Replace connecting clip

[Tom Wolsky]

Drag the replacing clip on top of the connected clip in the timeline and you should get the replace options. Also if you have the connected clip selected you can use the keyboard shortcut to do the replace.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Coming in 2011 “Complete Training for FCPX” from Class on Demand
“Final Cut Pro X for iMovie and Final Cut Express Users” from Focal Press

[Oliver Peters]

[Tom Wolsky] “Drag the replacing clip”

Thanks. I finally figured that out, too. Working on a spot that’s becoming a nightmare in FCP X, so the brain’s a bit fried.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Tom Wolsky]

Are you doing this for real Oliver? Like a paying gig?

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Coming in 2011 “Complete Training for FCPX” from Class on Demand
“Final Cut Pro X for iMovie and Final Cut Express Users” from Focal Press

[Oliver Peters]

[Tom Wolsky] “Are you doing this for real Oliver? Like a paying gig?”

Yes, but unsupervised. A long distance client. 4 x :30 NTSC spots.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Tom Wolsky]

Good luck. Let us know how the experience works out for you.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Coming in 2011 “Complete Training for FCPX” from Class on Demand
“Final Cut Pro X for iMovie and Final Cut Express Users” from Focal Press

[Simon Ubsdell]

Having just (I hope) finished my first paying gig with it, I’d say good luck too – a bit of a rollercoaster with some hairy twists and turns that I hadn’t expected.

Very interested to hear how it went when you’re done!

Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Don Smith]

If you’re interested in a report where FCPX is used for a paying gig, please let me jump in…

I’ve been working, for pay, in FCPX for a couple of weeks. I’m on-location using the client’s gear.

I have to qualify my report by saying up-front that I’m on a MacPro 3,1 with an NVidia GeForce GTX 285 graphics card. 10GB of RAM. Snow Leopard.

I also own a new MacBook Pro, 17″ laptop with Thunderbolt. FCPX and Motion 5 run better on the laptop.

I’m constantly running into little things. Where do I begin? I was stepping frame-by-frame to hand-keyframe a short motion path. FCPX would stop moving to the next frame, often, when pressing the right arrow key. I would have to click off, make another window active, and come back to resume.

I would copy a text effect. On the copy it would not lose the font family but would lose the type of font (normal, bold, etc.). It kept going back to Light.

I would shorten a clip and the playback would be like the longer clip was still there. It seems the render file didn’t disengage.

That’s only three of the many LITTLE things that happened to me. I’m still a fan of FCPX, though. I just think and hope that the next update will shake all these beta bugs out.

Don Smith

NewsVideo.com

[Oliver Peters]

[Tom Wolsky] “Good luck. Let us know how the experience works out for you.”

Tom & Simon – These were 4 x :30 NTSC spots. One of these was just a single take with a banner across the bottom. I did that in FCP 7. Simply easier. The other 3, I did in FCP X. Of those, one was pretty standard. Images with a VO and music, plus some titles. Basic color correction and mixing. No big deal except it was DV in a 486 timeline, hence my other “Questions” post and the issue of properly centering the DV frame inside the 486 raster.

The last two spots were tougher. Each was a series of stacked animated titles over a background. One wasn’t too bad, because the background was just a provided animated clip. The other spot was tougher, because it used a generated gradient, plus moving images and lots of animated titles. That one really bogged things down, plus caused some hard crashes. FCP X is very encumbered now that all titles are Motion projects. Fine for a single layer of titles, but really causes slowness when you have a cascading stack for the whole length of the spot. This is an 8-core (2.26GHz) Mac Pro, 12GB RAM with the ATI5870 card. Even if I disabled the video clips and played only titles over a gradient, the timeline wouldn’t play smoothly unrendered. That’s not particularly better than FCP 7.

The second issue is the combined a/v clips. Since I work in the smallest clip view, the audio track is hidden. Therefore you have to remember to edit picture-only, otherwise you end up with the inadvertent audio tied to a clip and you won’t see it as the clips are all shrunk. Then you have to manually go down the timeline and disable the audio for each clip.

When you start layering clips and audio and SFX, you also end up juggling the vertical order since there are no tracks. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to where a clip lands vertically at times. This makes it hard to keep your dialogue together, your music together and then your SFX together. As you place SFX, they seem to randomly go in between VO and music pushing them down. A real mess. So you spend a lot of time vertically re-arranging the timeline clips in order to have some sense of what’s going on. Compound clips are not the answer, because you have to be able to work interactively with all three sound elements. In short, I feel like a trackless timeline causes me to spend more time tweaking vertical position of the clips on the timeline than a traditional track structure.

The system definitely can’t handle too much of this in a stretch. Must be a RAM cache problem. For example, with the titles. I took a preset and modified the moves. Then it should be a simple matter of copy & pasting and changing the text. At one point, the paste quit working correctly. So, exit and relaunch and it “remembered” correctly once I started doing the same steps again.

Other than the general slowness and a few crashes, the spots got done. FCP 7 and LiveType (oops, another Apple helpfulness ) would have taken less time.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Kevin Patrick]

Did you consider or attempt to use Roles to manage your audio?

[Oliver Peters]

[Kevin Patrick] “Did you consider or attempt to use Roles to manage your audio”

Considered? Yes. Useful? No. The issue I had wasn’t in mixing the VO/music/SFX, but rather visually organizing the clips. For example, I would cut in an SFX as a connected clip and it would insert itself between the VO and the music. That pushes the music as well as other SFX clips (which were below the music and VO clips) in the timeline farther down vertically in the timeline (project) window. Since you can’t make that pane full screen, you end up needlessly scrolling the view up and down a lot because so much of the pane is wasted to negative space. Or you take the extra step of rearranging the vertical order of the stack.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com