Benjamin Reichman
Forum Replies Created
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Here’s a belated thanks. Compressor did the job, and the footage looks surprisingly good next to the EX-1 clips! I was worried there would be a hugely noticeable drop-off in quality, but that audience probably won’t even notice (much).
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Good to know–thanks! I’ll stick with Leopard, and find some other way of running Win7.
This is off-topic, but I really enjoyed your “Final Cut Help” podcasts. Is there any chance you might continue them? The latest I could find was from last April.
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I’ve recently starting learning After Effects, so I was interested in this thread.
I’ve found After Effects Apprentice to be incredibly helpful. There’s one version of the book for AE 7 and CS3, and another version for CS4. It comes with a DVD containing sample projects and the focus is on completing them, instead of explaining individual commands in isolation ad nauseum, which so many software guides seem to do.
Haven’t checked out the options you two are mentioning–I’ll have to look into those, too.
And you’re not alone in being overwhelmed by the depth of After Effects. It’s exciting to learn, but sometimes my brain just freezes and I have to take a break…
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Bill,
A belated thank you! I was hoping, however, to search in a more specific way, for example, by using commands like “does not contain” in order to find a clip that had some particular tag in one column but NOT another tag in a different column. I suppose there’s nothing for it but to get used to the search function in FCP and use it as best we can.
Ben
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Matt,
I’m NOT an expert, so I don’t know the best approach. What I *can* say is that subclips alone won’t help you–they simply point to the master clip which is still intact on the drive, so you’re not saving space.
The Media Manager (sometimes jokingly referred to as the Media Mangler) should have the capability to delete unused portions of a master clip once you’ve set all the subclips, etc. that you want.
I hesitate to say anything more, because even though I’ve done something very similar with the Media Manager, I don’t want to steer you wrong–there may be a better way that someone else here can tell you about.
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Thanks, Dino, but that’s what we’re doing already. It just seems clunky and slow, because a) we can’t search across those fields, b) the text doesn’t wrap within each column, and c) the process is slower than the more modern style of tagging items (as you would on various websites).
I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining! This approach will work–it’s just that we were wondering if there’s a better, faster, searchable way. Ideally, I’d love to be able to use Spotlight on the bins in the Browser–including creating “smart bins” whose contents would automatically update based on certain criteria, just like smart folders.
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From where I sit, you both seem adequately cool. And I aspire to some day be the experienced fuddy-duddy who remembers when a 650 GB file was considered “large.”
Thanks for the advice!
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David, I’m a beginner, and I probably am making something simple needlessly complex, but I assure you that’s not my intention!
My goal is to get footage from my miniDV camcorder into Final Cut quickly and without too much wasted hard drive space, while saving on wear-and-tear of my camcorder.
Logging and capturing from tape the way I was taught in a course works well, obviously, but:
a) it seems slow to fast-forward, rewind, etc. as I log clips from tape, and
b) I’ve been told that it’s best to capture from a miniDV tape deck and NOT a camcorder so that you don’t wear out the camcorder. I don’t know how large an issue this really is, but I don’t have access to a deck. So all the logging and capturing I do is straight from my camcorder.
Because of the two issues above, I thought that if I could capture the tape as one large file, then I’d be saving wear-and-tear on the camcorder, and I could save time reviewing the footage because fast-forwarding, rewinding, jumping from point to point, etc. is much faster from the hard drive than from tape.
If I capture one large file, however, I need to break it up into pieces, so that I can save hard drive space by not keeping portions of video I don’t need. Another reason is that Mark warned above about the danger of having a single massive video file that might become corrupt, which would require recapturing the whole tape from scratch.
So that’s what I was thinking. Whether that thought process makes sense or not, is the question. 😉
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I appreciate all the advice! Just for the record, in case this is helpful to anyone: I decided to:
1) Capture the whole tape as one file with Capture Now.
2) Add markers automatically with the DV Start/Stop Detect command.
3) Make those marked sections into subclips automatically with the Make Subclip command.
4) Follow the advice on p. 115 of Volume IV of the manual (“Removing Portions of Media Files After Creating Subclips”). It did NOT work as advertised–it created a set of files in a temporary folder with odd names instead of my Capture Scratch folder. I found another thread on Creative COW that saved me: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1010749
5) After fiddling around with the Media Manager, I followed the advice in the thread and “moved” the media into my Capture Scratch folder. Then used the Rename File to Match Clip command.
I now have 12 files that represent all the footage in the tape that I’m using, and about 125 subclips that refer to those 12 files. I was expecting I’d get one file per subclip, but that didn’t happen. I suppose that’s not a problem, but as a new FCP user, I found the Media Manager to be quite wonky. It didn’t work as the manual clearly stated it would, and that’s a little unnerving.
Anyway, it’s all set, and I’m only leaving these comments in case anyone else is in my same situation. The lesson, as many other people have said in the forums, seems to be: don’t rely on the Media Manager.
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Ron, what would be the advantage of making them independent clips–or “new media”–is that the same thing?