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Tearing down and rebuilding – is FCP the answer?
I’ve also posted this in the Avid forum but Avid and FCP are my two main options right now.
I’ve worked on Avid, FCP, and gasp Premiere with Matrox Axio (redeems itself from earlier Premiere experiences) so I’m kind of platform agnostic and I’m tasked with creating an complete production department for a public attraction.
We are educational in nature and my department is reponsible for feeding content to nearly 30 flat screens.
There are a number of 50 inch HD plasma’s kicking around and a series of projection screens in one area.
These are all fed windows media at whatever resolution the PC driving them can handle.
This is by way of background for what I’m doing. Basically I’ll be pushing windows media, in HD resolution to a number of screens so that is my main output. On top of that our footage is valuable and is used for promotion and stock.
Currently there is a sony HDV ZIU being cut on a stand-alone FCP system that’s fairly old.
At this point I’m assuming my acquisition is going to remain HDV (though the HVX200 is very tempting). Money is there but not huge and I’m thinking either ramp up the FCP setup or start-over with Avid xpress pro.
Avid appeals because of the avid codec. It seems to me, like in old days with the composer codec, I could just install the codec on a compression machine and the quickly export files as source from avid and compress them on a different system. Same goes for working in AE.
So that is good. Does it still work that way? Does FCP work that way?
I get one edit system now, maybe another down the line so I need to make the most of it.
My workflow is shoot HDV. Capture HDV. Edit (add graphic elements from AE and possibly some 3d and green screen). Export source file for compression offline. Store fine cut on tape. Burn fine cut to dvd. Archive project for rebuilding and retrofitting (inevitable logo change)
Is anyone doing similar things in FCP, or have advice for things to do or not do if going FCP? Are add-on cards necessary?
What can I do to get realtime full-screen display on an HDTV while editing?
whew, any input is appreciated.
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7 Replies
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well, I don’t know about the Avid codec, but I strictly do 95% of everything in 10-bit uncompressed in fcp.
We switched over to FCP from a discreet smoke about 1 year ago.
We’re much happier with the FCP system.
In our region, nobody knows how to use smoke, but everyone and there brother knows fcp. Though there are a few flame artists in town. -
My latest version of FCP (5.1.2) exports Windows 9 files straight out of the timeline. I can’t recall if that’s standard or if we bought a plug-in. But even if it’s not we always used to use Cleaner, which works great and is fairly cheap and easy to use!
I wouldn’t hesitate to go FCP as Apple makes great deals for educators on both hardware AND software.Good luck,
Bugsy -
[Bugsy] “But even if it’s not we always used to use Cleaner,”
I’d stick with sorenson squeeze for your major compressing needs. Cleaner seems to not be supported so well anymore.
Check out flip4mac.com for your wmv needs.
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[Bugsy] “FCP (5.1.2) exports Windows 9 files straight out of the timeline. I can’t recall if that’s standard or if we bought a plug-in.”
For WMV HD You have to spend $179 to get the Flip4Mac WMV Studio Pro HD, but its well worth having, especially as it allows export of WMV files directly from FCP, from all of its components in the suite, and from QT Pro.
DRW
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We shoot with HVX200 and edit DVCPRO HD in FCP, we are providing
a major university with digital signage using AdTec servers….
We can produce High Def .TS streams encoded from HD .m2v files.
These units don’t miss a beat and I am getting much better
results than computers playing WMV HD -
For HD Signage and tradeshows we too employ mpeg2 transport streams.
They work very well and run on relatively old systems.
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Could you explain a bit more about this. The system we’re working with is an omnivec (sp?) system. Each panel has its own PC. So far they’ve been running HD half res windows media.
It looks pretty bad on the big 50 inch screens. Apparently some of the pc’s choke on anything bigger. I thought selective upgrades to the PC’s and windows media would be the way to go.
How to mpeg2 streams work in this equation.
Basically the PC’s can display anything that plays in media player, Quicktime (though qt really bogs) and flash.
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