[David Michael]

John,

Thanks for responding, perhaps I am overlapping two separate instructions.

When creating an OMF from a sequence and adding 10 seconds handles, I’m not adding anything to the timeline length? I’m adding 10 potential seconds to each clip for massaging?

I was told to add a sync 2 pop. (So I changed the timecode start and added a frame of tone and some slug.)

I was also told to add 10 seconds of handles. Perhaps this is a separate instruction. I was assuming these were the same thing for total of 12 seconds lead-in. But I’m starting to think I was mistaken, hence why no 12 second lead in in Soundtrack pro?

What do you think?

[David Michael]

Thanks for the info, let’s see how deep the rabbit hole goes…

[David Michael]

I appreciate the feedback. Now since I’m starting from scratch I’ll have to ask you the obligatory stupid questions.

Is there a good fcp-xml reader out there that will allow me the freedoms I require to automate these name changes? Or perhaps, how do I make or find a good XSL stylesheet for Filemaker?

[David Michael]

No, I can’t change the actual file names since I am using file based media (Red transcodes). What I’m trying to do is actually very simple, it is the implementation of it that seems difficult.

Again, I just want to change the clip names in the browser. I already have input the scene, shot, take info in FCP’s respective columns, now I want to transfer that info over to the clip names in an automated way. It’s not going to be in the FCP drop down menu, I don’t think (if so I would have found the answer already!).

Let’s say scene is x, shot is y, and take is z. I want to be able to write a script that quickly changes the clip name to xyz.

I know people are about to write scripts for FCP and I’d like to write one myself is what this comes down to. If anyone has insight into how to implement something like this I’d very much appreciate it!

-David

[David Michael]

Thanks for your advice. If I understand you correctly, you think it would be best to keyframe each change in image size? The only problem with this is that the picture size changes from frame to frame and there are about 250 frames. And this isn’t the only image sequence I’m working with in this fashion, so putting in the time to manually do it wouldn’t make sense in the long run. If I am not understanding you properly, I apologize. Again, I appreciate your help.

What I am thinking is that maybe if I can apply a key just to a certain region of the image (that being the black space set by the smallest image) I could do an OK job. I just hope there is a better way. Perhaps there is a better way of creating an image sequence to begin with?

[David Michael]

Very interesting. I understand basically how you’ve set that up, and this is certainly going to make my world a hell of a lot easier. I’m going to take that code, play with it as soon as I get home and look up all the functions to make sure I understand them inside and out. Basically, what I see is that there are only a few commands ease(), wiggle(), random(), and seedRandom(). And most of the lines are definitions of the arrays and ease() is really the driving force behind this operation, as it is going to draw the line over the 10 seconds, and it’s got the wiggle built in. Before reading your response I didn’t realize variables could be arrays and that will be endlessly useful. Thanks again for your help! If what I end up animating is worthwhile looking at all I’ll make sure to post up a link.

[David Michael]

Hey thanks for that! Exactly what I needed.

One more thing, if I have linear movement from point 0,240 at second 0 and I want a motion path to travel to 720,y at second 10 where y is a random point between 0 and 480, how could I set that up?

[David Michael]

Thanks! That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.

[David Michael]

Is there a quality difference between VTR controlled capture and non-vtr ‘capture now’ footage?