thinking of switching to final cut pro

[John Steventon]

In no way wanting to sound sour here – I thought I’d come back to this to tell you what just happened to me – and why I still don’t feel 100% comfortable with FCP.

I had until 17:00 today to online a programme for Broadcast on Friday. Sounds normal so far, huh?

Everything captured fine, which is normal – I went through and graded each shot individually, and when happy, applied a Broadcast safe effect, as the facility I’m doing the online at doesn’t have legalizers – and FCP’s is supposed to be good enough anyway.

I had to sit here for an hour while everything rendered, as when I tried to play in real time, even though it’s swithched to SAFE and all the video playback is set to FULL – it still dropped the resolution to play certain clips.

Anyway, everything’s hunky dory until 16:00 when the render’s done and I start to edit the piece to tape.

Unfortunately, some of my rush-grades weren’t as good as i hoped, but with an hour to go, I knew I had enough time to run off the 23 min prog, and then insert any iffy shots if they needed it. In the end, only 6 needed tweaked because of exposure changes mid-shot. So, I needed to perform insert edits for shots that didn’t turn out as well as hoped.

3 of them worked. Then I got the dreaded ‘….the edit only lasts one frame’ error – even though I’m inserting in 30 seconds of material.

Delete prefs, re-start, go back into it – great. Next edit – same thing – and again. So I’ve already lost 10 minutes through re-starts. Yeehah.

I’ve got 10 mins to finish the cut to tape, label it, and courier it out of here, or I’m (insert your expletive here).

I then sit on the credit roll at the end, and to my horror, see the yellow exclamation mark at the top of the screen – some of the shots are STILL ILLEGAL!! The same shot was used four times in all (once in the main prog, once in the credits, then twice in clean credit beds at the end of the tape). Each one of them needed to be exported as a quicktime, laid back into the sequence, a new broadcast safe effect applied (which needed rendered) and then cut to tape. And what happened on the fourth one? Yup. You guessed it – the edit only lasts 1 frame according to FCP – so I need to restart the machine. Again.

SO – it’s 5 past 5 – and I’m getting my shiny hiny kicked. Something that would have taken 10 minutes on Avid ended up taking 40 minutes on FCP due to the instability of the edit to tape tool (which I’m hoping an upgrade to 5.1.2 fixes) and the fact that the broadcast safe effect (even set to very conservative) doesn’t actually mean you’ll put everything out broadcast safe.

Sure, you could say that it’s my own fault for not checking each clip step by step after the render, but I didn’t have the time, and I’m working within the range of what the edit system says it’ll do – and put my trust in it in the exact same way I put my trust in an Avid to do similar things when doing a digital cut.

The time issue is one thing, it was embarrassing for sure, and I don’t like missing deadlines – but what I really don’t like it that randomness of how some functions decide to work – and then other times, decide not to work. For this to be something that’ll truly take over from Avid (which I’m sure it will anyway, regardless of my bleats on this forum) it has to be a lot more solid – do EXACTLY what it’s supposed to do, and not throw up the odd gremlin here and there.

They said exactly the same thing about Avid when it started to wedge its way into the old tape suite market, so this is all very familiar, but I’m just trying to say that though it feels like trying to stop a river with a stick on here sometimes when I try to suggest that FCP isn’t the editing Holy Grail as I am in the minority for finding faults and annoyances with it – I think that issues like this need to be addressed, and considered when someone posts about the shift from Media Composers to FCP. Creativity and control are incredible – but if you can’t hit deadlines, or if you unwittingly put out a tape that fails a QC (which I’m kacking myself about now – who knows what other clips the machine missed) then I stick by my earlier comments in this thread – that it’s ‘almost’ the best system to use – but it’s almost like putting on a condom – almost just ain’t enough I’m afraid.

John
Success is merely a failiure to imagine more…

G5 2.7Ghz, 4.5Gb ram, Blackmagic Decklink/multibridge, 5.6Tb Infortrend storage, FCP Studio 5.02, Makie MCU control, Yahama 5.1 surround, JVC DTV multi-format monitor, 2x23inch Apple monitors – and a partirdge on a pear tree.

[Sean Lander]

[walter biscardi] “Just curious how Avid teaches standards that others don’t? Avid doesn’t magically make you a broadcast editor. Any NLE can cut to broadcast standards, it’s whether the operator knows how to work in broadcast standards that make the difference. The Avid I learned on couldn’t cut broadcast material because it didn’t have high enough resolution for broadcast. The Media 100’s I cut on for 6 years sure did, but they didn’t teach me how to conform to broadcast standards. 5 years at CNN taught me that.”

I guess what I am trying to say Walter is that an Avid which cost over $100,000 back in the day was not the sort of thing you could buy and take home to learn. They were usually kept in Post Production houses. Hence to learn Avid you had to work in that environment. Much like your CNN experience. So I it’s not really the Avid itself more the environment you were in where it was used. Today you can buy FCP, put it on a Mac Mini and play with it for as long as you like, never having to think about such things as VITC, Blanking, +O.3 IRE etc etc. How often do we read on these forums people asking the most basic of questions about standards. Thank god these forums exist
where the ones who have done the training can pass on the knowledge to those who haven’t.

Of course this is all from my experience in OZ and it may be different in the US.