Gary Askham
Forum Replies Created
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Your Mac is perfectly adequate for editing XDCAM. I don’t know why you are worried.
Sony have really over-complicated their lineup of apps and drivers needed for working with XDCAM. It’s a bit of a joke really. Andy’s explanation is about as good as it gets.
The main decision you are going to have to make is if you want to work with the native XDCAM (rewrapped as QuickTime’s using one of Sony’s applications) or to work with ProRes.
Advantages of working with XDCAM – takes up less drive space, less transcoding.
Disadvantages with working with XDCAM – compressed, unstable on some systems.Advantages of ProRes – visually lossless, very stable.
Disadvantages of working with ProRes – Larger file sizes, transcoding time.————————
FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
It can be done… but I don’t know why you’d want to. The hassles and complications that you’re going to come up against are just not worth it.
Although I do it occasionally when I want to grade an Avid editted sequence in Color. I basically playout the Avid sequence to Final Cut Pro and capture it via HD-SDI and then export an EDL.
It’s pretty much a one time deal and not a workflow designed for multiple back and forths.
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
Is your hard drive by any chance formatted as FAT32?
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
Ah, the joys of working with large, complicated sequences in Final Cut Pro.
Deleting items from your project doesn’t actually free up that much space.
What you need to do is create a new project and drag your final sequence into the new project.
I would be tempted to then trash all your render files and start a fresh render – setting the render drive to the fastest drive you have available. This might not happen in one go. Depending on whatever is going on in your project you might find it crashes so you might have to do it in sections, maybe even clip by clip. Once you’re sequence is rendered export a Quicktime movie (self contained or refernce). Then move on to Compressor.
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
I’m sorry to break this to some people on here… the world of post production is changing. In fact it has been for some time.
Where I work we have been catering for some time to clients who edit in their office on their iMacs and then bring their final projects to us for finishing. There’s no way to ignore that this is the way the industry is going. You can’t force people to hire facilities for hundreds of pound (or dollars) a week to use a piece of kit which isn’t that much different to the laptop they use for sending emails.
There are just too many of us around now and although there are more media channels out there than ever before there has to be some balance. I believe FCPX is just the next logical step.
If you’re an editor then your assets aren’t the kit you own – but the skills you have… and that’s the way it should be.
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
I’m the head of technical at a small post facility in London. We have about 10 Mac Pro’s running FCP 7 and a 64TB Xsan. We also have half a dozen Avid’s (Mojo’s & a Nitris) running on a small Unity and we integrate heavily with our 4 or 5 ProTools suites..
This announcement has me slightly worried. If everything we have seen are additions to FCP then great. Onwards and upwards. But what concerns me is that have done something similar to QuickTime X – added some needed functionality while sacrificing a lot of the lesser used but vital components of the application.
What about AJA/Blackmagic support?
What happens to the thousands of pounds of filters and plugins we have?
Can I still export an OMFI for ProTools?
Why no word on the other Studio apps? Are they going to be sold separately (possibly not a terrible thing)?
Is it going to easy for 3rd party developers to create plugins (to fix it’s shortcomings)?If Mac allows you to have FCP 7 and FCP X on the same system (like QuickTime) will there be a simple way to send a sequence from one to the other? If so we might find a situation where we do the “edit” on FCP X and then send the sequence to FCP 7 for finishing.
I actually like the look of the new version and the new features probably are “awesome”. I’ll probably love using it for my own self-contained projects but I’m just a little worried how it’s going to work in our world of having to integrate with external factors.
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
That sounds like a ProRes file. And it is normal for it to be that large.
You see when editing video it works better to work with large, high quality files. Yes they take up more space but hard drives are pretty cheap nowadays… it’s always been an issue when dealing with video which is why it is only recently as technology has become more available that people have been able to work with these files.
Luckily Apple have included an application in the Final Cut Studio suite to help you out called Compressor. You still have to edit with your large video files but when it comes to creating deliverables you drop your large videos into Compressor and they come out smaller. There’s even a YouTube preset (although I tend to use the Ipod/iPhone presets as they’re pretty universally accepted by sites like YouTube and Vimeo too).
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
But as Rafael says – why did you transcode the clip to ProRes 4444? That’s a hide-end finishing codec for film mastering or graphics work. You are going to need pretty fast drives for no gain whatsoever other than pain and heartache.
ProRes 422 is more than enough – not even the HQ variation is necessary for the camera you shot on.
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
Do you see a picture if you plug a TV into the composite output of the deck?
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London -
I use FCP, a Kona Lhi and a 3D TV.
And we already had the FCP and Kona so the only extra cost was the TV.
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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London