[Jason Adams]

I am working on an animated series, 52 episodes, all offline. Online will be done at another facility. The deliverable is progressive frame 25fps square pixel 768×576. But as a master the producers liked the idea of a over rezzed delivery in case there was ever a need to cheat uprez to HD. The shots are being compiled from tiff sequences. I want to use proRes because it is fast and easy to work with. I experimented with a lot of different types of sequence setups but the 960×720(used as square pixels not anamorphic) was the only one I could find that worked natively in progressive and square pixels and still utilized all of the FCP realtime functionality. Any other setup and we lost the realtime(even at lower resolutions). It actually works great and proRes is the greatest thing since sliced bread, except if any of the comp guys or producers want to check a shot in quicktime player it displays as 16×9 squashed. We also just started to use Final Cut Server and all the proxys and thumbnails display as 16×9 squashed. Every quicktime compliant application we have opens these files 16×9 squashed even if we try to overide aspect ratio in the original files. Somewhere there must be a switch that tells quicktime to ALWAYS display this resolution as 16×9. Since I dont work with live action or have any intention of ever using this resolution in its anamorphic state. I would like to know where I can find this switch and turn it off.

[Jason Adams]

Sorry didn’t specify that I am trying to use it for a 4:3 proRes project. So I want it to keep its 960×720 4:3 aspect ratio.

[Jason Adams]

We ran into the exact same problem last week after upgrading to Leopard. Not understanding it totally, it has something to do with system permissions and admin permissions. I went into the the terminal and command line changed the project files owners to different users with no luck, even whole folders and drives. In the end we simply removed the user with the user ID 501 (usually the first user created or reserved for an admin account). Everything works great now. All projects old and current, open and work fine now.

[Jason Adams]

I have had the same problem working in animated series with maya and constantly updating shots. I believe the problem stems from FCP “checking out” the file, purposely blocking others from changing for security reasons(a OSX unix thing). After all my testing I have only found 2 solutions. The first and easiest, is that for some reason the Quicktime player app in windows will directly save over the “checked out” files, bypassing the permissions checks. I use Quicktime player as the default previewer in maya so I can save stuff directly to fcp. In the case of AfterEffects I believe that it renders straight to disk. So a work around could be to have it render to a temp dir and then have After Effects open it in Quicktime then save from there. The second more involved method requires the use of the terminal. I create a general render temp directory, render to there, and then command line copy it over the original. This will bypass the permissions problems. Copying through the finder will give the same “file in use” error. To take it a step farther I wrote a shell script that will look in the temp dir and then replace the original automatically with a single keystroke. That is certainly more involved, but is a really simple script if you want to get your hands dirty in some shell scripting. It is also the fastest in terms of workflow – render, type “update renders”(or whatever you call the script) in a shell, and boom you are on to relinking. I have absolutely tried everything over 2 years of heavy production( I update hundreds of shots a day) and those are the only 2 options I have found that will work.

Relinking. Relinking under 10.3 and fcp4.5 has come to take up a good portion of my fcp station’s working day. It is slow and cumbersome. Media offline, cursor spin, do you want to relink, spin, what do you want to relink, spin, Is this the file you want to relink, spin. I would say it takes a good long minute or so to relink the shot. Over hundreds of shots minutes add up to hours. And unfortunately there isn’t anyway around it. period. It has to do with the database fcp keeps of current clips, if the creation or modification date of one of those shots changes – Media offline. I have tried everything to trick the database, shell scripts, long workarounds with dummy files and pointers, reference movies, everything. Nothing. No tricks. No workarounds. I am starting to believe that if you even THINK of updating a clip – Media Offline. The good news. FCP5’s relinking is a dream. If Media goes offline, 3 clicks of the mouse and its relinked. No spinnig cursor. All in seconds. I will say as of now I am having a few issues with FCP5 not updating the clip after a relink, hopefully something that will be addressed in an update. But when it does update it is a savior.

I am sure these arn’t really the answers you were looking for and I would not say I am an expert on the internal workings of FCP and OSX, but I have used both since their original versions. Having worked constantly on Animated series over the last 2 years, these 2 issues have been the only and biggest workflow issue I have delt with and endlessly tried to problem solve. If someone else out there has any more definitive answers or better solutions for a workaround I would be just as appreciative to hear them.