[Dan Riley]

Well, if you don’t have a capture card and a bunch of drives for a RAID
then do it all native firewire. Your actual footage from your DVCPRO
tape will look the same whether it’s edited on a DV/DVCPRO timeline
or an uncompressed timeline. However, you can get better looking titles,
keys and graphics with a higher rez codec other than DV/DVCPRO.
Either DVCPRO50 or uncompressed 8 bit or 10 bit is best for your finished show.
My workflow is to offline at DV/DVCPRO, inputing our DVCPRO
footage via our Aurora Pipe Studio card via SDI. Then for the
finished show I uprez to 10 bit uncompressed.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

I’m with Walter on this one.
I used to adjust playback levels too, with the AVID or whatever.
Now I just capture all the clips and then either as I lay a clip
into the sequence or at the end of the offline I just drop
the 3 way CC filter on the clip and it’s easy as pie.
I’ve got a separate waveform monitor and vectorscope
conected to my composite out of my Aurora Pipe Studio
while at the same time I have active SDI and component
outputs for monitoring and going out to digibeta.

Plus once you set your CC filter for one camera or scene, you can
easily copy the filter attributes to any other time you use
that same camera or scene somewhere else.
And as Walter said, these settings from your offline sequence
follow quite nicely into your uprez when you go to
digitbeta or whatever.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

Start with this:
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/basic_onlining_jordan.html

however, it will still be not as smooth as AVID. Believe me.
But my experience of doing quite a few uprezes with FCP now is
your clips will work, your color correction and transition effects
will work. Your titles will work (title 3D). But your freeze frames
might not and your speed changed clips might not. For what’s
happening with your time code breaks where you know there isn’t any,
my suggestion is to tell FCP to “warn after capture” in the
user prefs.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

First, is your camera or deck DVCPRO ?
If so, and you want to capture via firewire,
set you capture setting to DV NTSC 48 kHz.
With Blackmagic, it may have a different name
but it should include DV and/or DVCPRO in the name.
You do not have to use the Blackmagic codec
to use the Blackmagic card. One more thing…
DVCPRO is not a different format than DV
as far as the codec is concerned. DVCPRO
is only a faster running tape for less dropouts.
The picture quality is the same as DV so
use that setting.
If you don’t see one with the Blackmagic name in it,
that’s ok. Just use the stock one above.

Second, what disk are you telling FCP to put it on?
It needs to go to that RAID you said you had,
not your system drive. Where is it going?
Check under system settings, scratch disks.

Third, set your sequences to be the same as
whatever setting you used for your capture.

I hope this helps.
Dan

[Dan Riley]

Actually, I forgot to ask, are your capture settings set for DV/DVCPRO
as well? You could, for example capture your footage over firewire
but use the DVCPRO50 codec or even 10 bit uncompressed
if you wanted to. Wouldn’t make your DV footage look any better
but it would require your sequence to be the same as whatever
your capture setting was.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

Is your sequence set for DV/DVCPRO ?
There is an easy setup for it.
You can use either the Blackmagic DV/DVCPRO codec
or Apple’s. It makes little difference. You should not
have to render any of that footage.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

oh…I see those links aren’t right.
I guess you have to go to the main URL below and scroll down
to get the mpeg 4 movies I posted links to.
https://www.cgm-online.com/eiperle/cgm_screenshots_vc_e.html

dan

[Dan Riley]

They have two, one for transitions
CGM Zoom/Rotate 3D:
javascript:openWindow(‘../movies/movies_dve2/zoomrotate.html’,’ZoomRotate3D’);javascript:openWindow(‘../movies/movies_dve2/zoomrotate.html’,’ZoomRotate3D’);

and one as a filter
CGM Basic 3D:
javascript:openWindow(‘../movies/movies_dve2/basic3d.html’,’Basic3D’);

All of these filters are very customizable. All the controls
come up in the filters box in the canvas and you can
change anything you want basically.
I don’t work for them, it’s just that this guy’s software
has saved me a lot of setup time for 3d effects.
And there are quite a few of us FCP users who think
CGM stuff is good. I’m surprised more of the people
on this forum aren’t agreeing with me.
Could be the $300 it costs. Perhaps that’s too steep for some.
But you get quite a few filters and effects, both
2d and 3d and color effects etc.
He has a demo that just puts a name over stuff I think.
You can see how the plugins work for real I believe.
I have forgotten how that works because I’ve owned them
for a while.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

I told you about CGM on your last post.
Not like them? I think they are very good.
https://www.cgm-online.com/eiperle/cgm_screenshots_vc_e.html

dan

[Dan Riley]

I HAVE had problems opening 4.5 project in 5.
Some do, and convert just fine. Others won’t
open at all. They crash midway through the process.

I kept my 4.5/OS 10.3.7. system on a separate drive
partition because I was expecting trouble. I did a clean
install of Tiger and then Final Cut Studio. Now if I
need to go back to the old 4.5 project, I just boot
into that other partition, open FCP 4.5 and the old
project file and everything is fine. I’ve updated my
Aurora Pipe Studio drivers on the old partition too.
They are backwords compatible so I was told
that was the way to go. It’s been good.

FCP5, well that’s another story.
I would not have upgraded except I needed the
multicam for a project because our AVID was
tied up. FCP 5 is not ready for prime time if
you are doing a lower rez offline, like DV, then
uprezing to 10 bit uncompressed for finishing.
The media management is terrible.
Many extra hours will be spent by you fixing stuff.
I’m pretty frustrated with FCP 5 (and 5.0.2)
because of this and a general instability
compared to 4.5, which was very solid.
But the multicam did work very well for my 4 camera shoot.
I’m used to AVID so that says something
for Apple’s 1.0 version of that feature.

Dan