 frames from the first frame of ‘Clip 1.mov’
is 375 frames longSo FCP needs the clip to be of its original length and with the original first frame time stamp, to be able to ‘derive’ all timeline clips. Even if you manually recaptured the tape from about 02:35:12:16 to 02:37:20:02 you would have adequate media, but FCP cannot link it to your timeline. Because it needs a clip that starts with 02.33.41.05 to figure out where your first frame, 02:36:14:00, is located.
This fundamental behaviour in Quicktime has to change for FCP to be able to media manage effectively.
In my workflows I’ve practically never have had to re-dig a finished sequence. But coming from Avid I know exactly how frustrating it can be if one needed to.
Some workarounds I can think of are… (one of)
Export your seq as a EDL, then import that into FCP and redig.
Make seq clips independent and use MM to create offline clips, then redig.
Export as XML and reimport into FCP and re-dig.I haven’t tried any of these, just thought them up.
But hey, like Walter said, why should you HAVE to think up workarounds when a fundamental thing like this is expected of an NLE?
FCP Editor, Mumbai, India.
Completely PAL.
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