Andrew Rendell
Forum Replies Created
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The first one is an adapter to slot the VHS-C tape into a regular VHS deck, so yes to that. The EasyCap thing, I’d be wary of – it says that it’s windows and doesn’t mention mac plus there’s no mention of what file format it creates, so it’s a bit of a gamble. It might work, but probably not very well, I’d go for what Rafael suggests myself.
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Being based in the UK and working in the mainstream broadcasting arena, the way it’s looked to me over the last few years is that Avid had the professional market in London pretty much sewn up and it took a lot of effort for Apple to really break through, which they did around three years ago(ish) when (a) FCP could do pretty much what Avid did (b) Avid released some buggy updates, and (c) the BBC bought a load of them. So as a freelance editor I only had to know Avid to make a living until FCP became big enough in the market to make it necessary for me (and others like me) to learn it. To some extent editing software can be a personal choice, but for example I frequently cut stuff on my laptop then take it to a facility for the next stage and it ends up at the BBC, so that’s 3 systems that it’s been through before it gets transmitted – all currently FCP, but whatever system you want to use (and I’ve done the same thing with Avid) you don’t get away with rendering into different codecs for different stages of the job when you’ve got BBC or Channel 4 engineers doing the technical reviews. I don’t particularly care whether the system I’m using is new or “amazing” (whatever that means) or who manufactures it, only that it’s fast and reliable at doing the things I want it to do and that it doesn’t give me any technical headaches at delivery time. FCP works, Avid works, I don’t know much about the others, but getting a major broadcaster to use your system is going to be a major marketing coup and losing one would be fairly disastrous for any manufacturer.
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As far as I’m aware, FCP doesn’t change the levels unless you tell it to (the difference with Avid is that Avid puts that option in your face when you import, whereas FCP doesn’t), so where you have footage that comes from a video camera the levels will be as the broadcasting spec and signals over 235/100% are essentially overexposure (giving you the chance to correct it rather than just clip it).
As an experiment, I’ve just imported an image from photoshop and peak level is at 255, so FCP isn’t changing anything automatically.
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Probably not a real answer, but I had a similar thing happen sometime last year with an audio track playing back the wrong bit of a music track – the music track that I’d imported was a regular 48kHz 16bit WAV. I changed the track to an AIFF using Compressor and replaced it in the timeline and it then worked perfectly. I thought it was a one-off, but maybe there’s a bug somewhere…
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I prefer to send my sequence to color and use the adjustments to make everything “legal” as the scopes in color are much better than the ones in fcp, and use the limiter filter just to make sure that I haven’t missed anything (mainly because clipping changes the way it looks and the way it looks is important to me). The things that you need to watch are black level, white level (peak), colour saturation and colour gamut.
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Oh, and you can drag an effect from the viewer window into the browser (rename it, put it in a bin for effects you want to repeat), then drag it onto another clip….
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aaaah, not sure, search around the forum, I’m sure this has come up before. I have a feeling that you might have to do the conversion to prores (or whatever) in compressor or streamclip…
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Yes indeed the frame size is the giveaway.
What will happen is when you put your first clip on the timeline, it will (probably) ask you whether you want to make the sequence settings the same as the clip settings. Assuming that your first clip is an SD one, click yes and you’ll have an SD sequence. Then when you edit a clip from the HD material into it FCP will automatically resize it to fit, so it’ll make it into SD.
N.B. SD can be either 4:3 or 16:9, so you’ll have to decide which one of them you want your sequence to be, then whether you want black bars and the whole of the picture or crop to fill the frame for whicherver pics are the other shape. -
you get the list when you select your operating system, then it’s about a third of the way down
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+1
ProRes is the codec of choice for FCP.
Clip 2 is High Def (HD), whereas the others are Standard Def (SD) so unless you’re actually making something in HD, I’d change that one to SD at the same time as changing the codec (it’ll take a little longer to convert but it’ll save time later).
P.S. I love the typo “Field Dominance: Nonce” – ROFL for obscure technical nerdiness reason (don’t worry about it).