Alex Elkins
Forum Replies Created
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No problem. It’s always a bit of a learning curve for people when you start working with new formats.
All the best,
Alex Elkins -
Hi Adam,
With FCP you can’t transfer from the EX3 as anything other than its native/re-wrapped format, unless you are playing it through a deck, so recapturing it is unlikely to be an option. I’m not even sure if decks exist for SxS cards??
The long render times are normal due to the way HDV and XDCAM is compressed (see Long GOP). However, and you’ll find plenty of information about this if you search the archives, you can change your compression settings in your timeline to ProRes. This will speed up render times, and you’ll get better quality. To do this, go to Sequence > Settings, then change compressor to Apple ProRes.
All the best,
Alex Elkins -
[Martyn Greswolde] “Can i import larger than 1080p into FCP and pan the image across in post so it looks like i have panned the camera?”
Yes. After Effects would be more appropriate though if you have that.
[Martyn Greswolde] “If i can, does anyone know how I would do this?”
Under the Motion tab in the Viewer window. You have to keyframe the position of the video from one point to another – the manual covers this if you search for ‘keyframe’
All the best,
Alex -
[Matthew Troyansky] “do you think it would be easier to go with the 24″ LED display with the mini display port? I don’t need another huge monitor right now but maybe it would be wise to have a second DVI port for the future?”
Hi Matthew,
If your graphics card has a mini display port connection you can buy an adapter from Apple which attaches a DVI port to the mini display port. This would be by far the cheapest option if that’s your concern.
All the best,
Alex Elkins -
Have you tried just changing your edited sequence settings to progressive?
Sequence > Settings > Field Dominance: None
Best,
Alex Elkins -
Hi Jeremy,
[Jeremy Garchow] “Load one sequence in the viewer and have your other timeline open. Gang the playheads and hit play.”
I’ve never had a reason to gang the playheads when I’ve been editing so I tested this out of curiosity (once with a sequence and once with a clip loaded into the viewer).
Should I be able to see both the viewer and the canvas playing independent things simultaneously? All I’m getting is playback on the timeline, then when I pause, the clip in the viewer jumps forward the same number of frames.This is all just XDCAM playing off a solid Fibre Channel RAID 5, so bandwidth shouldn’t be an issue.
As I say, I just did this as a test so perhaps I’m getting the same results as everyone else??
Thanks,
Alex -
[Rupert Lloyd] “Would it be a good idea to change the render codec in user preferences > render control tab to pro res now?”
This is a setting you’ll find if you go to Sequence > Settings > (CMD+0) Then where it says ‘Compressor’, change that to Apple ProRes. (Don’t use the ProRes HQ setting, it won’t improve the image quality in this case).
I’d suggest that if you’re just doing some fairy standard editing (cuts/dissolves only, no effects etc) keep the setting as it is until you’ve got your edit locked. Then change to ProRes when you want to do your final render.
If you’re going to be testing a lot of effects then you’ll probably find that changing to ProRes from the beginning will produce faster renders – test that theory though as I could be wrong. I don’t work with HDV all that often.
If you’re going to grade it with Apple Color then you can remain at HDV throughout, then render as ProRes out of Color.All the best,
Alex Elkins -
[Rupert Lloyd] “I have a mixture of PAL and NTSC archive footage as well as HDV, which is the majority. My sequences are set to HDV 1080i50, 25fps”
Stop before you get yourself into too many problems – you need to convert your NTSC archive into PAL (using Compressor gives good results if set up correctly).
Having your timeline set to HDV is ok for now while most of your footage is HDV but when you do a final render you need to set the compression to something that isn’t going to degrade your images. Apple ProRes is your best bet – good quality/small(ish) file sizes. Ideally all of your footage would have been captured as ProRes to begin with and you could work with everything in the same format.
[Rupert Lloyd] “i have 8 tracks of video and 22 audio tracks.”
That’s quite a lot of audio tracks, especially if you have any filters applied to some of the clips. Have you tried increasing your Real-time audio mixing setting in the User Preferences menu? Depending on what kind of storage you’re working from you might get away with setting that to 22 tracks. You can then do an audio mixdown with the final render.
Good luck,
Alex Elkins -
Hi Thomas,
Is this by any chance XDCAM footage that you’ve re-imported at some point?
This sort of thing can happen when FCP converts spanned clips. Do the clips appear to be as long as they should be when you open in Quicktime?That’s one guess. If not, give us some more details about the footage, your workflow etc.
All the best,
Alex Elkins -
Perfect, Andy. Nice one.