[James Bayliss-smith]

Thanks but I still don’t really get this

[Hegedus Gyula] ” It is bad because you can’t reach the standalone render files like in FCP7.”

Why would one want to access the standalone render files?

James

[James Bayliss-smith]

Okay thanks guys, just for clarity…..

Say I have a simple 3 clip HDV project. The first and final clips are left unaltered but the second clip has loads of colour correction and a zoom on it.

With the FCPX default settings the 2nd clip will render to pro res automatically in the background. What actually happens? Is a new clip created, transcoded to ProRes, and placed in the renders folder. Is this what rendering does?

Then at the end if I export media with currrent setting (so not selecting pro res) the master will be an HDV master? What happens to the second clip (the one with the effect). Does it somehow convert back to HDV?

Of course I know I should master to ProRes rather than HDV but I was just wondering how rendering actually works

Thanks and sorry for the beginners questions I’ve never really understood rendering properly.

Cheers,

James

[James Bayliss-smith]

Hi Tom,

Okay so HDV is optimized to work with Final Cut Pro Natively? I thought that was a bad idea as the codec does not take well to adding effects. Is this resolved by FCPX rendering portions of ‘projects’ with effects applied to them to ProRes? I don’t really understand thos anyone fancy explaining it in basic terms.

james

[James Bayliss-smith]

Hi Timothy, I’ll have a play around with the settings and look at the levels when I get back to the office but I honestly don’t think that was the problem unless Final Cut Pro X was panning my clips without me telling it to. I only panned once I had made the compound clips. Actually with that particular timeline I captured the media from P2 cards using log and transfer in Final cut pro 7. I then decided to use this media in FCP X so I’m pretty sure FCP 7 didn’t pan my clips. Anyway I’ll have another look at this when I’m on my work computer with the timeline in front of me. Thanks for the offer of an iChat let’s see how I get on,

All the best,

James

[James Bayliss-smith]

Hi thanks for this it helped me out a lot (especially working out these compound clips) although I could still not do what I wanted to (i.e. split the tracks and pan them upon export) because every time I changed the settings to stereo, the clips where I had broken apart the audio from the video (and had deleted three audio channels thereby just leaving the radio mic) lost sound. I tested exporting the video but the export had no sound on those clips. So I had to leave the project in surround mode. I then tried to pan one compound clip right and the other left. The compound clip containing the background sound (all the clips I hadn’t broken apart) worked fine but when I tried to pan the clip with the voiceover and interviews, they mysteriously muted again. So basically all of the clips where I had broken apart the sound tracks and deleted some had problems. In the end I had to duplicate the project and export just the audio from one track in one project and the other track in the other project and send the video separate to the audio voiceover track separate to the background sound. In short a massive ball ache. I’ve now been told by my boss categorically that I’m not allowed to use final cut pro x in the office and that I should have played around with it at home before I tried it at work. Fair enoough it caused us loads of problems. Anyway I’m keen to get to the bottom of this so what was I doing wrong or is it some sort of bug? Any answers appreciated. Should I have started the project in Stereo? Perhaps changing it at the later stage effects those clips. Or maybe I just had some settings messed up but there seems to be very little setting to play around with. If I can’t do this I can’t use FCP X for my needs. Seems crazy but I’m starting to understand what all the fuss was about about upon this release. They better have a goo updates lined up or they will lose a lot of customers me thinks.

James

[James Bayliss-smith]

Thanks Brendan but that doesn’t work

[James Bayliss-smith]

Fair Point, I do appreciate your answers. One final thing. Am I getting this straight, the SDI-DV converter spits out a digital signal and Final Cut Pro can capture that digital signal at varying levels of quality. DV, DVCPro and DV50 All flavours of the DV family?

[James Bayliss-smith]

[Chris Tompkins] “DVCPRO is no better for color space then DV”

So what’s this colour space all about then?

[James Bayliss-smith]

Cheers BTW

[James Bayliss-smith]

Hi Chris, thanks for getting back to me

[Chris Tompkins] “You’re shooting P2 – then you don’t need a capture card.”

Sure, understood but I thought I would need a capture card to capture ProRes 422 from Betacam SX for best quality as Michael suggested

“Betacam SX is best captured in FCP via SDI as ProRes 422.”

[Chris Tompkins] “DV50 Mode will yield much better results as it has much more color space. Avoid Plain DV if you can.”

So are you saying that, given my limitations (i.e no capture card) I should just capture the Betacam SX as DV50 or DVCPro in FCP? I have these options available but not ProRes

[Chris Tompkins] “Capturing the old stuff with the Canopus ADVC-1000 SDI-DV converter is fine. Can you choose a DV50 setup for this capture? That would be ideal. Or 8-bit uncompressed would really be nice. But maybe overkill.”

Cool I’ll try this but I’ll probably capture at DVCPro-PAL not DV50 as we tend to shoot DVCPro to save file size as we often have to FTP stuff in a hurry.

So am I getting this straight, the SDI-DV converter spits out a digital signal and Final Cut Pro can capture that digital signal at varying levels of quality. DV, DVCPro and DV50 All flavours of the DV family?

[Chris Tompkins] “BetacamSX captured to 10bit uncompressed would best preserve the quality chain”

So just out of interest how would this differ to capturing ProRes 422?

[Chris Tompkins] “Archiving would be best in digital form. Make digital masters of finished edits and keep on hard drives.”

Well what they do in the office at the moment is lay copies of our stories back to tape through the Canopus so I guess the quality will depend on when it was captured. But there must be some generational loss going back to Betacam SX?

[Chris Tompkins] “But if it’s all compressed for mpeg delivery, DV50 will be fine, go with it.”

I think that in hindsight someone has actually thought through our setup and the only thing we’re doing wrong is capturing at DV and not DVCPro or DV50? Any thoughts. Hopefully this will all work when I get in the office.

Any advice much appreciated the main thing I want to get my head around is the following

So am I getting this straight, the SDI-DV converter spits out a digital signal and Final Cut Pro can capture that digital signal at varying levels of quality. DV, DVCPro and DV50 All flavours of the DV family?

Thanks!