[David Roth weiss]

Just use FCP 7, which you already know, learning a new app or plugin will take you even more time. Find an app or plugin when you have free time, and learn it for the next time around.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

The term for what you want to do is “rotoscoping” – it’s very easy to do on a still or on a freeze frame, but not easy on live action material, as you have to do it frame by frame.

Roto work is considerably easier when using a dedicated compositing and/or paint program, but you can do it with any app or plugin that allows for creation free-form masks or matts.

The easiest way to do it is simply to add as many keyframes as it takes, around the persons face, to cut them out. When you add the last keyframe the completes the entire outline around the face, the app will automatically create either a transparent black background or a transparent black hole where the face was, and you can reverse that is necessary. You then add a soft edge, and that allows you to super the face seamlessly over any background you choose.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

There is no reason to create a stereo pair from two identical mono tracks – you’re much better off simply deleting one track and center panning the remaining track so it plays out of both left and right speakers.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

[Shane Ross] “These hardware encoders David’s talking about…won’t work on the new MacPros. As they don’t have slots in which to install them.”

Hi Shane,

I was not advising the poster to use a card such as a Matrox HD Compress in his new Mac Pro, but rather in his current Mac. There is no real advantage to using a dedicated hardware encoder in a faster Mac, as the procs don’t affect the encoding, it’s all done onboard the hardware card. That’s why I suggested he put the card in his old Mac and use that as his dedicated encoding machine.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

You’ll need to playback off a hard drive RAID, i.e. two or more drives striped together. A single drive does not have the throughout necessary to playback four streams simultaneously.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

Hi Mark,

I can assure you that the single Xeon proc of the new Mac Pro, while faster than earlier Mac Pros, is still not nearly as fast as a dedicated hardware encoder. I know this because of tests I conducted at Promax using much brazier Windows machines with dual Xeon procs.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

For the record, the dedicated hardware encoders I earlier referred to will speed your h.264 encodes by a factor of 5 to 6 times faster than software encodes. Your new Mac Pro won’t keep up with that, so you might want to consider getting one and dedicating your encodes to that machine while you edit on your new Mac.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

H.264 is a very processor intensive codec, to render it faster you have only two solutions:
1) get a faster computer
2) get a dedicated h.264 hardware encoder card such as a Matrox HD Compress card or an Elgato.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

Since you received the file from someone in Europe where PAL 25fps is the standard, it seems logical to assume that they did a lousy job of transcoding. Have you asked them about the original vs the file you have?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “So, what’s the criteria for categorizing “basic, necessary functions” vs. “different priorities, different approaches”?”

Hopefully for those of you who want the replace clip feature the longest response doesn’t carry the most weight with Apple.