[David Parker]

[Gary Huff] “Well, that really depends on your source files…how do you think trimming works to begin with?”

In any rational software, aka not Premiere, it will copy anything it can’t losslessly trim. See page 484 of the Resolve manual for example, which I can’t copy and paste due to it being “secured”.

[David Parker]

Noah, not only are you responding to a need not being discussed here, you are way off base as well (psst. trimming files is not a generation, and no one wants to archive TBs of useless media; even if the tapes are cheap, the time and physical space to store them is not).

Jeremy, compressor is cool, but can’t do what I need. Even if I wanted to throw computers at the problem to parallelize my fix up script, there would need to be a lot of workflow glue to compensate for an extra step at the most crucial part of the edit workflow, which really demands a tight coupling to ingest. So I’m inclined to keep it at the end.

So, I had a look at the FCPX xml. The good news is that it is very readable and well documented. The bad news is that when a clip changes duration, that change apparently has to be rippled all the way through the document to every place that it is used. I was hoping I could just change the duration when the reference is declared, but for reasons I don’t understand at the moment, this isn’t the case.

So any munging script would have to keep the whole state of the document, and be pretty darn smart about what needs to be updated, which is a bit more of a project than I had anticipated. I have some ideas for how to do this, but not sure I have the time available to implement. Any developers out there interested in taking on this project?

In the meantime I’m going to consider finishing in resolve, if the one way trip in is solid I’d be ok to finish there . . .

[David Parker]

Kinda. More like conforming the pull down to be correct. We have 30fps material in a 60fps stream, however it’s not locked and can drift. We edit with the sloppy 60fps stuff, and I can make it solid 30fps, and either leave it in a 60fps file, or make it 30. Either way is fine, and I’m sure fcpx will be happier if it remains 60. Premiere and FCP 7 have no problem with 60fps files becoming 30 all of a sudden 🙂 (well FCP will complain, but take it).

[David Parker]

Thanks Oliver and Jeremy. Yeah, I am reluctant to make a roundtrip like this an element of our workflow, taking a sequence with all of its complexity from NLE to NLE generally hasn’t worked well in the past, and I’m not hearing confidence that it does now. Though I will give Resolve a look just to see how I find it.

The “process” I need to run is a script that takes the original files we edit with and transforms them into them into the final form, mostly in the area of things like removing duplicate frames and establishing the correct cadence. It would be nice to run this on the source material before we edit with it, but this is not possible due to the extremely tight cycle between ingest and edit. We work a bit like sports highlight editing, tons of content coming in as edit happens, during finishing is the only chance I have of making things proper. FCP 7 works beautifully in this way, and we are still using it, as all our editors (and myself) dislike Premiere, though it does work.

So, I will head under the hood and see if I can hack the fcpx xmls to point directly to trimmed files, avoiding the roundtrip to another NLE. It can’t be that hard right? (Famous last words).

[David Parker]

Thanks Oliver,

How reliable is that roundtrip in your experience (assuming it is something you are using)? Does the resulting project back in FCPX look exactly the same with all the original filters/effects/fades/time remaps/etc etc on it? As I mentioned I am unwilling to consider the roundtrip through Premiere, as I have seen it be fairly flaky. Is through Resolve known to work well?

Unfortunately we would want to do this roundtrip as part of the finishing process, so it would be when the edit is most complex, with most of the finishing work at least started, meaning lots of complexity in the filters/effects department.

[David Parker]

Ehh, perhaps for some of our longer captures it would be worth syncing that up. But would much prefer to do the marking in the same program that is capturing, so there isn’t a separate sync step (and the logger doesn’t miss a cut and restart, etc. etc.). And would pretty much need an dedicated person on the ipad, rather than one of the crew already there reaching over and hitting a button in the capture program to add a marker.

Thanks for the suggestion though!

Does anyone know if Avid clip markers come over to Premiere cleanly? . . . Perhaps worth using MC as a live capture app, as they do have the mark while capturing feature, heh.

[David Parker]

First of all do you know what Lt/Rt is? It’s a special stereo downmix of 5.1 designed to be decoded by dolby tech.

Lt/Rt mixes are really hard to get right, and since you are not in surround, why would you even bother? Just give them a Stereo mix (Lo/Ro in dolby terminology), and it should play fine.

If you want to spacialize your music into quad surround, and have the vo coming out the center then you will need to get the 5.1 mix first, then go to Lt/Rt with a hardware dolby encoder or some software solution.

[David Parker]

You don’t specify Mac or PC, on the Mac the one everyone uses is DiskCatalogMaker. (https://diskcatalogmaker.com/) It’s been around for ever, is fast, and just works. It does export a txt, which is not so pretty. Better to just share the catalog files, if your recipient is on a mac.

[David Parker]

Have a look at the Sound Devices Pix: https://sounddevices.com/products/pix.htm

We have a few, and am liking them much better then the Ki. They also support DNxHD.

[David Parker]

Wow AJA. I was waiting to see how 3.0 was before deciding on adding a third KiPro to our kit, or trying out the Sounddevices Pix 240. I guess I’ll just go for the Pix, I know the Soundevices guys are great on supporting their stuff.