[Eli Mavros]

Two ideas…which may not be what you are looking for.

1. Since you are using a Decklink Card, if you layoff your sequence to tape via SDI, could you not choose to insert a standard 3:2, which I am sure Smoke could recognize and extract quite easily?

2. I don’t know if this is a long format show or what your server space looks like, but if you have the Smoke on a server that you can access from your FCP setup, couldn’t you export a Quicktime movie, staying in the native format and keeping it at the 23.98 frame rate that you cut at (which should yield not too large of a file, since it is DVCPROHD) and just put it up on the server and bring it into Smoke that way? I don’t know about Smoke’s DVCPROHD capabilities, but the codec should read correctly…or you could export an uncompressed image sequence (which I’m sure it can read)…though the file would be pretty huge.

I don’t know if either of these ideas help at all. I also don’t know the answer to how you insert the meta deta onto a tape for extraction later (though I would have thought that FCP did this automatically), but I do know this…there is no way that you are going to be able to lay down a 23.98 onto a DVCPROHD tape without adding some sort of a pulldown. If you don’t want to go the route of doing it the non-tape method that I described above, then I think you are going to have to do what everyone else was saying about laying down to HDCAM or D5 if you want to keep it at 23.98 on the tape.

Best of luck,
Eli

[Eli Mavros]

Thanks…good idea.

Best,
Eli

[Eli Mavros]

I have dealt with this issue several times. The place that I normally edit does not have HD decks either, so we generallly rent a deck for a day or two and then return it. I would recommend, if you have the space, to rent the deck and log the media, then capture it both DVCPRO100 and Uncompressed, work at the DVCPRO100 level, and then if it isn’t up to snuff for you, you can use an edl or xml file to reconnect to the 10bit media (as long as you don’t rename anything), and then you have it for back up. I find DVCPRO100 much faster and easier to work with, but I work on gfx intensive spots most often, and to be honest I have had nothing but complaints from rotoscopers when I give them shots in this format to key/roto. The compression is similar to that of DV, so if you shot on green screen then you often have a lot of noise that makes it difficult to key. If you don’t have the room to capture uncompressed, but you know which shots are going to be rotoed, I would stronly recommend that you at least capture those particular shots uncompressed, I think it will save you some trouble on the roto end of things. The last project that I worked on, some of the stuff was shot on DVCPRO HD and some of it on HDCAM, I brought in the DVCPRO stuff native, and I captured the HDCAM stuff uncompressed. Now different DPs did shoot the stuff, and the actual shooting formats were different, so those are two variables to consider, but he rotoers had a much much better time keying and doing cleanup roto on the HDCAM stuff.

Best,
Eli

[Eli Mavros]

I am leaving my current job, so they are having the new company montage cut out of house and we have tons of master tapes, so we just want to send up one long digibeta to the editor who is going to cut it. I work on FCP and he works on Avid and he requested a digibeta.

Best,
Eli

[Eli Mavros]

Thanks for the quick response. Bummer…this is the easiest way? It is a very long tape.

Best,
Eli

Eli Mavros

[Eli Mavros]

Thanks for the quick response. Bummer…this is the easiest way?

Best,
Eli

Eli Mavros

[Eli Mavros]

Bob,
Where were you at 1AM when I was pulling my hair out. Of course this it a great solution. I think I was so tired that I never would have thought of that, cuz I just wanted so badly for it to work the right way. Why I should think that I shouldn’t have to perform a work around when so much of this business is based on work arounds?! I still wish I could get it to work, but seeing as I can’t and I have now wasted time I will do exactly what you say…perfect. I figured out after I posted that in order to insert a new angle you have to open up a multiclip that is already in a timeline, you can’t insert it into a multiclip that you open from the browser…figured that out after much frustration. But, like you, I had the same problem where other clips’ time codes were being thrown off when I tried to insert new angles. Frustrating…but I should just realize those problems exist and find a way to work around it. Thanks for the response; very helpful.

Best,
Eli Mavros

Eli Mavros

[Eli Mavros]

I’ve been having this same problem ever since I switched over to FCP5 like a year ago. So far nobody has been able to solve my problem. Like yourself, I have installed and uninstalled FCP and the works several times to no avail. I wish I had a solution for you, but I feel your pain…solidarity. I spend so much wasted time exporting full rez movies and then compressing them using Cleaner (which all of a sudden has stopped working correctly itself).

Good Luck (for both of our sakes),
Eli Mavros

Eli Mavros

[Eli Mavros]

Ok, cool. Thanks for the input. Sorry my question was kinda off topic.

Best,
Eli Mavros

Eli Mavros

[Eli Mavros]

You can also hold down option and double click on a nested clip to open it in the viewer.

Best,
Eli Mavros

Eli Mavros