[Ben Holmes]

Hi Stephen

Well – you did ask for 5th grade (but I’ll try to go easy)….

Based on a quick scan of the internet about your camera, but with no info in your post (I’m guessing because you don’t really know) I see that your camera shoots HD video to cards.

At the moment, it looks like you are bringing those files in somehow (?), and dropping them into the default DV (which is 4 by 3 SD) timeline. HD material is natively 16 by 9, so it would both scale down (losing a lot of quality that might not be apparent in the FCP canvas window which is half res) and letterboxed automatically to fit the DV frame size.

What you should be doing is using “Log and Transfer” to import all your camera files in a format FCP likes (such as ProRes – please see the manual) and then drag one clip into an empty timeline and ask FCP to match the timeline settings to the same as your media.

In all honesty, there is too much to explain (some of which I suspect you are unaware of) in a post, but I really would recommend looking at the sections of the manual detailing video formats. Also, try to read up on the easy setup options, and those detailing the video output settings. The manual is available within the FCP application.

Also, all 5th graders will find a warm welcome in the basics forum.

Hope that helps.

Ben

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/community/communitydetails/?UserStoryId=8757

[Ben Holmes]

https://www.digitalrebellion.com/proadmin/

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/community/communitydetails/?UserStoryId=8757

[Ben Holmes]

Buy the best you can afford – a quad core is a must, as it will improve performance no end – the i7’s hyper thread, meaning you have an 8-core machine. Max out the RAM to 16Gb – it’s not expensive like Mac Pro RAM, and it will allow FCP and AE to run smoothly together.

I have a couple of the 3.4Ghz i7 quads, and they beat some of my Mac Pros at FCP renders. Lovely machines.

You’ll need to add some fast storage – preferably thunderbolt RAID, though right now it’s Promise (yuck) or Lacie (yuck), and the latter are rapidly going out of stock as Thailand floods. If you want broadcast monitoring and video input, you can choose between the excellent MXO2 with thunderbolt, and the excellent Blackmagic Ultrastudio 3D.

All the best.
Ben

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/community/communitydetails/?UserStoryId=8757

[Ben Holmes]

If the shot is static, you would be able to mask the colour correction adjustment layer in AE to limit the effect, but take a look at the footage first: You have nothing left there but blue – any attempt to reintroduce skin tone is probably doomed.

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/community/communitydetails/?UserStoryId=8757

[Ben Holmes]

Good news: You can use the Canon FCP Import plugin to log and transfer all your footage to ProRes. As Jerry says – leaving it in H.264 just will not work, as FCP7 is not designed to work with that codec – it will see it as it’s quicktime, but it doesn’t mean it WANTS to use it. And for another reason – ProRes is 10-bit, so will hold up much better under grading.

Your new footage will, unfortunately take up more space – an hour of HD ProRes is around 60GB. But storage is cheap these days. Make sure, however, that it’s fast enough to deal with a proper codec – you really need an external RAID, FW800 or SATA or better. A nice big G-RAID is a good start.

Of course, there’s always FCPX – which will natively import and cut your footage. Many people still prefer to let X background transcode this footage to ProRes for better performance.

Tragically, this question is asked daily here, and the advice is always the same – but many people prefer to ignore it and try to edit with the H264 files..

Ben

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/community/communitydetails/?UserStoryId=8757

[Ben Holmes]

Hi Alan

The Core i7 Macbooks and iMacs run FCPX remarkably well. The advantage with the Mac Pro is the ability to add more RAM (I recommend 16gb in iMacs and Mac Pros) and faster graphics cards. It is also capable of adding a video in/out card for proper video monitoring, but that may not be of interest to you.

I’d also think that if this laptop has thunderbolt, you would have better expansion options for storage – although you can much more cheaply stick 6/9Tb of storage in a Mac Pro. If it doesn’t have thunderbolt, you will always be restricted on the speed of storage you can add.

I’d have a hard time right recommending an older Mac Pro – newer models, or forms of pro machines are probably around the corner. An i7 Macbook pro with thunderbolt will, however, give you a number of years of happy FCPX usage.

Personally? I’d take the third way and buy a 27″ iMac 3.4 Ghz with 2Gb GFX and 16Gb RAM. At around the same price as the old Mac pro, you’d have a lovely FCPX machine!

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/community/communitydetails/?UserStoryId=8757

[Ben Holmes]

No – that’s not what I’m saying – FCS3, which includes DVDSP runs on Lion, so will work with new Mac Pros. The original question was about FCS2 (FCP6) which apparently needs PPC support to run, which can be kludged from SL. What it means for you is that you will HAVE to run FCS3 on Lion. Whenever Apple release a new piece of hardware, it is not supported in previous OS versions (what are they going to do? Update all the old versions?)

Whilst I have not upgraded any of our pro edit systems to Lion for FCP7, I have been running it on my own laptop (trusty test machine) for a while, and have not heard of, or seen any problems with this.

As far as I am concerned, Apple have stated that FCP7 is Lion-compatible, which means they will have to fix anything broken in FCS3 by OS updates with ProKit updates. Other people here disagree with me. We all agree that sticking with SL is a better bet, if you have a choice.

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/community/communitydetails/?UserStoryId=8757

[Ben Holmes]

Just make a folder in your applications folder called FCPX and drop the FCPX app in there. Ridiculous as it may seem, this cures the problem (which is essentially that both apps are called FCP). I would imagine you’d need to reinstall FCS after doing this (just the apps mind, which doesn’t take long).

Apple suggest partitioning the system drive and installing FCPX on a separate bootable partition, but I’ve yet to find any clear examples of this being a problem.

Hope that helps.

Ben

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/community/communitydetails/?UserStoryId=8757

[Ben Holmes]

Rosetta is not support in Lion, nor are any PowerPC apps AFAIK.

See thread below – it’s stated that FCP6 will install under SL, then you can upgrade to Lion – but again I guess this would require the Intel version (was FCP6 universal? I don’t recall).

Note as well that any hardware released SINCE Lion (so far only MBA’s and Minis) will NOT run SL – as these hardware profiles are not in the SL code.

Hope that helps.

Ben

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/community/communitydetails/?UserStoryId=8757

[Ben Holmes]

Chris – you may be right to say that FCP6 works under SL, and it may well even run under Lion (doesn’t sound like a good idea to me though as it won’t be supported) but new models of Macs released since Lion (i.e. Macbook Airs and Minis, and any future model of MBP or Mac Pro) cannot be downgraded to SL – the hardware is simply not coded into or supported by earlier versions.

If you bought a current iMac or Mac Pro, you’re ok – as they were released originally with SL. Anything newer WILL NOT support it.

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/community/communitydetails/?UserStoryId=8757