[David Eaks]

Rafael, interesting comments about Larry’s workflows. I don’t doubt your expertice and your posts have been very helpful to me and countless others over the years. I am constantly trying to improve my workflow and quality, striving to learn something new everyday. So your comments and corrections are always welcome.

I really should have better indicated that the “article In a nutshell” steps that I wrote were not Larry’s instructions verbatim, but my own words. I need a balance of fast turn around and quality, also the move away from DVD is in full swing for the majority of my work.

I’m aware that Chris already has an HD Prores movie exported, and of course he can use it for whichever method he chooses to use. I dont think I mentioned frame rate conversion, I’m not really experienced with the process.

What I posted will make a 16:9 Anamorphic DVD, not a 4:3 letterbox DVD. I found that the method Larry outlines for taking HD Prores video and running it through Compressor to make a 16:9 SD Prores file does an excellent job downscaling. Then, in my own experience, using that 16:9 SD Prores file to burn the DVD just as you said with Apple DVD Best setting ends with better a quality DVD than just putting the HD Prores into Compressor and applying Apple DVD Best.

But, my current workflow for burning DVD from 1920×1080 video is to: Edit in HD on FCPX> change sequence settings to NTSC SD 720×480 Animorphic> export (resulting in an SD Prores file)> Submit Compressor Apple DVD Best. One major consideration in my tests, is how the DVD looks when played back in a Blu-ray player upscaled on an HD TV, not only how it looks when played in a DVD player on a CRT. This is because many of the DVDs I deliver are to people who have an HD TV and “will get a Blu-ray Player soon” but want a DVD now. GRRRrrrr I just want to make sure it will look good in the future too.

[David Eaks]

Joel and Sascha, no it is not proven that FCP7 will not run on Mavericks.

[David Eaks]

Hi Andrew,

Many DVD players have this function, do you have control of what player is used? If not, do you have DVD Studio Pro?

Eric says-
“Compressor doesn’t author a disc, it only encodes”

Sure it does. It’s in the Job Action menu in the inspector. Though it may be extremely limited in customization options. It does Blu-ray as well. The DVD could be set to play on insert and the DVD player set to loop play.

[David Eaks]

See my first reply. It doesn’t have to be FCPX… if Adobes Creative Cloud suits you, go for Premiere.

You can upgrade some components in the Mac Pro, you can optimize your setup and workflow but I just don’t think you will be able to get the increase you are looking for continuing with FCP7.

I promise, FCPX isn’t “iMovie Pro”. It’s great. Download the free FCPX trial, drop some clips on the timeline, add some effects typical to your normal work, observe real time performance, observe render speed, try exporting with and without rendering the timeline and observe its speed. Don’t even worry about learning the new ways of the magnetic timeline, event browser, secondary storylines etc, just try it and see for yourself if the speed is worth the hassle of learning it. Then, once you see the light, the community in the FCPX Techniques forum will greatly ease the transition.

[David Eaks]

Whoa whoa whoa, lets back up. You can’t make a DVD with 1920×1080 video for playback in DVD players. There is a way to put HD content on a DVD but it only plays In Blu-ray players and you only get like 20 minutes or something… I’ve never bothered to try. That’s what Blu-ray is for. Oh, and there is also the dead format called “HD-DVD”. It lost the battle against Blu-ray Disc. DO NOT use the HD-DVD setting in DVD Studio Pro.

There is no reason for you to be creating H.264 in the workflow from HD in FCP7s timeline to burning a DVD. H.264 is great though, for Blu-ray, iOS/mobile devices, YouTube/web etc.

Editing with all Prores files and exporting Prores self-contained current settings should be an absolutely pristine version of your edit. No “not working” transitions or anything odd. Are you sure you don’t have any other codecs in the timeline? Namely H.264? FCP7 does not work well with h.264 and doing so anyway will cause unpredictable behavior.

Do it like Larry Jordan says, here-
https://www.larryjordan.biz/convert-high-definition-to-standard-definition-video/

Article’s method in a nutshell-

1) Export self-contained with current settings from FCP (not “send to” or QT Conversion)

2) Import to Compressor, apply the Apple ProRes 422 codec to the HD source. Select the setting.

3) In the Inspector, (if you need the best quality and are prepared to wait for it, click the frame controls tab, enable by clicking the gear icon and choosing on, set resize to best (and deinterlace to best if necessary) adaptive details on). Click the Geometry tab (To convert a 16:9 HD master file to NTSC 16:9)-

Set Crop to Custom and make sure all numeric entries are 0
Set Frame Size to 720 x 480
Set Pixel Aspect to NTSC CCIR 601/DV (16:9)

4) Submit. This will make an SD Prores file which, while much smaller than HD Prores, is still much too large for DVD.

Then-

5) Import the SD Prores to Compressor and apply the Apple DVD Best settings. Set “job action” to burn a DVD automatically when the encode is finished or take the resulting files into DVDSP for authoring.

6) Let me know how it turns out

11) Get a Blu-ray burner, I’ve got a couple of these but I thought they were closer to $120 when I got them-
https://www.amazon.com/LG-BE12LU38-Lightscribe-External-Rewriter/dp/B005GU0BLC

I think I got that all written right…

[David Eaks]

Thank you AJA, your support is unparalleled in my experience. This issue is more of my being nit picky than any real damage. I’ll call or email to see what your guys say, if I feel its necessary after more research. As things are, I’m one happy camper in AJA Land.

Thanks for the suggestion Steve. Though its not what I am referring to, I will be ordering a pack of those caps. I assume that the entire terminal would need to be replaced but it doesn’t hurt to ask. Here is a picture to clarify-

[David Eaks]

It’s just really, really slowwww. What is the Mac are you using?

Matrox MAX accelerates H.264 encoding on its own hardware, to just under real time. The file your working on now would take about 50 minutes (a couple minutes added for the audio encode) You’ll need a Mac with either an available PCIe slot, an expresscard34 slot or thunderbolt. And at least $500 if you’re on a Mac Pro, or $1000 if you’re on an iMac/MacBook Pro.

[David Eaks]

Edit- ah, the man himself has got you covered, thanks Andy!

The connected clips need to be in a “secondary storyline” in order for roll to work between clips. Skimming through the video I linked, I didn’t seen an explanation of secondary storylines, could have sworn it was in there.

This ones got it-
https://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/tutorials/927-what-are-secondary-story-lines-in-final-cut-pro-x-and-how-do-you-use-them

[David Eaks]

The trim tool changes function based on where the cursor is on the clip. Two connected clips butted up to each other cannot be rolled, unless they are both within the same secondary storyline. Here’s a nice trim tool overview from Andy Neil-

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/neil_andy/FCPX-Trim-Tool/video-tutorial

[David Eaks]

Ah, well its a general best practice to have a separate drive for your boot drive, with only your operating System and Applications installed on it. Then edit your media off of a separate drive, prefferably a fast RAID.

Since just the OS and Apps don’t take up much storage space, I’ve been just fine with a 128GB SSD (I have a couple Crucial M4s and a Samsung 830 which are rotated per clean install). An SSD system drive is a great “useability” upgrade, not so much of a “productivity” upgrade though. I use three 2TB WD Blacks in RAID-0 for my Media drive. Original camera cards are backed up to a separate dedicated external drive. Then an 8TB RAID for TimeMachine backup. This gives me three copies of my media, decent storage space and performance.

First thing is to be sure to have at least a second copy of your original media files backed up on a different drive, immediately after copying them to your editing drive. There is no sense in risking the loss of irreplaceable files on the failure of one hard drive, I hear data recovery centers are expensive.