[David Dean]

Good heavens, Mark, I think it worked! I’m unfortunately not anywhere near a Blu-Ray player to test it, but there were absolutely no hiccups in the process at all. I actually did try your method earlier, but what apparently messed me up was the fact that I exported the six tracks as AIFFs, but the Quicktime VIDEO I tried to fold in was a version without sound (why would I want sound on the PICTURE if I had six surround tracks already in the batch?). And so when I tried to enter “Add Video,” I got an error message saying “There is no audio on this file.” Well, duh. So this time I dragged in the movie with a stereo mix, and it easily accepted it.

I’ll let you know if it really did give me a surround mix (and just in time — it has its world premiere at the Nashville Film Festival tomorrow night and I needed a backup just in case there’s something amiss with the DCP). Seriously — thank you so much for responding.

[David Dean]

Thanks for responding, Russ — I DO use h.264 when I’m making a simple stereo Blu-Ray — choosing “New Batch From Template” and picking “Create Blu-Ray.” And it’s worked fine, with an acceptable timeframe. The problem I’m having is creating a Blu with a 5.1 surround mix, and the MPEG workflow enabled me to do that on the previous job.

So let me ask this: I can export a QuickTime movie with FCP7 with the six discrete tracks. They’re laid out on the timeline Left, Right, Center, LFE, Left Surround, Right Surround. If I drag that movie into Compressor, using the Template method, I do indeed see in the Inspector that there are six tracks — but when it burns, do those tracks wind up in the correct places for a surround playback? (I’m just asking about a simple burn — believe me, I’ve tried the method where you drag the tracks into the “surround” diagram and it’s way too complicated to explain how THAT didn’t work.) Thanks!

[David Dean]

Wow — that’s great! I never would have thought to put the matte BELOW the movie, but it works simply and beautifully. There’s another forum post from a few months ago raising the same issue, and I’d love to copy and paste your response (with your credit, of course) to help that guy out — the responses there were things like “export a freezeframe and create a mask in Photoshop.” (If you’d prefer to do that yourself, do an FCP forum search on “widescreen” and it should be right on top.) Again, many, many thanks.

[David Dean]

Thanks, everyone. I should be more specific, and it leads to a second question. I’ve edited a 93-minute feature that the cinematographer now wants to put a widescreen 2.35:1 mask on. I need to upload the film to him, in Quicktime format, so he can create a new FCP timeline on his own, apply the mask and then, using the blade tool to create subclips in the QT movie, reposition the shots up or down to fit correctly (to his eye) within the letterbox. He’ll then upload the timeline back to me and I’ll paste the repositioned attributes onto the actual color-graded clips on my timeline. For that reason I wanted the smallest-sized file I could create; hence the codec question.

But here’s the second question. Unlike in Avid, where a single effect can be placed on an upper video track and it changes multiple clips beneath it, I can’t find a way to place a single “widescreen” mask over the entire film so the clips beneath it can be manipulated. Placing it on the clip itself raises and lowers the letterbox as well, and placing it on a slug on V2 masks the center of the image, not the letterbox. This seems like a really basic thing to do, but I can’t make it work. Thanks!

[David Dean]

Okay, here’s the damn thing. When I started writing this post, at 1:00 in the morning, it was at 40% with 24 hours still to go. Twenty minutes after I hit “post,” as I was going to bed, it had jumped to 83% with 3 hours to go. Ten minutes later it was done. So I did it, but it still took 14 hours from beginning to end. I’ll ask it in a different way — is this something I should be expecting with future ProRes to H.264 conversions? Thanks!

[David Dean]

I’m having the same problem. I’ve just purchased 5.5.3 (I didn’t want to upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion just yet in order to buy 6.0), and have downloaded and installed the Sony XDCAM plugin (version 1.2048). I have a harddrive full of XDCAM material that I’ve easily accessed on Final Cut (through XDCAM Transfer, of course), and I cannot get MC to link to it. No matter how far down the XDCAM architecture I go, the message reads “Unable to link to any clips.” The console does confirm that the plugin is there, but there’s also a specific message on the console reading “Version 1.2048 does not support [the folders containing the footage on my drive].” Is that simply a matter of it not being MC version 5.5.2 that the Sony website specifically mentions, and this plug-in is NOT compatible? I also do not have an XDCAM tab in the Import settings, which I thought I should be seeing. Thanks.

