[Chris Good]

Thank you!!

-Chris

[Chris Good]

The thing that really threw me was the fact that FCPX has an export preset called “Uncompressed 8-bit” worded exactly as Pandora’s specs.

In the end I sent them a 450mb SD uncompressed clip, and a 1080p h.264 clip which came out to 37mb. Haven’t heard anything from them yet.

[Chris Good]

Thanks for the replies guys. I was starting to think I was loosing my mind.

[Chris Good]

I used CarbonCopyCloner the other day to clone a hard drive and noticed that it has drive sync backup options. I decided to give it a try as my backup tool and see if I liked it better than SyncSyncSync.

I do like it better! AND it has a built in ‘unmount drive after backup’ option, which is just what I was looking for so that FCPX wasn’t seeing the events on my backup drive.

If I leave my “video backup” drive unmounted, CCC will mount it and run the backup. The problem is that as soon as it mounts “Video Backup” FCPX grabs it and when CCC tries to unmount, it can’t….

[Chris Good]

[Jeremy Garchow] “This works like any other clip, if there’s no media, it can’t do the transition, unless you overlap it.”

If clip A and clip B both have 1:00 of head/tail, then you make them a compound clip, you loose the head/tail.

[Jeremy Garchow] “So, assuming you don’t want to break apart your clip items add heads and tails:”

This is what I’ve resorted to doing, but sometimes it ends up displacing connected clips later on in the timeline. (I havn’t quite figured out why yet.)

[Jeremy Garchow] ”
Why not just keep your backgrounds as connected clips?”

Whenever possible, I do keep the BG as connected clips. The trouble comes when I need to have a transition (other than a simple crossfade or dip to color) between two clips. For instance a transition where the keyed foreground & background clip, scale down and fly away.

But anyway, thanks for your response! It got me thinking about other ways to solve my problem. Actually, this weekend I did a big project with lots of keyed footage with a few complex transitions. What I ended up doing was making all my timeline clips about 1 second longer on the front and back end than they needed to be. Then, I made compound clips. THEN, I trimmed them. This worked out pretty well. The only issue I have with this is that it makes the process of making accurate in/out points kind of irrelevant.

-Chris

[Chris Good]

[Craig Seeman] “Of course if you archive the entire AVCHD you can import that into FCPX, no transcoding needed at all.”

Yeah, it sounds simple, but working in Premiere for several years, I never had a reason to import the whole AVCHD archive. (I’m not discounting that there may be a good reason to have copied the whole AVCHD, it was just never an issue before). I only copied the relevant MTS files to the folder for that project then imported them straight into Premiere. The fact that FCPX can only read the MTS files if they are in an AVCHD folder is kind of annoying.

For your BluRay split, you could pull the MTS files out of their current AVCHD folder and divide them into 23GB chunks then use the Panasonic utility to rebuild it.

[Chris Good]

This happened to me several times in one of my first FCPX projects. If I’d quit and reopen, it would re-appear, but zooming in and out would make various clip in the timeline disappear. It’s just a bug….

[Chris Good]

Another thing to consider. If you have a RAID setup where you have mirrored drives, like in RAID10 (for example, 2 pairs of striped drives that are mirrored) – this could potentially be a bad choice for any sort of media production. If you have corrupted files on one striped pair, you also have it on the mirror. Or if you delete something that for some reason you are unable to undo, it’s also gone on the mirror.

On one of my Mac Pros I have 4 drives in it. A 500gb OS drive, 2 x 1TB drives striped together into 2TB, and a 2TB drive that syncs with the striped pair every night as a backup. This way if some video file or photo gets corrupted or deleted… I still have yesterday’s version on the backup. If I lose a drive, I could potentially lose a whole day’s worth of work, but it’s better than losing a project or file completely.