[Carl Edwards]

Boo. Kind of lame, I guess I’ll either have to talk them into giving me the login info or updating our work software to CC.

Thanks for getting back to me, you guys should think about some way for one computer to hold multiple licenses. While I’m sure it’s not common I also bet it’s not just me that’s going to hit this problem.

[Carl Edwards]

I’m sorry, you’re right. I let the condescending tone you use in pretty much every post get under my skin a bit.

Sorry about that.

[Carl Edwards]

Listen, it’s nice that you are trying to help us recreate our workflow to get around FCPXs shortfalls, but don’t.

A 10bit “uncompressed” compressed quicktime is not a substitute for 10bitlog DPX or 16bit OpenEXR. This is aside from the fact that I bet we can’t read it in Linux, which is what our compositors are working in.

I’m not expecting anything out of FCP to look good honestly. It’s always had so-so image quality and really terrible looking timewarps. That’s fine. It’s offline quality and it’s great for that, or it was until they took away it’s ability to integrate into a pipeline. That’s what bothers me.

[Carl Edwards]

[Andy Neil] “I don’t understand. FCPX can export XML. Its a new flavor of XML so it may not be compatible with whatever you do VFX on, though that may change since Resolve already supports it. Also, FCPX renders in 32-bit float, what are your 8-bit concerns regarding a QT export? ProRes? HQ is a 16-bit codec I believe, but quality will only be as good as the original footage.”

It is in fact a new flavor of XML that very little supports, so yeah, that would be part of the problem.

But I get the feeling you didn’t read too closely. We export out DPX and OPENEXR, neither of which FCP supports so we do this out of one of our smokes or flames. There was great integration between the two with FCPs old XML format turning into a near universal format that we could pass around. But apple chucked all this integration for no reason when they up-versioned.

So I don’t have QT export concerns, but even if I did HQ is certainly not a 16-bit format. The only decent quality you can get out of FCP is 4444 at 12bit, the rest is chopped off at 8bit. 4444 would be ok except only Macs can read it, which doesn’t help us that much.

On top of all this we still get people sending us tapes all the time and expecting us to be able to read them.

[Carl Edwards]

I’m sorry but that’s not how VFX shares media, we do it with XMLs and with Avid AAFs and relinking to the original media.

We never export out of final cut do to quality concerns (8bit and such). Until we can get DPX or OPENEXR out of final cut at original quality it is not going to be doing any media export for us, it’s strictly offline quality.