[Dave Blodgett]

I found a little work around as this was driving me nuts the other day – I go to the timeline and ‘select all’ (cmd-a) then choose Modify/label/ and choose a color (optn-cmd-2, 3, 4, etc).

This grabs all the clips in the timeline and changes their label color to your choosing, and it also changes the clip name color in the browser. Now I scan the browser and quickly see any clips that haven’t changed color and I know which clips are in use in my project and which aren’t.

Not as elegant as a media usage counter, but better than writing it all down on paper.

-dave

[Dave Blodgett]

I use my XH A1 to bring DV clips into FCP without any problems at all. No jaggies, No lines. The DV clips were shot on another DV camcorder – I just drop the DV tape into the XH A1 and capture from there since it’s usually connected to the mac.

FCP won’t let me capture using a SD preset and HD device control, (it requires all HD or all SD settings) – so I tell it to capture uncompressed and then manually control the capture & camcorder.

-d

[Dave Blodgett]

Thanks Chris – I’m taking the clip down to 25% which is why I was searching for something better than frame blending.

Neither the client nor I am really happy with the frame blending result, and I was hoping to redo a few of their videos for them with optical flow and improve the result. No time pressure as the project has already been delivered – just trying to deliver a better product to them.

[Dave Blodgett]

Thought I would try exporting the sequence as a QT movie to see if the ‘stuttering’ was apparent there (since it isn’t there when the clip is played in the Viewer, but *is* there when played in the Canvas).

The exported clip plays just like the Canvas with all the stuttering.

any other thoughts?

thx,
-dave

[Dave Blodgett]

Hi David, Not sure I would characterize timeline scrolling as ‘critical’, but it does make for a more efficient editing process.

For example, I often find myself working on videos with a dozen or more video tracks. With the timeline scrolling during playback, I can often spot problems before the video plays down to that location, repair, and continue on without wasting time. In FCP, because I am often blind to the area of the sequence that is playing, I must wait until that section plays, recognize the problem, repair it, set the playhead back to the beginning of the section where the problem began, watch the video a second time, and then continue on. Sometimes it’s only matter of going back 10 or 15 seconds, other times to resolve a problem at the end of a clip, I have to adjust the beginning, and that causes a lot of wasted time.

Another example in these multi-track videos is that I often end up making many changes by adding new clips on new tracks. Often the ‘new’ version ends up hiding entire ‘older’ clips. I like to take the old clips out of the project when they’re no longer used just to keep things clean, but in FCP I find I have to do that in two steps – first step is to ‘zoom out’ of the timeline so I can see the entire project and scan it for these types of ‘buried clip’ issues and resolve them, then I can zoom back in and play the timeline at a visual resolution that lets me see the transitions, clip alignments, etc.

again, not critical, just something that flows a little nicer in some other NLE’s. There are other features I would place in the ‘critical’ category that have caused us to stop the migration from Vegas to FCP, but thats for a different thread I think.

-dave

[Dave Blodgett]

Thanks guys – Yes, my question is specifically about timeremapping and optical flow – what would cause the .motn clip to play well in the clip Viewer, but not in the Canvas?

the clip is 2 seconds long as I pan a camera shot of a motorcycle passing by, and is the only clip in the sequence.

I’ve tried smoothcam in the past to see what improvements it could make on my panning performance, but it gives up – I forget the exact msg, but essentially it complained about too much movement.

-dave

[Dave Blodgett]

Another Vegas feature I really miss in FCP – having the timeline scroll during playback makes troubleshooting complex sequences so much easier.

In FCP I find myself constantly pausing playback, forcing a re-centering of the timeline, then resume playback. Wish there was a simpler way…

-d

[Dave Blodgett]

I came to depend on a similar feature in Vegas – One column in the browser shows how many times a clip is in use – sure do miss it in FCP. It’s very convenient when you have many shots that all have to get into a video, but the order and location in the timeline isn’t especially critical.

Lately I’ve changed my workflow where I don’t set in/out points until a clip is used – that way I at least have an indicator in the browser that I’ve used a clip.

-d

[Dave Blodgett]

pixta, This may have nothing to do with your prblm, but a week ago I tried to capture some DV video and FCP gave me some TCB errors during capture where I knew the video was good. The project wasn’t important so I set it aside. Later that day I started running into Motion import prblms and the following day even more issues with other apps. The root cause was a corrupted directory on two of my internal drives. Disk warrior resolved the directory issues (also zapped pram, repaired disk permissions, & ran maintigit for good measure). All is well again.

-dave

[Dave Blodgett]

oh yes, regular backups – we hadn’t been doing them until we got the mac, now we do them all the time.

-dave