Darren Roark
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Oliver,
I agree with what you are saying that with production realities vary greatly when it comes to post. When I have the luxury of being involved before production begins, things go much better.
The biggest use of Sync N Link is that it actually makes the subroles for you automatically by character if the sound mixer labeled the mic properly.
On a short shot on Red Dragon for a horror anthology series for Showtime, the directing team edits in FCP X, the budget couldn’t afford a dedicated DIT so I suggested renting more than enough cards so you don’t have to erase them. Then have a competent person make disk images of the cards to a drive on set, then clone that drive overnight to a backup every night.
I asked them to be sure and rent a Lockit box, found out that the sound person already labels takes the preferred way.
After wrap of the three day shoot, they brought me one of the drives, I was able to sync and batch relabel all the takes using the audio file names. Then a quick ‘select all’ and then transcode proxy media on my 12c (newish) mac pro, I went to sleep and woke up with everything done. The thing that took the most time for me was spot checking the sync in the takes.
Lockit boxes and the even better and less expensive Timecode Buddy tools have come down in price to the point where they should no longer be optional. A sender/receiver bundle rents for about $70 a week, that’s $12 per shoot day.
I have to say, having worked with what Mike has been saying for the past three and a half months on a lowish budget action movie in FCP X, everything Mike is saying is true if his instructions are followed.
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To clarify, my main point is that it’s been five years since ‘legacy’ FCP development stopped, yet it is still functional after four new 10.x releases. A half a decade and it still works is hardly Apple ‘suddenly pulling the plug’.
It’s worked fine for me opening archived feature film projects and cleaning them up for getting them into FCP X. It’s 3rd party plugins that are no longer compatible with the OS that are often the problem.
Installing Yosemite over an existing OS with FCP 7 installed can be a problem for some, but it works fine with a fresh install.
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[TImothy Auld] “The big question is, as it always is in a business environment, will Apple all of the sudden decide to bail?
“How many weird half baked permutations of Avid were EOL’d suddenly? Several off the top of my head. At a former place I work at the owner bought several Mojo’s just a couple months before they killed support.
Seeing how FCP 7 still somehow manages to work in Yosemite five years after it’s last update and the remaining six years left of the promised development cycle for FCPX, I’d say people are safe giving FCP X a go.
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[Gary Huff] “I would agree with the latter. Anything that is short-form interview with b-roll on top is almost always done in FCPX on my end.”
It’s also ideal for really long projects too. 😀
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[David Lawrence] “Not a problem, as far as I can see. Any meaningful improvement would have to be significantly different. And Apple has certainly left plenty of room for improvement! ;)”
It’s actually my favorite part of working with FCP X since getting used to it especially on larger projects.
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[TImothy Auld] “Apple files for copyright when a receptionist sneezes.”
It’s true, they already have a patent on something called ‘iSneezeâ„¢’.
The magsafe connector hasn’t been copied except for on the Microsoft Surface tablet, and they’re both magnetic… See? 😉
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I asked a couple people on the FCP X team at NAB last year if Apple patented the magnetic timeline, the answer was yes. If anyone wants to borrow ideas from it, they would have to be different enough.
https://alex4d.com/notes/item/apple-magnetic-timeline-fcpx-patent
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I was working with a producer of some fairly well known films recently making changes on a locked feature that was cut in FCP X. He said he didn’t want to work in anything else unless it had the post prep capabilities as FCP X.
FWIW, the prep lag between set and post that FCP X avoids is not going unnoticed.
I should have called ‘bean counters’ producers.
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I find it interesting that the “Well… FCP X’s strengths really only help out the assistant editor.” keeps being brought up. I think the more producers start to understand the time savings at the start and end of post FCP X gives you it will start to be taken more seriously.
Currently I’m working on a lower budget film, under $5 million, shot on two Red epic cameras.
On the days where the camera crews used a Lockit box for jam syncing the timecode, and the sound person labeled the takes correctly I could sync and relabel the dailies in less than two minutes, and this is including dragging in the Red raw footage.
This gets the editor cutting scenes much faster during production, mistakes can be spotted in the footage faster allowing for reshoots when needed.
The iXML data even comes through into FCP X labeling all the multichannel WAV file tracks automatically for exporting to the sound mix. Avid cannot do this and it’s a big pile of work entering in that information by hand.
I helped out on this film called “Starry Eyes”, it had a great festival run getting into SXSW, and a small theatrical run.
This film was shot on two Red Epic cams and cut by one of the directors in FCP X in his kitchen on a 2011 iMac. This was the first feature for him, his only other editing experience was cutting his own short films.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2793490/?ref_=nv_sr_1
He had an assistant help prep the footage and worked with him on a rough stringout and then took over. He then cut in proxy mode till picture lock, flipped the switch back to ‘original media’ and exported to Resolve.
No days of conforming, checking sync, repositioning, all the handoff work was done.
The hiccup they had was creating the AAF as a result of improperly made multicam clips. (They didn’t read the manual) This was fixed by Gregory Clarke via a doctored XML from Intelligent Assistance even though it wasn’t caused by their software.
Having been through this, the bean counters are going to eventually take notice that certain set in stone time consuming and labor intensive costly steps can be avoided with FCP X.
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[Michael Gissing] “So for my license fee I usually have to take the extra step of deleting things like clip gain and dynamic levels, EQ etc. Also many plugins cannot be translated like pitch etc so for me an OMF is simpler and better.”
That makes sense. With XML there is no reason a third party couldn’t make an app that could generate one.
I quite like having the 3rd party apps deal with this stuff, if something doesn’t work right the XtoPro people and the Intelligent Assistance people are very accessible with support.