Cyrus Dowlatshahi
Forum Replies Created
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I’m actually turning down invitations to go out at night because I have to spend time learning to edit in FCP X.
Ironically I am spending my nights with Larry, his videos on my laptop while I’m in FCP X on my desktop.
He knows I love him.
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FCP X haters —-> mad at apple
my psycho ex —> mad at me
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Aaaand I’ve got something that’s working for me. Just some background, I’m shooting a doc on the 5d, with shotgun and lav mic sound recorded on a Zoom h4N.
FCP X Dualeyes Workflow
1. Clone 5d CF Card and Zoom h4N SD cards to Backup HD
2. Run Dualeyes and create new H264 Quicktime Files with good sound married
2b. (Optional) Run Adobe Bridge and batch rename Quicktime files created by Dualeyes to something different/shorter (I renamed files like ‘MVI_6762.MOV’ to ‘MVI_6762.MOV_sync’)
3. Move all Dualeyes files into their own folder, so as to keep the 5d CF card folder hierarchy intact (if you choose to archive this way)
4. Import the Dualeyes Quicktime files into FCP X
5. Import Quicktime files that Dualeyes missed into FCP X and sync manually.Note on Step 5: If there are shots you aren’t rolling sound on, obviously Dualeyes will not sync these. When you import to FCP X, it is immediately apparent that ‘MVI_6762.MOV’ does not have the ‘sync’ suffix, and thus has on-board audio.
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Okay I got it.
If you do not transcode to ProRes when you import your footage, you’re editing the native h264/AVCHD files. But as soon as you add an effect (and color balancing/correcting/grading is an effect), FCP X will transcode that clip (whatever you apply an effect to) to ProRes 422 (or whatever codec you specified in your Project Properties under Audio and Render Properties; can be Uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2, ProRes 422, ProRes 422 (HQ) or ProRes 4444).
This presumably means that when it comes to color correction, the whole editing-H264-natively-in-FCP X thing won’t be any different than when we color correct our DSLR footage in FCP 7: we have the same abilities/limitations in the 4:2:0 color space as before.
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FYI, The quote is accurate. Here’s what he just wrote me:
“Will picture quality suffer [by editing native h264/AVCHD]? Not particularly. The downside is render time and limited color correction space.” -Larry
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I don’t know the insides of codecs that well.
I’m pretty sure than any portion of a timeline to which an effect is applied is converted to ProRes (per FCP X’s render settings).
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In his tutorial, Larry Jordan suggests that converting to ProRes improves image quality:
“The file sizes are bigger, but the color quality and image quality is greater. Also the performance of Final Cut is better.”
I’m doing some side-by-side testing using the J-K-L keys to fast-forward and rewind through native footage (in this case AVCHD) and also footage transcoded to ProRes. My computer (an 8-core Mac Pro) handles the ProRes noticeably easier, but compare the file sizes of a 38-second clips in AVCHD (80.8MB() versus ProRes (525.5MB).
I can deal with some choppiness as I edit, but I don’t want to sacrifice image quality. Image-quality-wise, will a final sequence edited natively look worse than if it was edited in ProRes?
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Ha!
The few, the proud.
My Saturday: Larry Jordan’s voice, this forum, coffee, and FCP X.