WTF slow…juddering playback control on FCP

[David Bogie]

[Keith Rivers] “For no apparent reason,”

This statement usually implies you changed something on your system.

Importing material form the Canon DSLR is not, as LaRonde has noted, a simple matter. Have you successfully done this before? There are many articles on the Net describing several different workflows. EventDV magazine has one and Stu Maschwitz’s site is absolutely priceless and right on the cutting edge of this filmmaking process.

https://prolost.com/og

bogiesan

[Keith Rivers]

Just had no idea that I needed to batch process my Canon 5D files before editing. HA, always too good to be true. Whats your best method for batching? Apple Compressor? What setting?

THANK YOU DAVE

keith
youtube.com/krfilms

[Keith Rivers]

oh and this resource…thanks david

https://www.cinema5d.com/index.php

keith
youtube.com/krfilms

[Blair Golson]

I’ve figured this out:

Two ways to do it:

(Note: I favor ‘Option B’)

Option A) Quick but creates HUGE files on your hard drive

Download MPEG Streamclip and transcode your files into any of the ProRes formats (which are all .MOV). Then import them into FCP. The playback delays will be gone (as FCP loves this format).

Benefits: Quick solution. Transcoding happens at 1x speed. (A 10-second clip takes 10 seconds to transcode)

Drawbacks: Transcoding to ProRes increases your file size by anywhere from 10-30x. (A 100 MB file becomes 1GB – 3 GB or larger) So unless you’ve working on a massive external hard drive, this will quickly become a problem. Not to mention that if you ever want to re-edit your project, you’ll have to keep those massive files in their massive state — forever.

Option B: Slower but doesn’t increase file size

This involves changing the pre-set settings of new sequences.

So NOTE: You can’t do this with existing sequences. You’ve got to start with a new sequence. (I may be wrong about this aspect, but I don’t know how to repair/change already-existing sequence settings in a way that will eliminate the playback lag)

1) FCP menu > Easy Setup
2) On the menu that appears, choose:
Format: Apple Intermediate Codec
Use: 720
Rate: 29.97
3) Create a new sequence
4) Edit a cut into the sequence
5) IMPORTANT: When you are prompted to change the sequence settings to match your clip, click NO. (If you click ‘Yes’ you’ll un-do everything you just did in steps 1-4)
6) Hit option/alt-R to render both the audio and video at the same time

Benefits: Doesn’t increase your movie clip sizes.

Drawbacks: The rendering process takes roughly 4x the clip length. So if you edited a 10-second clip into the sequence, it’ll take about 40 seconds to render.

Is this a pain? Yes. But I’ll take it any day over the need to fill up my hard drive with massive files (option A)

[Michael Gissing]

I suggest you search this forum Blair as the best methodology has been covered here many times. The winning formula is to convert to ProRes via Compressor, fixing frame rate and audio sample rate issues at the same time.

AIC is an old and not very good codec which has been far and away superseded by ProRes. If you don’t change sample rate and frame rate from the 5D you will be sorry.

Hard drives are so fast and cheap that there is no reason to transcode to 720 AIC from 1080 H264.

[Blair Golson]

I apologize. I didn’t read the original post carefully enough.

My fix was actually for people using 720p Sanyo Xacti cameras. I had written my post for elsewhere and pasted it here without reading the original closely enough.

But I have to ask: Is there really no alernative to transcoding my mp4 files to ProRes format? At best, that’ll increase my file sizes 10x. And I have to keep those source files if I want to re-edit, right?

So all of a sudden 20 GB of source material becomes 200 GB?

I know that external hard drives are relatively cheap, but still: A few projects like that are we’re talking Terabytes. Do I really have to buy a new 1 TB hard drive for every 2 or 3 projects?

[David Roth weiss]

[Blair Golson] “Do I really have to buy a new 1 TB hard drive for every 2 or 3 projects?”

Blair,

Come on man, that’s less than $30 per project (see the link below). I’m tempted to send you the money myself. When I started in non-linear editing the price was $1000 per gigabyte. Charge you clients an extra $100 and live a little.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145304&cm_re=1tb_hard_drives_internal-_-22-145-304-_-Product

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

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