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Working a mixed media project FCP7
Hey Guys
I’ve just inherited a documentary project that was a real mess when I got ahold of it.
Not much thought had gone into the shooting of it, so the interviews were all shot on different formats. I’m not even sure what cameras were used, as no-one has the answers, but I’m definite that there was a 5D, an EX1 and something that creates an Apple Intermediate Codec. Some of them are shot against green screen (rather badly in some cases).
I’ve transcoded all these files to Pro-Res for editing.
The film is mostly built out of these interviews, and the rest is built out of stock footage and stills.
The stock that was with the project when I got it was captured from VHS (originally a mix of 8mm and 16mm), and is DV-PAL codec, which I’ve also transcoded to prores.
I’m now capturing more VHS through a capture card with a DV-PAL codec. I’m planning to transcode the files to prores for cutting aswell.
The stills are a mix of jpgs, tiffs, pdfs, and probably other things. There’re a LOT of them, but many are duplicates, so I’m searching for what I need as I need it.
What I’m asking is, given this background, what is my best course of action in terms of being best prepped for online, and in terms of avoiding problems with all of this mixed media. I started getting the FCP “Error: Out of Memory” export issue the other day, which I worked around by exporting chunks and putting them together, and I’d like to avoid that kind of messiness.
What should I be looking out for? I’ve attached a screengrab of my sequence settings.
I apologise for the vagueness of this question. I don’t have a specific problem yet, but I feel that they’re just around the corner. I’m just out of college, so I’m not that experienced in the offline/online process, and I’m running and gunning as a one man band in this scenario, so any help will be greatly appreciated. I’m an Apple Pro User in Fcp, but again, I’m not that experienced in this part of the process.
Thanks in advance guys,
Mike -
4 Replies
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Sorry, didn’t attach the image properly. See below.
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Hi Mike,
How are you planning to finish the film? Are you going out to Resolve/Color and then back to Final Cut? Or will you finish in something like Smoke?
Also, I’ve found that Still Images can really affect performance. One way I deal with this is to have separate Projects for separate things as opposed to having one large bloated Project with everything.
For instance, I’ll do all my Stills Animations in one Project or in After Effects, and then import a rendered Quicktime into my main Edit Project.
It’s important to keep your Projects as streamlined as possible. Export out various versions. I also export out XML at the end of every Edit Day on Projects like this.
Sandeep.
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Hey Sandeep
Why export out the xml?
I don’t know where we’ll be going for the online, that hasn’t been sorted yet. What would you recommend?
That’s a good idea on the stills. Would it be a good idea to run the two fcp projects at the same time, do my moves in one, export then reimport into the other? It sounds fine to me, but better to ask…
Thanks for the reply.
Mike
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I export out XML in case I have to restore the Project on another System for whatever reason. There’s always a danger with large projects that something goes wrong and you’re left scrambling trying to fix things with time running out. Just another safeguard, alongside Versioning.
You will end up running your Stills Project and your Edit Project concurrently on occasion. But you don’t want to have them both open all the time as that again impacts on performance.
With regards to Online/Finishing, that will depend on your budget. If the Producers can spring for a Color Grade in a Grading Suite and a Finishing Session in Smoke that would be ideal. If not, Grading and Finishing on something like a Symphony may be the way to go. Or if there’s no money left over you may have to do it within Final Cut!
Btw, recent versions of Smoke accept FCP XML, so incase you go that route, the XML will come in handy.
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