Alex Elkins
Forum Replies Created
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[Jonathan White] “I think I can make this with Quicktime Pro but is there anyway to edit this in fcp?”
Can anyone confirm whether this can be done in QT Pro? I have a similar job coming up and am wondering which software to use.
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Hi Roli,
That drive is pretty good, we use them in our office. You don’t need any additional cards to use it, as your computer has Firewire built in – however, for an extra £15 I’d personally be wanting to get the e-SATA card too, because it’ll be a hell of a lot faster than FW400. Note that is is FW400, not FW800 which is what you said you wanted in your first post. (Don’t forget to buy an e-SATA to e-SATA cable too if you go for the card, as I don’t think they come with the harddrive.)
Good luck,
Alex -
Check out http://www.eclipsecomputers.com in Coventry, UK for some good prices and selection on harddrives.
I would recommend Seagate Barracuda or Hitachi Ultrastar drives. Both of these drives come as ‘stand-alone’, i.e. not inside an external enclosure.
You can get Seagate and Western Digital FW800 pre-built external drives, but personally I would buy a SATA harddrive and an e-SATA enclosure and just make it myself. It’s straight-forward, and SATA is much faster than FW800. You’d also need an e-SATA PCI card, which are about £15 for a bog-standard one (what I use on my G5 at home). Works fine and anyone in a computer shop would be able to help if you weren’t sure about it.Good luck,
Alex -
If you’re in the UK the standard is to use ‘Full Frame’ bars with tone at -18dB.
Simplest way to know what you need for certain is to ask the channel for their delivery spec document – it will give you all of the information you need. -
FCP does allow custom frame sizes but it doesn’t handle them well at all.
You would have a much less stressful time doing it all in After Effects, in my opinion, and you can monitor audio using AFX. Just do a search in the help for info on how to preview audio.If you do want to do it through FCP, go to Sequence Settings and type in your custom frame size with square pixels. Not recommended though.
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If you have an AJA Kona 3 card you can do a realtime up-convert of the SP material if you feed it through an analogue/digital converter. Blackmagic also have a card that does upconversions but I’ve never used it.
The other way is to capture everything you want and then upconvert using Compressor. This would take a long time depending on how much archive material you intend to use.
I think various telecine houses also offer that service, as do many post houses – might be worth considering if you want to take the load off your hands and free your system up for editing the other parts of the programme.
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If you need to deliver both 16:9 AND 4:3 then you must keep all graphics 4:3 safe, unless you are allowed to letterbox the picture, i.e. your 16:9 video inside a 4:3 frame with black bars at top and bottom.
If you deliver one 16:9 master that you have kept 14:9 safe then you should be ok for 16:9 and 4:3 broadcast. Bottom line though is that you need to check with the channel that what you are doing is acceptable. They MAY require your graphics to be 4:3 safe. Check now to save yourself having to re-do graphics later, or just keep it 4:3 safe regardless for peace of mind.
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I would imagine that what they mean is deliver it 14:9 safe, so just use Andy’s Guides to make sure everything is within the 14:9 safe area. I’m not aware of people actually delivering in 14:9. Double check with the client though, because it sounds to me like they may be confusing 14:9 aspect ratio and 14:9 safe.
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Hi Daniel,
Thanks for responding. However I think what the manual says on page 69 and 70 is more about setting in/out points rather than re-setting them.
What I want to do is set my in point at, say 10:14:00:00 on the original Quicktime (which I have done) but then I need the compressed Quicktime file that is created to begin at TC 00:00:00:00. At the moment the Quicktime files that are created maintain the original timecode.The only way that I know to do this is to bring each clip into a timeline in FCP and set the timecode to start at 00:00:00:00 – I’m just wondering if there’s a more efficient way to do this through Compressor to avoid a second stage of encoding through FCP.
Hope that makes sense. Any further help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Alex -
[Jeff Pierce] “FCP never creates a folder on the Scratch Disk for the project — so I have to do it manually (and make sure my project name matches that folder name exactly.”
I wouldn’t bother with manually creating a capture folder if nothing is being captured anyway – just work on your project as normal, then when you render FCP will create a render directory relevant to the name of your project file. As long as your media is on a fast, secure RAID then there’s nothing to worry about regarding performance – just stick it all in a folder called ‘Project A Media’ and separate into folders such as ‘Graphics’ ‘Video”Audio’ etc. That way you can import the folder called ‘Project A Media’ into your project, and it will maintain an organised directory structure in the FCP browser.