[Gary Askham]

Encore works in a very similar way to DVD Studio Pro… and comes with an application called Adobe Media Encoder (which is similar to Compressor) which makes the media files for you (for a 45 minute video I would recommend the MPEG-2 Blu Ray setting rather than the h.264 one)

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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London

[Gary Askham]

I don’t want to disagree with Shane but I am going to have to.

PAL and NTSC are terms referring to frame rates. But it’s much more than that. Yes, it refers to frame size as well but it is also the specification of the colour encoding system – how the signal (the chroma, luminence, audio, reference pulse etc.) is delivered down a cable.

Called a 1080/25P signal PAL or a 720/59.94i NTSC is lazy. I do it myself sometimes but it is not the correct term to use.

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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London

[Gary Askham]

15MB isn’t a large FCP project. I too would say that your problem is down to the XDCAM media. I have worked on large, multi-episode XDCAM projects with hundreds of hours of footage where 6 or 7 crashes a day were the norm.

We found that not using thumbnails at all helped (view your bins as lists and turn off thumbnails in the timeline). Unfortunately a lot of editors need these features so they would prefer to use thumbnails and put up with the crashes.

One of the recommendations we received from Apple was to spread the RAM evenly over the risers. This is a good practice anyway but seems even more important when working with XDCAM. And I do mean EVENLY. If you have 8 slots then you should put 1 GB in each slot.

(After my experiences with XDCAM I have since become a big fan of transcoding media before it gets anywhere near my timeline)

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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London

[Gary Askham]

Unfortunately that isn’t the kind of monitor used for video editing. I am guessing your monitor’s Broadcast settings are for working in applications like Photoshop where the final output will be for television.

If working in HD video you need a monitor with a native resolution of 1920×1080 and either HD-SDI or component inputs. Even a good quality HDTV with HDMI inputs would be better than a computer monitor.

And for your computer you need some kind of video interface (Matrox, AJA, Blackmagic, MOTU etc).

To calibrate a monitor you need a dedicated probe not some internal setting. There are cheap versions but these are usually designed for print work. We hire someone who has a range of probes for different types of monitors to calibrate our screens every six months or so (doing it once and forgetting about it is no good as colours drift over time).

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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London

[Gary Askham]

Try creating a new user on your Mac? It’s as close to doing a full reinstall without having to do a full reinstall.

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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London

[Gary Askham]

3 hours to render a 7 minute sequence? It doesn’t sound like you need a new computer, it sounds like you need to rethink your workflow.

FCP and post production in general is as complicated as you make it. If you’re working in SD for example – shoot DV, edit DV, export DV – make your delverables. If you want a bit more quality – convert your footage to ProRes SD, edit ProRes SD, export ProRes SD – make your deliverables.

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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London

[Gary Askham]

I think Edit Share is the only system that allows you to truly share a FCP Project. I haven’t used it for about 5 years though so that might be wrong.

We all work off local projects and share media. If you need to share a sequence with another editor then you have to create a new project and copy the sequence into it. You then put that somewhere where the other editor can access it so they can move it to their local machine. It’s not as painstaking as it may sound.

Maybe one of your issues is that you are thinking of FCP projects in the same way as you would an Avid project. They work differently and you could maybe think of an FCP Project more like an Avid bin. Remember you can have multiple FCP projects open and you can copy between projects. A lot of people when workjing on bigger projects will have multiple projects open – one for current sequences, one for old sequences, one for rushes, one for graphics, one for music etc, etc…

I know it sounds like a lot of organising but once you start working this way it becomes second nature and it makes your edit system much more stable.

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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London

[Gary Askham]

I personally wouldn’t use a Unity for FCP but I understand why someone might if they already have one. And there shouldn’t be any reason why it wouldn’t work – FCP just sees it as another hard drive.

However there are two other things you mention that I wouldn’t do either…

1. I wouldn’t use Photo Jpeg as an edit codec. It’s quite a dated codec and except for a small number of older offline presets created by Apple back in the day they don’t work in RT.
2. I wouldn’t keep the projects on the Unity. I’ve never put our FCPs on a Unity but I work with an XSan all the time and we never work our projects from it. They become corrupt and if someone else accesses your project you will lose everything.

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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London

[Gary Askham]

I’ve seen some good things from AVCHD even though it is quite a low bitrate codec. You must remember that there are a number of different types of AVCHD – some better than others.

I still avoid editing any of these newer “camera” codecs given the choice – HDV, XDCAM, Nanoflash, NXCAM and AVCHD (and obviously h.264). Even if FCP started supporting AVCHD I would prefer to transcode it before it got onto my timeline. Computers are getting more and more powerful and drives getting faster and faster but I still like the responsiveness of a codec designed for editing – DV, ProRes, DNxHD and Uncompressed.

I’ve now accepted that these codecs are here to stay and that it makes sense for a camera to record to a codec that can be recorded to slower, cheaper media and take up hardly any space.

But the stability and responsiveness you lose in the edit are not worth the extra few GBs you save on hard drive space. I know that Premiere and Avid now are capable of editing some of these camera codecs and FCP has been able to edit HDV and XDCAM natively for a few years. But I like my sequence to start playing when I press play and not crash when I move a clip into the timeline.

I’ve read that a FCP refresh may come as early as April – with a further update in the Summer when OSX Lion comes. And if it adds native AVCHD support I’ll probably continue transcoding to ProRes.

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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London

[Gary Askham]

Final Cut Pro only works in Real Time with a small number of codecs when they are presented in a specific way – this is known as RT Playback. The easiest way to make sure you are working correctly is to use an Easy Set-Up and match your media to that. Your RT Playback can change depending on your FCP version or installed hardware/software but it tends to be DV, HDV, DVCProHD, XDCAM, ProRes or Uncompressed.

In an ideal world keep all your media the same frame rate, same frame size and the same codec. It just makes editing more pleasant.

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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London