Dylan Reeve
Forum Replies Created
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Yeah it’s some of the basic stuff that bothers me the most. I personally don’t like the method of having effect editor in the viewer, I’d much rather have it as a separate panel, it seems more flexible. I can’t think offhand if Avid can hold sync separately between multiple monitors, but I believe it can. If FCP could do that, it would be an adequate solution, as I could load my reference in a supplemental viewer, and gang that with the sequence viewer. However I’ve tried that and had no luck. It breaks sync when opening a clip into the source viewer to edit the effects.
As for the ‘Avidism’ of effects on filler… It was very counter intuitive when I first started using it (I’d only used Premiere and FCP when I first started learning Avid) but I’ve since found it very practical and often a lot easier than nesting (or collapsing in Avid) to apply the effect.
The capturing situation is a joke. Of all the NLEs I’ve used FCP has the worst capture interface. It hasn’t changed since I first used FCP about 8 years ago (when I didn’t know to expect any better).
I assume the FCP developers have a few copies of Avid Xpress and Media Composer at their disposal – they really should look closer at some of the basics of those products.
As for the relinking – The reason that this is impossible in FCP, as far as I can determine, is that FCP has no real media management to speak of. It’s come from roots where things like tape numbers and timecode were unimportant, or not even there. While the metadata is supported now, it’s not given any level of priority. Media in FCP is still managed in a very simple way.
As futile as it might be to call for, I really think FCP needs to re-evaluate how it manages and tracks media. It should maintain some sort of media database and value meta information (timecode and reel primarily) more highly in determinations of media relationships.
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Hey James,
I’m a bit late into this – but here is my feedback from considerble experience.
It is not practically possible to capture 720p25 from Varicam over Firewire into FCP (or Avid). This is because the Varicam system is a 59.94/60Hz system and recording 25fps on the Varicam is basically recording an ‘offspeed’ rate on 720p60. This means to play the tape the deck needs to be operating at 60Hz and FCP will not communicate with it for a 25fps capture.
The most manageable work around is to capture the footage as 24fps and then use the Reconform Rate option of Cinetools to make it 25fps footage, which works fine – but there will be no usable timecode relationship to the original tape, so a recapture will be very painful.
If shooting Varicam there is really only one viable option and that is to use a direct IO like DeckLink or AJA cards. The Panasonic AJ-HD1400 has a ’25(HD)’ mode that is designed to play back the 25fps Varicam footage, but it plays it 1080i50 (not 720p). And rates other than 25fps are still problematic. They can be captured with the AJA or DeckLink cards, but the timecode reference is again lost. In our workflow we capture the footage and then output it to tape again at 720p50 (it’s a loss of a ‘generation’ but makes the edit restorable)
Shooting on the HDX900 will be a lot less painful, in that it records on 720p50 base, so it works in a fairly straight forward way. It lacks the variable motion obviously, but you do that the option of a 50fps mode which you can retime to 25fps later.
I have a love/hate relationship with Varicam as a format. It’s good and and versatile, but it really doesn’t sit well with PAL frame rates.
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Automatic Duck moves sequences.
You can use the ALE option to get bins in, or (and this is just me thinking, I haven’t tried it) take all clips in Avid bin, create a new sequence and dump all clips into that sequence. Export that sequence through Automatic Duck into FCP – the clips that built the sequence will be created, so you’ll have them that way.
Reading the media is going to be a problem. You can install the Avid codecs on your Mac, and they do work in FCP (although no reliably I hear) – but you will have to relink your media manually and it probably isn’t easy.
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If they can read the tape the will read it natively, so a 50i tape in a 60i camera or deck (if it supports it) will come out of the Firewire as 50i. This is because the Firewire is basically a raw data feed off the tape. There’s no scope for format conversion in there.
Some cameras will do it. Many decks will. But without specifics it’s a bit of a gamble.
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The 10second freeze will only apply when delivering commercials for broadcast, it’s so when it’s ingested there’s a little padding in case the timing isn’t perfect (some systems use Long-GOP MPEG2 and have trouble making frame-accurate trims).
If they’re providing commercials for insertion into your show, then they’re not going to want leading black or a freeze. You’d deliver the show as it is to be seen, so it will start, run through part one, run ads, back to back as on regular broadcast, run part two, ads, run part three.
For line up tone the drop duration doesn’t matter, it’s just for identification. I usually drop 2 frames at end of each second.
If you’re unsure through, it’s definitely worth checking with them. Having programs fail is a pain in the ass. The BBC requires that countdowns include a circular clock – learned that the hard way.
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I’ve had exactly the same error trying to edit to tape from a 720p25 sequence to the AJ-HD1400 in 720p50 mode, and a few other assorted situations with the deck.
