David Heidelberger
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Paul,
Is it possible you have in and out points set in the timeline? I’ve found that happens in FCP 7 when I have those. Not sure if that’s a bug (probably) or some new and clever behavior I haven’t found a use for yet (maybe).
– David
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Hi Nick,
I’m getting similar behavior sometimes on multiclips I created (from acquisition to sync) in FCP7. Not sure when it happens exactly, but on occasion, the viewer will stop playing along with the timeline, even if sync is set to open. Like I said, I haven’t noticed a pattern to when it’s happening, although I haven’t been looking too hard, but it definitely has happened.
Also, I’m getting something weird with multiclips where sometimes (again, not sure what I’m doing to trigger it), if I set ins and outs and perform a ripple delete, the playhead goes to the last frame of the outgoing clip as opposed to the first frame of the incoming clip (which is the normal, FCP6 behavior).
Oh, and finally, if I try to use a keyboard shortcut to switch (or cut) multiclip angles while there are in and out points set on the timeline, all hell breaks loose and clips seem to extend in crazy ways. I feel like I’ve done that in FCP6 and not had a problem, but I don’t remember.
That said, I’m more or less liking FCP 7. These are all annoying, but not too serious.
– David
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Thanks Jeff,
Cloning my drive now. Can’t wait to install.
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I’ll chime in, I guess.
I really don’t care about Blu-Ray. Very few clients I’ve dealt with have even mentioned it, let alone requested it. I suspect the Blu-Ray Lite, if you will, in this edition will pretty much cover my needs in that area for the next few years until FCP4 (are we back to that again?) and holographic discs or whatever.
I’m also really happy with the FCP interface. I take Andrew’s points, but I’d also be perfectly satisfied if they didn’t change a thing.
That said, I’m still lukewarm on this update. There are definitely some cool features in there. The iChat thing could have saved my company some money a few months ago, for example.
But I’m disappointed that more hasn’t been done for multi-core rendering and speed enhancements. I guess we’ll see how it performs in the future with Snow Leopard, as others have said.
I’d also love to be able to edit H.264 and some of the other temporal compression formats coming out of the more consumer-oriented cameras in realtime or in multi-format sequences. I just had to do a job where the B-Camera was the Canon 5D (A-cam was the HVX-200, so I was cutting in a DVCPROHD720p sequence). We didn’t use enough of the footage and were on too short a schedule to justify converting it all to ProRes, but it was a real nuisance to deal with, having to render each time. The images were beautiful, but the hassle on the post-side does not incline me to recommend it for future jobs. I think, in general, the Apple endorsed solution of “Just convert everything to ProRes,” is often not practical. I wish they had made it easier to work with all these new formats. H.264 (or similar) is showing up in a lot of cameras now. Dare I say, it’s the future of the consumer camcorder market? There really ought to be a way to deal with it without taking major render hits. And I take your point, Russell, that’s merely what I “hoped” they’d do. Still, somewhat disappointed there.
Finally, I realize they’re not going to tout on their front page “Hey, we’ve fixed all the bugs that were driving you crazy,” but there are several (I’ve filed the bug reports) that I’d really love to see fixed. Things like text and other generators being distorted in widescreen renders using Export Using>Compressor. Getting around this, doubles the number of renders you need. So I’m very curious to see how the new Compressor integration deals with that and other minor render bugs in that workflow (Timecode Overlay filter in Compressor being just flat-out wrong for 24p sequences or Quicktime files, for example). I’ll play around in the Apple Store before I upgrade and see if that’s all been sorted.
I know I’ll upgrade, I just wasn’t as thrilled by this release as I was by the last couple.
– David
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Hi Geraint,
I just had to do this last week. I wrote a little program to automate it. It’s the Clip Labeler on that page. Hopefully it works for you. I haven’t had a chance to test it in too many situations.
– David
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Thanks Noah,
Would it help to set the frame rate of the overcrank to 50fps in the 30pn mode (this can be done if you modify the scene file in a text editor)? Wouldn’t that be like shooting with a PAL camera? Or does the fact that it’s 29.97 instead of 30 and, presumably, 49.9x instead of 50 mess it up?
– David
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You can export a batch list and tweak it a bit in Excel to correct this after you’ve logged it incorrectly, but before you’ve captured. That only takes a few minutes. There’s a way to do it using XML, too, but I find FCP XMLs to just be impossibly complicated.
I wrote a program that can batch strip excess audio tracks from Quicktime movies after you’ve captured them in mere seconds, but unfortunately, there’s a bug that came up somewhere around FCP 6.0.2 that makes it impossible to reconnect to these modified clips, so I’ve taken the program down. Hopefully, they’ll correct in the next Final Cut and I’ll repost the program.
I agree, it’s annoying to keep having to disable all those tracks on capture.
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Be sure that your After Effects comp framerate is 23.976 and not 23.98 (Final Cut apparently knows the difference), then re-render. If re-rendering is impractical or impossible, you should be able to open the QT movie in Cinema Tools and click “Conform.” Set it to 23.98.
– David
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I just did a project that ended up as Flash movies. For my final renders, I changed my sequence settings to Uncompressed 10 Bit and did Export>Quicktime Movie and converted the movie to Flash. The results, particularly on graphics, were not very satisfying. The edges weren’t crisp. Then, purely by chance, I changed my sequence settings to Animation and converted that Quicktime movie to Flash. The result was MUCH better. The edges were really sharp. We got some pretty good looking video using the Flash CS3 Encoder at 400×300, 24fps, Medium Bandwidth (I think that’s 700kbps).
– David