[David Bertman]

yeah-

It had to do with any clips that had sound synced after they were shot… Using a sound clip that was a different length than the picture makes FCP freak out. And sadly, as we film makers know, sound and picture shot in dual system are ALWAYS different lengths.

Basically its a major bug in FCP which for some reason Apple hasn’t yet fixed, even though they claim that FCP is a professional editing system.

The only work around I found is either shoot the stuff with sound attached to the camera and thus the initial file has picture and sound married together, or make a quicktime clip of each cut and re-import that in (but then you lose the meta data) and its an agonizingly tedious process…

I’d love to hear if anyone else has found a better solution.

[David Bertman]

I dont get a lot of calls for commercials. 99% of the calls I get are long form.

But you could be right about bringing someone on who has done this before. What I gather from talking to people though is I will run into problems if I try to do in the cutting room what is usually done in the post house (eg getting the camera original files into a format I can edit with and then back to the camera originals when the editing is done)…

David

[David Bertman]

HI Gary-

Actually I have had very little experience working with LUTs and RAW files. However, I don’t think I would even be handling them. I think the post house who is doing the down-conversion and giving me the best-light quicktime dailies would be converting the sequence when I am done.

If I understand the process, that obfuscates the need for intel only macs (although, all the macs in my cutting suite are intels). I assume I would work with some low bandwidth nice looking codec like Prores 422 or even DVC Pro HD.

Thats why I am concerned. The workflow seems way too easy. The footage goes from the set to the post house. They add the LUT and downconvert for me. I cut with the smaller quicktimes then give the post house my sequence. They swap it out with the good picture… What am I missing?

David

[David Bertman]

Chris-

By that logic I would NEVER use a Red…

[David Bertman]

Cool – thanks for that info Aaron-

I think I would prefer the RED workflow cause, at least in theory, it seems faster and cooler. I’ve done the old digitize from tape workflow and as you said, it takes a while…

You said there are a bunch of steps that I could miss which would cause a headache later — can you give me an example? I’ve never done a project with the RED, so here’s how I assume the workflow would go:

They shoot on set. A data wrangler makes a copy of the digital footage on 2 drives. One drive they keep as a safety. The other drive is Fed-exed to the post hose where they add a best light color correction. They then downconvert the footage to quicktimes. I injest those quicktimes into FCP and cut… Once the editing is done, we just swap out my smaller quicktime source footage for the original RED stuff and then the color correcting is done and an HDSR tape tape is made or a DI…

Is this correct or just the dreams of an out of touch editor?

[David Bertman]

Hey Carl-

The shot is a tilt and pan from one side of a library wall to the other. I’m trying to attach jumbo-trons to the back and side walls… It should be simple as there are huge unobstructed planes (the whole back wall, the whole side wall, etc) and very little movement in the shot. The problem is its pretty dark (not a lot of contrast) and it was shot on 16mm, so its pretty grainy. The tracker keeps latching onto the grain. I’m sure there are tricks or techniques that experienced motion graphics artists use, but I haven’t learned them yet (hence the reason I’d like to get individual tutoring)

If you’re curious, I have put the shot on my .mac idisk. (This is not the full rez version- the full rez is 1920×1080) Heres the link — https://homepage.mac.com/dbertman/filechute/GRANDTILTorig.mov

Thanks,

Dave

[David Bertman]

I too had these green and pink frames while I was cutting a feature. MANY MANY calls back and forth to Apple. Like you, I have a Kona LHe card, but I am using 2 nVidia 8800 cards in a MacPro. I tried everything I could imagine including full clean installs of the OS and FCP suite (a number of times). Apple even swapped out the logic board, power supple, all 8 Gigs of RAM, the memory risers, and video cards to no avail. I transferred the footage from the G-Raid to internal drives assuming it may be a drive issue… Nothing helped.

Finally, I transcoded all my footage from XDCam to Prores and that fixed the problem… I assumed it must have been some weird way the long GOP Sony XDCam codec works with the mac….

Was your footage XDCam by any chance?

Dave

[David Bertman]

Hey Walter-

Thanks for the fast reply. Yes, like smoothcam…. But (an I apologize if this is the stupidest question in the history of stupid questions) where is it?

I looked in the FCP user manual and it said its in the Effects Menu under Video Filters/Video/Smoothcam. But there is no smoothcam in there for me. I am using the latest version of FC Studio (6.0.3). How did you get smoothcam? Did you have to install it separately or was in included in the install of FCP?

Thanks

David

[David Bertman]

What an amazingly unhelpful response, Rafael.

Obviously if it was working properly I would not have asked the question in the first place.

[David Bertman]

Setting the device to non controllable device was the first thing I did, and as I mentioned the Capture Now button wouldn’t do anything when I hit it. It wasn’t gray, so it obviously seemed like it should be working, but nothing was recorded or indicated when I would hit it.

And yes, I ended up using QT ti record. But I wish there was an elegant (or at least non-silly workaround way to do it in FCP, like you can in Avid)

Thanks