[David Dean]

Hi, Jerry. Thank you so much for your observation that the percentage of the export corresponded to the percentage of the timeline. It seems obvious in retrospect, but I hadn’t heard it spelled out so clearly.

When I got an “out of memory” error message instead of a “codec error” message, and didn’t understand why my Activity Monitor showed plenty of memory, I found a YouTube video by Larry Jordan, who told me about the maximum amount of memory FCP can use, and how you really shouldn’t have a project file much bigger than 100MB to keep it from getting hinky (and mine was 200MB — it’s a feature film), I had the thought of creating a new project and only bringing in the timeline in question from the main project. Sure enough, the project is now a streamlined 30MB. And this time, when I exported the timeline as a Quicktime movie (same codec, XDCAM EX 1080p/24), it worked — it did take the three hours or so I expected, but there were absolutely no error messages. And because of your post, I monitored the entire process, cross-referencing the percentage to where I knew it approximately fell on the timeline. If a percentage point took a long time to move, I could tell it was because it was a spot where there were a lot of graphics, or whatever. But it didn’t fail!

However — and this is baffling me — the exported QT movie gradually drifts out of sync. By the end of the 100 minutes, it is off by almost three seconds. As I’ve written over on the Compression thread, I am back to point zero, and have no idea how to proceed now.

Thanks again for any advice you might have.

[David Dean]

Hi, Craig. Between this thread and the one on FCP, and a very helpful Larry Jordan video on YouTube, I was able to export a 1920×1080 Quicktime movie successfully without any “Codec Error” messages. What I did: my project is almost 200 MB, which Larry says is way too big and causes memory problems. I will go back and delete unneeded segments, but I thought if I just created a new project and copied the timeline into it, the project would be significantly smaller and might avoid some of my issues. And it did! The export to Quicktime took the expected three hours, using the current settings, with no error messages whatsoever…

but the 100-minute Quicktime movie gradually drifts out of sync. By the end it is two or three seconds off. I was so close, and I’m now back to zero, with no idea how to deal with this freakish issue. Thank you for your suggestions.

[David Dean]

Thank you for your response, Craig. When I say “full-size,” I’m referring to the fact that it exports as the same 1920×1080 as the source footage. I don’t use “Quicktime Conversion,” but “QT Movie.” Exporting it as “Current Settings,” based on the XDCAM EX 1080p/24 codec from the timeline, has allowed me to create 1080p .mov files for the past six months. I created one last week and made a DVD from it. It’s only this last one that has given me the codec error, and the non-EX shots in the timeline are the same ones as in the successful exports.

Here is the data about my system and software versions:
Macbook Pro 2009 model with 8GB of RAM
Snow Leopard version 10.6.8
Final Cut Pro version 7.0.3
The codec of the sequence to export is XDCAM EX 1080p24 (35 Mb/s VBR)

I’m afraid I don’t know a lot about codecs, but looking at the Get Info pane of the 1920×1080 Quicktime movies I’ve successfully exported, the codec reads “MPEG-2 video, linear PCM, timecode.” As I say, I’ve never specified the software to make it that way, but just hitting “current settings” has created movies with those properties.

I hope this helps in your diagnosis, and I truly appreciate your time on this holiday Monday.

[David Dean]

Okay, slightly less panic — it’s now down to around ten hours, and speeding up. But I am still very nervous about it working another few hours and then failing with no explanation. This has been happening consistently, and I don’t know if it’s just Compressor or the communication between Compressor and FCP. This is why I usually export a QT movie and compress that, but now even that isn’t working.

Hey, does software take holiday weekends off?

Thanks for any suggestions to avoid failure messages.