I can’t find any meaningful information about the error. We’re using FCP 6.0.2 and a Blackmagic DeckLink HD Extreme. It’s insanely frustrating.
Since then I’ve had a problem, where capturing from a 720p25/50 tape (25fps over recorded at 720p50) – if I used the 720p50 control profile, it was doing weird things with timecode (namely doubling the frams – I put a clip in for 10:23:11:21 and it seeks for 10:23:11:42). So I’m wondering if that has something to do with it. I’ll be exploring that more later.
But this is all 25fps stuff, so I don’t know if any of it will help you.
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I think I may have found the cause of the problem.
For some reason when I started my project it had a Device Control profile set to 720p50 (rather than the 1080i50 that the deck is operating in).
What this seems to have done is double the frame number on any clip it encountered. So if I took a clip with in marked at 01:02:40:22 and dropped it in the Log and Capture tool the In Point that FCP decided to look for was 01:02:40:44 (which isn’t going to exist on a 25fps timecode obviously).
This is my fault for not checking the Device Control setting, but at the same time FCP could really make it a lot easier to spot these things. When doing a Batch Capture there is pretty much no feedback at all, I can’t see what timecode it’s looking for, the duration, or anything. If a clip fails I have to hit ‘Cancel’ then hit ‘Ok’ on the error summary that comes up, then hit ‘Continue’ on the batch summary to carry on skipping that clip.
This issue has highlighted the two things I find most disconcerting about FCP in this sort of work…
– The poor capture interface. It’s really crappy. No idea what it’s doing, no timecode, setting spread around and not easily visible.
– Immature ‘media management’… In my onlining experience with Avid there have been many times where I’ve had to manually capture a clip and then have Avid relink to that clip. In FCP this is impossible. In Avid I can easily relink a sequence (cutdown, re-edit, whatever) to existing online media – in FCP, unless the filename and start and duration are exactly the same, this is impossible.
These things aren’t a huge issue when taking a project from ingest to completion in one pass, but we often work in an offline/online flow where these issues do become a major problem.
Anyway, it seems to be capturing okay now… I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
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[walter biscardi] “Why are you doing this? There is no reason to do this at all if you’re just getting an AAF/OMF from the Avid editor. All of your media is going to be offline anyway.
In Final Cut Pro, Create a New Project, Import the AAF using Automatic Duck, Set up your Easy Setup, Capture.
I’ve done almost 100 Avid projects this way and it works perfectly fine. I’ve never used the Media Manager.”
We did that, what I get then in the sequence with the 6 master clips it was built from. Selecting a batch capture on that sequence wants then to capture all the media from those clips (about 3 hours worth for a 4-minute video).
The other option I have considered is doing the decompose in Avid first, then exporting the decomposed sequence (which will link to smaller clips) to FCP. I will try that today.
I was using the Media Manager to emulate the ‘Decompose’ function I’d use in Avid to prepare a sequence for online.
[walter biscardi] “No, it does not do 25fps over 59.94. You have to change that to 25/50 I believe. 59.94 is an NTSC setting, not PAL. You will have TC issues if you leave the deck in 59.94 and try to capture 25.”
Yeah, it does. Everything on Varicam is 59.94 (or 60). The Varicam system simply does not run at 50Hz, ever (other DVCPRO HD cameras, like the HDX9000 do). When shooting with Varicam in PAL world, we end up with basically a 25fps offspeed clip over 60Hz.
To counter this, the AJ-HD1400 offers two modes specifically for this called ’25(SD)’ and ’25(HD)’. They output the 25fps signal with new timecode on a 50Hz carrier (only over SDI/Analogue the Firewire doesn’t work in that mode).
It only works with 25fps material too, any other ‘offspeed’ rate has to be dealt with separately with the deck operating in 59/60 mode.
When operating in either of these 25 modes, the deck generates new 25fps timecode from the tape (although our tests have indicated that it is frame accurate of multiple playback passes).
Basically, Varicam, while a very nice idea, has only ever been properly designed to work in a 60Hz environment. It is pretty much a nightmare in 50Hz environments.
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Our Avid systems have no HD I/O hardware. We’ve been using them for offline because that’s what we are comfortable cutting on.
We purchased the FCP suite more or less for this role, as it offered better value for HD online than a similar machine from Avid (ie. MC Adrenaline with DNxcel HD)
Typically we wouldn’t offline and online on the same physical system anyway, although for SD projects we’d normally stay within Avid.
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That’s a shame. Avid provides free access to their codecs – we make extensive use of that to get footage into other apps like AE. Would like to do the same with FCP and ProRes – but seems unlikely, especially as most of our systems are Windows…