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The language of letting go
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Recent big international doco series I had to deliver HDCam to Irish, Welsh broadcasters and the international distributor. And a digi beta to ABC Australia.
Tedious but less trouble than getting a DCP to work in cinemas. That was a whole lot harder.
So yes dropping tape support did count against FCPX for me. I look forward to the day when I don’t need HDCam but not before I convert to file my friends library of underwater HDCam footage from the last decade.
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[Michael Gissing] “Tedious but less trouble than getting a DCP to work in cinemas.”
Have you had trouble with DCP?
So far I have been really impressed with how my film looks on the big scree as far color, sharpness and sound. I have not experienced any problems from either DCP file I have as for as load. (knock on wood)
If I had to deliver to HDCam I would outsource that. It would be so rare that I would do it, it wouldn’t be worth it for me to maintain the deck.
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While tape had the ability of being able to insert or replace a shot or title, it could not delete without one having to lay back everything after that deletion.
When I make masters as QT files, I bring back the master QT into FCP 7 and place the master file and leaders in an FCP 7 timeline. Anything that’s not real time video, I render out and bring back in and place on the timeline. So the FCP 7 timeline is a string of ‘elements’, all visible at the finder level.
I ensure that the master QT and all these ‘elements’ live in one folder.Then I simply export non self-contained (reference movie) files which can be used to encode other variants for upload. I can then many versions without the penalty of time for reexport. Any deletion in the timeline can be re-exported as another ref movie. Ref movies export very fast since only references to the original movie ‘elements’ are saved. So, one can have a stereo version and 5.1 version exported separately really fast. Or different versions with different leaders.
Once its all final, then I open the last good ref movie file in QT7 Pro and do a ‘save as’ a self-contained file.
Converting ref movies to self-contained movies used to take a long time with internal drives in a Mac Pro, with 8-bay Thunderbolt RAIDs these happen really fast since its a function of drive speed not so much processor speed.
Avid MC, PrPro, and FCP X don’t have quite the ref movie workflow that FCP 7 had.
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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India -
[Michael Gissing] “Tedious but less trouble than getting a DCP to work in cinemas.”
[Tony West] “Have you had trouble with DCP?”Yes heaps of incompatibility with cinemas. Although the spec allows for frame rates like 25 or 29.97 or even 48fps using SMPTE profile settings not the old Interop 24fps, many theatres I have sent the disks to can’t play the 25fps version. The other great issue is the drive format that you send. The specs say ext3 drive format but most cinema ingest systems are Windows so NTFS drives must be sent. ExFAT is unreliable as well. So in short many cinemas are not actually compliant with the up to date specs on DCPs and also have very poor tech support so are often totally unable to offer any clues when they can’t get a DCP to work.
Frankly if they just had a computer with VLC hooked up to their projectors it would work a lot easier.
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DCP is nearly 20 year old tech now, the main reason it hangs on is the encryption key system which most indies don’t need or want for festival screenings.
They are better off playing a ProRes file as a DCP is just a glorified JPEG sequence.
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What’s interesting is it was the great tape drought of 2011 from the Japan tsunami and iTunes making international standards have had more to do with the decline of tape than just progress.
The tape cost that year quadrupled during the shortage* so file based delivery suddenly became acceptable for a few major networks.
Funny how that works.
* I was able to sell used 126min HDCAMSR tapes for twice what I paid for them new during that time, and people were grateful.
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My file is 24p EXT3
So far so good, but I have only shown in 4 theaters at this point.
I was told by the people that made mine to go with 24p only.
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Why would you FedEx a file?
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