[Doug Metz]

Hey Peter,

I keep a legacy workstation with FCP 7 for just such an emergency.

If you’re willing to send / post the old project file, I’ll convert it.

Doug Metz

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[Doug Metz]

[Mark Suszko] “But he’s already cooked the omelet and it’s too late to put it all back in the eggshell now.”

True enough… should have made that caveat initially.

FCPX is horrifically strict with re-linking – so much so that I think for what’s already done with the music will need to be re-done with the licensed track. It can help to have the Used Media Ranges turned on in the browser to see what was stripped from the preview track.

Doug Metz

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[Doug Metz]

[Rikki Blow] ” I find that after my tweaks, when I go to export, it’s gone back to the project name (rather than my chosen export name), and the tags and description are the default stuff. This is a real pain as sometimes I fill in a decent lengthy description ready for posting etc. Now I have to keep anything I create as a separate text file.”

If you select your project in the browser, go to the Share tab of the inspector, and make your edits there, they should remain persistent. I had to break myself of the habit of changing things in the first pane of the Export dialog, because version numbers and edit-specific notes would persist through subsequent revisions and I’d sometimes forget to change them again.

Doug Metz

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[Doug Metz]

[Michael Hancock] “…take your watermarked music at the beginning of your edit and create a compound clip of it, then edit with that compound clip. That way you can just open the compound clip and drop the unwatermarked music over it, line it up to match the watermarked music if it’s slightly off, then either delete or mute the watermarked music.”

This right here is the nugget you’re looking for.

Doug Metz

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[Doug Metz]

Try this: select one offline clip in the browser, then go to Relink Files. Just below the file list, you should see a light grey path to the original.

Doug Metz

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[Doug Metz]

One other thing that may help you eek out a little more performance – the drive bays in that MacPro are only SATA II, which will limit the speed of your SSD boot drive (it sounded like that’s where you had it). OWC sells an inexpensive PCI carrier for the 2.5″ drives, and the PCI slots are faster.

Doug Metz

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[Doug Metz]

[Bret Williams] “If it’s interlaced, and you’re editing SD, why not edit in it’s native interlaced format? Output to mp4 will de interlace for the web.

But you can also just make it look better in the viewer by choosing the show both fields selection in the viewer. And make sure you’re viewing 100% size for QC check.”

There’s the rub… his clip info panel is showing 29.97p, so the interlacing has been baked into progressive frames.

[Edit] One other thing to try on one of these clips, just to see what you see, is Uncheck the Deinterlace box, and set the Field Dominance Override to Progressive.

Doug Metz

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[Doug Metz]

I think what’s happened here, based on your screenshot, is that the footage was captured as progressive (29.97p), so the interlacing has been baked in. I have an HV20, and used to shoot quite a bit with it in Cinema mode. This writes to tape as a combination of progressive and interlaced frames – P, P, P, I, I, P, P, P, I, I, etc.

There are tools to remove the interlaced frames (reverse telecine) and retime the footage to 24p (23.98), but if the interlaced frames have been captured as progressive, these tools can’t work properly due to incorrect frame / field information.

In order to really fix it, you will likely need to ingest from tape as interlaced.

Doug Metz

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[Doug Metz]

Looks like interlacing artifacts to me.

Assuming you want / need progressive output, there are a couple of things you can do when using interlaced source material:

1) Make sure your project is set to progressive.

To do this, select the project in the browser. The upper portion of the inspector’s Information pane will show your frame size and frame rate, audio configuration, and color space settings. You’ll also see a “Modify” button – that’s what we’re after. You can change frame size, codec, starting timecode, audio configuration, and switch between interlaced and progressive. Keep in mind that you can’t change frame rate once you have media on the timeline.

2) Make sure your media is set to deinterlace.

Select the clips you want (in the browser or timeline), and in the inspector’s Information pane, select ‘Settings’ from the pop-up menu at the bottom of the pane. Once there, you’ll find the ‘Deinterlace’ checkbox.

Ideally, you’d set this prior to edit so that you only have to do it once in the browser. Any clips edited into the timeline prior to making this change will also need to be changed.

Doug Metz

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[Doug Metz]

[Mark Suszko] “FF-Works is, if I understand it right, a GUI front end on the older but loved ffmpeg, which was powerful and flexible but command-line-based, and thus intimidating and opaque to some folks.”

It is indeed. I’m familiar with ffmpeg (needed to generate WebM files with alpha for a couple of clients), and I had an old copy of FFMPEGX floating around since I’m not fond of being a Terminal jockey, so this is a super find. The newer binaries are really capable transcoders for some pretty obscure formats.

Doug Metz

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