Second thoughts after a month editing a feature film on FCP

[Aaron Neitz]

The Cohen Brothers and Murch probably get their dailies on HDCAM with sound pre-synced on tape by the lab. So all your problems don’t really exist for them.

On our last film that we had to sync from DATs, we simply did a speed ramp in FCP on our audio tracks (99.99%) after lining up the sticks. Don’t know if FCP’s slowdown sounds “as good as” ProTools, but sounded just fine to us, and went all the way through a theatrical mix without any complaints from our mix house.

What problems with keycode? I can’t speak from experience as we’ve never used Conform in Cinema Tools when keycode was a factor.

[Alejandro Fernandez]

Thanks Aaron.

Yeah, I guess if you have a big Hollywood studio behind there are no problems, really. I guess we will do a “real” pulldown then, I mean, slowing the file 0.1 percent. The reason we didn’t want to touch much the audio files was that the movie has for the most part a very low volume level, since we didn’t want to have to much compression and have the biggest possible dynamic range (some scenes are very very quiet until some big noise came). We will try the time conversion in Pro Tools and compare it to the one in FCP. Most likely the difference will be not even noticeable, so I hope that just like you we will be fine in the mix studio.

Regarding the key code, the problem was that CT sometimes reads the flex file, sometimes it don’t. No reason. You have to turn off the computer, try again, and sometimes that was it. The machine reads the flex file. Or not. Random chance.

thanks again

[Chris Borjis]

[alejandro fernandez] “n order to sync the audio we need to do a 0.1 pulldown of the audio files, but since we didn’t want to use a program that would process the audio files (compromising the quality of the sound),”

no compromise of quality whatsoever if you are saving as pcm .wav or .aif

[Steven Gonzales]

Films have been completely successfully, and in sync, with Final Cut. I’ve done a few myself.

How was your sound captured? I helped on a feature last summer which used the Sound Devices recorder. That machine has a clever setting, which is 24F (for faux or fake). The machine records at 48.048, but tags the file as 48k. This makes the pulldown automatic when the files are brought to Final Cut, and the same data is played .1% slower.

I spoke with the sound man before shooting started, and informed him which recorder settings would be best going into Final Cut. I figured out the right setting by downloading the recorder’s user manual.

If you post some detail on what audio files you have and what machine they were recorded on, perhaps you’ll get some good hints on the best way to handle them.

Also, if you describe your keycode problem, someone may have a suggestion that could help there.

Don’t waste energy questioning your choice of edit system. I’ve seen plenty of sound screwed up with the wrong settings on an Avid. Better to put your mental energy into the best solution for your current situation.

[Misha Aranyshev]

So you realized you don’t know how to edit a film originated feature in FCP after a month of work? Sorry for being harsh but that’s how it sounds. FCP is not Avid at a quarter of the price but a very different app with a very different workflow.

After you resample in ProTools — restamp. That means PT or some other app should write 48kHz into the header of the file. It is fast and probably automated in the right utility. What you should’ve probably done with your sound dailies is not to be a TDM-hardware-is-the-only-way snob and to slow them down in FCP to the desired amount, then batch export everything with Render Setting set to Best.

You may lose Audio TC going this way but Audio TC is useless anyway unless you got it in telecine logs via Aatoncode. Why are you importing telecine logs into CinemaTools and not directly into FCP?

[Alejandro Fernandez]

Thanks a lot Michael.

Don’t worry for the harsh criticism. I completely deserve it. After all, I never defend the usual workflow strongly enough and though (wrongly) that one program should not be not much of a difference from another (stupidly wrongly).

Luckily you gave me the key word “restamp”, and the BWF reStampp tool worked its magic.

https://www.24p.com/AvidInsider2.htm

I drag a test file of a six minute take onto the “convertto47952” and it restamp it as a 47952 sample rate file. Put it onto the timeline and it’s in perfect sync.

I will restamp the rest (from a copy folder) and relink them and I guess I will be OK from now on.

Thanks again

[Alejandro Fernandez]

So far I have discovered that I don’t need to restamp every file. For some reason FCP plays many of the 48048 files (created in Pro Tools) at 48000hz, in fact, applying the “pulldown”. Strangely enough, if I see a restamped file and a 48048 one together in the timeline, you can notice that they are out of sync, but they sound OK. It gets weired when you zoom in to one frame only, and then you see that both files are perfectly in sync, but if you zoom out again, let’s say to about five frames, you can notice that the waveforms are out of sync by about half a frame a minute. Good news is that if you export an OMF all the files are rendered at 48K, no matter what their original (or altered or restamped) sample rate was. Also, if it sound good and in sync in the time line, it’s because it’s good (otherwise you will begin to ear the “echo” after one or two minutes).

So, I would say, one problem solved and one piece of the workflow ready for the next project. Next time we will need either to restamp all the files before importing anything in FCP (by the way, the restamp tool only works on wav files, so better tell the sound man to record everything in wav) or use a record machine that have the “fake” 48048 option.

Regarding the keycode problem, the case is as following:

The footage is captured on the FCP at 29.97fps.
Then on Cinema Tools, the Transfer “log file” (ATN o ALE database file from Keylink) is loaded.
Then each quicktime clip (29.97 fps) is processed though Cinema Tools, pulldown removal is done (“Reverse Tk”), we obtain at that stage 23.98 fps clips (with no hybrid frames).
Each 23.98 fps clip is then connected to the Cinema Tools “database”.
Then on FCP, the 23.98 fps clips are loaded on a bin, and “synchronize with cinema tools” function is applied. FCP, opens Cinema Tools and after a few seconds -and one click- the bin shows the Keycode information displayed.

Sometimes, this works perfectly, and all clips are “syncronized with their keycode” with no problems. But what is happening is that a lot of clips do not get their “Keycode syncronisation”.

It’s seems to be totally at random, since we are working with the exact same parameters and workflow for all clips. Even more so, when repeating the exact same process, a few new clips do achieve their keycode sync while others still can’t.

Maybe someone would know if that is a known issue and what’s the best way to deal with this.

I recently upgrade to 6.0.3 and we are using Leopard 10.5.2 on a Macpro 8core.

Thanks