Gabriel Spaulding
Forum Replies Created
-
If you want tracks then don’t use Final Cut Pro X. You can try all you want to create the illusion of tracks but you’ll just be working against the editing paradigm introduced by Final Cut Pro X. You can use the Position Tool, and other tools in combination with the Tilde key, to change the behavior of the Magnetic Timeline, but you’re still not creating tracks. The “grey bar with a roof” is simply a Secondary Storyline, and will behave more or less just like the Primary Storyline. It is not a separate track.
By default, a Secondary Storyline or Connected Clip is connected to a specific frame on the Primary Storyline. You can change which specific frame it is connected to by Command+Option+clicking on the Secondary Storyline or Connected Clip. If you don’t want the Secondary Storyline or Connected Clip to move when you move the Primary Storyline clip it is connected to, hold down the Tilde key when you move the clip in the Primary Storyline.
I understand you frustration. I use a track-based editor, Premiere Pro CS6, daily. It is a fine way of working. Even though it behaves very differently, I still prefer Final Cut Pro X. Don’t try to force FCP X to work the way a track-based editing program is designed to work. Learn how the program is supposed to work and you might quickly see how wonderful it can be. It might not speak to your unique style of working, however. In that case, maybe you should stick with a track-based editing program. Everybody has their own style.
Best of luck!
By the way, you can adjust the length of a black slug just as you would adjust any other clip: just click and drag the start point or end point.
-
Select a clip in the Timeline, then open the Inspector. You can click and drag (or enter a specific value in) the X and/or Y position (just as in Motion). You can even set keyframes. You can also click on the icon on the bottom left of the Viewer window and select Crop, then click the Ken Burns button that appears in the bottom of the Viewer, where you can set keyframes and manipulate the scale and position of the clip from right within the Viewer, using onscreen controls.
-
Press Control+P and then enter in a timecode. The Playhead will jump to that timecode location. If you hover your mouse over a clip in the Event Browser it will jump to the timecode location on that clip; if you hover your mouse over the Timeline it will jump to the timecode location there.
-
Click the gear icon at the bottom of the Event Library, then uncheck “Group Events by Disk”. None of your hard drives will appear in the Event Library, only FCP X Events that exist on your mounted drives. If no Events exist on a particular drive, it will not appear in the Event Library.
-
I have a 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 iMac with 16GB of RAM and the ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card with 512MB of VRAM. I know I am not getting the full functionality of Adobe’s Mercury Playback Engine because I don’t have a Nvidia card, but with 4 cores on my machine and 16GB of RAM, I am able to do some very complex animations in Motion and After Effects, so one would think I could play a simple AVCHD file. Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of what Premiere has to offer (except the appearance of both clips and waveforms in the timeline –very difficult to read accurately and quite ugly, unlike Final Cut Pro X). I am just (unfortunately) stuck working with AVCHD for the time being, and find it frustrating that I have to render the clips just to play them.
-
I am a Final Cut Pro X user who has been learning how to work with Premiere Pro CS5.5. I was used to taking the time to transcode my AVCHD files to ProRes so I could work with them in FCP X, but was curious to see how well Premiere Pro would play with them, considering all the hype about not having to transcode media. They barely play at all, that is, without rendering. And after some real testing I found that it took MUCH less time to transcode the files to ProRes for FCP X than it did for them to render in the Premiere Pro timeline. I think it’s odd that I have to render anything in the timeline just to be able to play it, as no changes have been made to the original media, i.e. no effects applied. It would be nice if reviews were more forthcoming about the fact that in Premiere Pro, ‘not transcoding often requires rendering’, which is a considerable amount of time to wait before one starts working.
-
I have the same camera (HDC-TM700), same software (Toast 10 & Final Cut Studio). When you put your first clip into the Timeline and the dialog window pops up, just click “yes” to the question “set sequence settings to match clip settings?”. Then you’ll be editing at 60fps (59.94fps). This has been working for me. As far as which codec to use, I have found absolutely NO reason to use anything other than ProRes 422 for AVCHD footage. It’s just not a high enough quality to warrant using anything else.
For a “film look”, however, 60p is (perhaps) not the best idea. It looks great, but it’s way too fluid to emulate film, which is only 24fps. You could try some “film effect” filters, of course, but I think the frame rate itself will prohibit an authentic film look. I don’t recommend the “cinema mode” on the TM700, as the image quality drops significantly. Perhaps any of the other settings will work, since they’ll shoot at 30fps, which is much closer to 24fps, but they’ll be interlaced.
If you do choose to shoot 60p and still want to emulate a film look, I think the best option is to work with your camera settings. Shoot for shallow depth of field, for one. There are all kinds of sites that walk you through how to do this. The TM700 has a fair amount of control over the images shot, for a consumer camcorder. Use those settings and you’ll really be getting your money’s worth.
Good luck!