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Vegas to FCP+Motion Workflow?
I’ve just edited my first feature on Vegas 8, and now have gotten a MacBook Pro because the film school I’m starting required that and FCP for us. Several shots in the movie were done handheld and my DP who is a Mac guy kept talking about Motion, now that I have it I tried one of our shots and the effect is amazing.
I now want to go back and do a bunch of shots in Motion, but even though I think I’m choosing uncompressed options and I’m using the original avi captures there is some sort of degradation happening going between the PC and the Mac and the encoding somewhere.
Does anyone have any tips on how to either render in vegas some mov files or something short of recapturing everything into FCP, running the motion magic – and then I’ve got mov files, and will they work with Vegas?
The thought of totally recutting the movie in FCP makes me want to slit my wrists – I’ve been on Vegas for the last 3 years and I’m like a 2 year old on FCP now, basically I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew about it.
Help! please 🙂
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10 Replies
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Render to IMX/MXF formats in Vegas, it reads very nicely in FCP
Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASSTCertified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor -
So when the IMX/MXF goes into the apple programs, they’ll want to render them as QT. What is the best path back into Vegas, leave the MOV files?
luckily I’m shooting full frame anamorphic for 2.35 masking, so in Motion I can do vertical corrections without having to zoom in at all.
I’m assuming as long as I make sure I have the right project settings and select “none” for compression that I’ll have the best posible outcome? Right now taking the AVIs I’ve managed to improve what I am getting to the point where they look like slightly contrasty dupes that you might expect from optical work in an old movie lol.
It’s not horrible, but when I A/B in vegas I can definitely notice some quality loss, but on their own it’s not super horrible – however when we’re on a 25 foot screen I’m betting it will be a different story lol.
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A followup with the MXF/IMX thing. I made the renders in Vegas fine, but when I put them on the mac, FCP says they’re not recognized. I did some looking and see I need an MXF component for QT – but the ones I see are $400 and up! Is there a free or sub-$100 solution? I’m a broke student that just shelled out for the MacBook Pro and Final Cut 2 Studio the school requires and money wise I’d have to just live with some shaky shots before I spend another $800 right now (The one I found was $400 each for import and export)
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I would avoid the whole .mxf thing. Render your shots out of Vegas at the native size of your camera original or project settings to Quicktimes using Photojpeg setting with the slider set at 100%.
These will work great on the Mac. Render them out of the Mac the same way (.pjpeg at 100%) and just cut them into your Vegas timeline. You should see no quality hit.
Lance
Lance Bachelder
Southern California -
Lance –
Thanks, I will try that too. What I did for an experiement was render uncompressed mov which is huge, but looked identical in an A/B on the Vegas timeline. I then put these directly into Motion and did the SmoothCam process, then exported those out in QT uncompressed. The results back in Vegas (Thank god for 4GB thumb drives…) look like 98% as good as the originals, which I’m very happy with.
I’m trying to just do the same shot over umpteen times until I find the best way, then I’m going to do a mass render out of all the shots in the film that aren’t on a tripod and do all of them on the mac when I’m at work (I have lots of downtime there)
Will post results…
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Yeah uncompressed or animation codec are great but very big – we use pjpeg here on our series because the quality vs. size issue.
You can batch your uncompressed files into Pro RES files on the Mac using Compressor. These will be smaller and easier to work with then render back into a PC friendly format when you’re done.
Lance
Lance Bachelder
Southern California -
Yeah, size isn’t really a factor, I have a 500GB drive to play with and I’m probably going to end up with about an hour of shots I want to correct. Once I get them back into Windows I have about 3TB, so I’ll just keep the huge files uncompressed until I go out to mpeg-2 for DVDs. I just have to figure out what we might do if we want to run the whole movie from a file rather than DVD at a screening, just have to do something that isn’t too high a bitrate that it will start stuttering on playback 🙂
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Hi Douglas,
I was very happy to see your post here as this is the first post I’ve where someone is successful exporting from Vegas to FCP. I am having the same problem whare FCP doesn’t let me import them. I exported as Sony MXF NTSC IMX 50. I have an old ver 4 of FCP. What am I missing? Thanks in advance. Danny Hays -
I don’t believe FCP 4 supports mxf?
We do this fairly regularly, as we exchange files with a posthouse in Austin, who is an FCS-based house.Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASSTCertified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor -
Yea, I thought that might be a problem. The reason I ask is we’re adding a FCP system to our work studio as one of the new and upcoming rides will be using FCP for all the video systems and we’ll be having to change the queue line video sometimes and I would like to be able to go between Vegas and FCP when thaat happens. Any articles or forums you see on this, please foward then to me if you would I would greatly appreciate it. danhays2004@yahoo.com Thanks
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