[Jeff Kirkland]

Not sure what’s prosumer in FCPX but that’s a debate for another forum… 🙂 Most people find that once they get to grips with the X workflow, all the other NLEs seem painfully awkward to use.

On to the questions:

1. I usually select all and create a compound clip as a snapshot of the current project before I do any playing around with ideas. Then just break the compound clip apart again and keep going. Makes it easy to have multiple versions and restore all or part of the previous state of your project.

2. You can duplicate a project (CMD-D when you’re in the project library) and move on. You could also do this to snapshot your project when you plan to do some playing around but too many projects open at the same time tends to slow FCPX down a bit.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

From the manual re FCPX import :

Logic Pro allows you to exchange multiple audio tracks, with all positional region information, region names, and volume and pan automation data retained.

On export to FCPX MIDI tracks are ignored. You can also choose to export your composition as a compound clip.

I’m excited because I was a musician for a couple of decades and I do occasionally compose soundtracks for the stuff I edit but I’m wondering what Logic actually brings to the table in terms of day to day editing? Actually having tracks and a mixer, I guess…

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

Or because you’re not doing anything other than an up-res, you could export the 720p version from FCPX, add it to the resolve media pool, conform it and export at 1080p. No need for any messing around with XML, etc.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

I’ve got no real reasonto say it but I think I’d use Resolve to do the upscaling. You get a lot more control over how the scaling is done.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

It shouldn’t matter what a field contains, the specification for a PAL interlaced (50i) DVD is lower field first – otherwise you’ll get judder and horrible motion artifacting.

And yes, I guess sometimes you just need that higher frame rate so interlaced it is. A friend shoots for a ballet school who always get 50i on a DVD as they hate seeing motion blur on a dancers movements.

But I think the original poster’s issues mainly stem from the original footage not being shot at 50i/50p in the first place. 25p footage, jitter aside, is never really going to have the ‘interlaced’ look he seems to be after.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

Firstly, I can’t understand why you’d shoot at 25p and then actually want it to look like it was shot interlaced – apart from home movies what DVD isn’t encoded progressive? And who still plays them on a screen old enough to be interlaced?

Just curious… I have a broadcast station that needs everything delivered 576i but that’s the one and only. I had thought the need for interlaced material pretty much over these days.

I’m not sure what you mean by flickery progressive look – I’d expect a flickery interlaced look, not the other way around.

I personally used to edit at 25p, export 25i ProRes , and let DVD Studio Pro do the encoding, although I haven’t used DVD Studio Pro in a long time. It may result in a whiskers lest quality but it always seemed to get it right and I’ve never had a client complain.

Last thought is double check that Compressor is getting the fields order right – lower first for PAL. That’s usually the cause of flicker.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

[Craig Alan] “But doesn’t it seem like a silly work around to create a compound clip just to get it saved in the browser? “

FCPX is still in it’s early stages of evolution and silly or not, sometime it’s just the way the app works. I hear that Apple do look at customer feedback so feel free to send ’em a feature request…

I tend to use compound clips as snapshots – it could be of an entire project timeline as a backup before I make changes or an individual clip to preserve whatever I’ve done to that. [alt]+g–>give it a name isn’t really much more effort than dragging a clip back into the event library and has the advantage that I can group as large a section of the timeline as I want.

As to how many is too many… depends what’s in ’em and how powerful your computer is. Can’t say there’s a hard and fast rule other than use them sparingly. And when you do hit that tipping point you’ll get slow projects, corrupt projects that hang and don’t open, or take hours to open, mysterious crashes – generally lots of unpredictable behaviour that comes from FCPX running out of resources.

For all of that, it doesn’t happen often these days but when I get a call from editor friends asking why FCPX is behaving badly, my first question is always “how many compound clips do you have on the timeline”. It’s usually nesting compound clips inside other compound clips that does the damage.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

[Craig Alan] “Not getting this. By way of example, I have a clip on a timeline that I have cropped and color corrected.

I decide it is not working in the current sequence of shots, but I like the clip and it might fit later down the timeline or in a different version of the project. How do I save these changes for future use?
“

I’d just select the clip or clips and create a compound clip from them. That gives you a version of the clip including your changes in the event browser that you can re-use later. In another spot or project either use the clip as is if you think you may want to change it globally later or drop in onto the timeline and break the compound clip apart if you want to change it further without affecting other instances (keeping in mind that FCPX can become very unhappy if you use too many compound clips in a project).

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

The exception would be opening the browser clip in it’s own timeline and doing something crazy like deleting the audio track rather than just switching it off. I’d expect you would need to re-import the clip to fix that.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Jeff Kirkland]

If I follow ant you’re doing then I”d suggest you’ve missed the point of a compound clip, and of auditioning.

A compound clip is essentially a grouped virtual clip. In your case it’s an image with a title. As soon as you make that a compound clip FCPX treats it as a single clip. When you drag a new image over it in the timeline and add as a new audition you are replacing the virtual clip – both the image and title grouped together – with just the still, just as you’ve described.

Compound clips for the most part have a parent – child relationship. You can use that clip in many places but any changes you make to one instance will change all the others. So if you open a copy df that compound clip in the timeline & replace the image, you will make the same change in every other place you’ve used the clip. It’s a global change.

To prevent a global change, you need to break the relationship between the copy compound clip and its parent with the “reference new parent” command.

There’s plenty of good FCPX training out there that covers compound clips in depth, and the user manual does a good job of explaining how they work.

Or have I missed what you’re trying to do?

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland