[Jim Waterwash]

Lesson learned: Don’t buy an iMac, even one with an AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2048 MB.

[Jim Waterwash]

Thanks, good to know. I’ll see if I can work with smaller chunks at a time.

I wouldn’t mind waiting, but as it is the program will not even function reliably. As soon as Motion looses focus (I click on the finder or some popup occurs), it seems to just stop the analysis. It’s strange that the Activity Monitor never shows Motion utilizing much of the other cores on the CPU.

[Jim Waterwash]

Thanks for your replies. When I was young, I opened up and turned a screw to adjust the speed of my fathers apple II hard drive so my video game disk would load. After that, my game played.., but my father could not open up any of his spreadsheets. I do still love to screw around though.

I suppose the answer lies within the engineering realm. If I come across an answer, I’ll let you know.

Jim

[Jim Waterwash]

Is that 6.2, the average bit rate or the maximum bit rate? I could assume its the average, but what would you set the high to be?

Thanks
Jim

[Jim Waterwash]

While this works, ideally, It seems that I should be able to have a single multi-clip for this whole project and just add each tape from each camera as a separate angle. Without the ability to sync the in-point of these angles to something other than to their beginnings or their ends, this seems impossible.

If anyone knows a way to specify the offset for a video that is part of a multi-clip, please let me know.
Jim

[Jim Waterwash]

Just made a sub-clip of the existing cameras with the new in point.
Easy…

[Jim Waterwash]

My major problems with the audio in FCP, is that as soon as I change something, its stops.
I felt so productive in Vegas, being able to edit 5 seconds ahead of the playback, whether it be moving and dropping clips around or tweaking parameters. In Vegas, you can have a section running and add audio effects and change parameters without it stopping. That really freed me to do things that I wouldn’t have done, had it been a big deal. When it comes to normalizing, I can do it anywhere and anytime, I can adjust my workflow for that. In Vegas it was a check box, though not as much control over normalization with that box, as is in Soundtrack.

The other problem is basically that the work-flow forces me to lock the video for audio sweetening. I find that very confining, to not easily make a change that I know should be made, but won’t, without losing the undo-ability (?) of the non-destructible edits. It loses so much of the benefits of non-destructible edits, if you do happen to need to make a change (you are human). I understand now the point about why picture lock happens, so as not to waste time. That does make sense and I’ll sit with that for some time so I can swallow it, but its hard for me to accept a tool that “forces” that work-flow. I also just like to do something different sometimes after I’ve been cutting for hours and maybe I want to work on finding a good EQ for that windy beach shot that I know I want to keep.

I’m sure the next version will offer better integration, but from much of the feedback that I’ve read, most seem content with that locked video and the “stop and tweak”. I suspect as online video distribution gains momentum, there will be more editors looking for quicker and more flexible tools that are geared for a single editor, I’m sure FCP will bend.

At this point, I’m just trying to find some work-flows that may help me take advantage of both systems, being that I’ve invested time and money into both.

Thanks everyone for your feedback so far.
Jim

[Jim Waterwash]

OK, so I had to put some closure here. The ugly unspoken truth is that this is simply not possible in FCP studio.

Once a project is sent to Soundtrack, it is only the original FCP project that can be worked on from within this Soundtrack project. Further timing edits within FCP will make the original STP project obsolete and useless, being that it is out of sync. Though they tout round tripping in their product descriptions and help docs, subsequent timing changes made to clips within FCP will not be updated within your recently created STP multi-track project.

If you resend your FCP project to a new STP project, all non-destructible edits that you made to your audio are only within the old STP project and so are now lost. The “Send to Soundtrack multi-track Project” is intended as a one time operation and makes an assumption that the video clips within FCP will be frozen.

You can round-trip all you want, you just can’t any longer change your video edits. Your work-flow must accept this constraint if you are to work with FCP and want more sophisticated audio editing abilities such as normalizing and real-time tweaking, both of which are not included in FCP.

This integration constraint was not obvious and I felt a need to spell it out for those considering FCP.

Its not about capturing and its not about learning to work within the program. In my view, this is a basic technological disconnect between sound and video, imposed by FCP, that forces a workflow that restricts spontaneous/creative changes to both sound and video.

I expected “Studio” integration.

Jim

[Jim Waterwash]

Log&Capture work-flows aside, I am really surprised that I cannot edit audio as easily and in as integrated a way as my video edits. I’m really on the verge of going back to Vegas Video. I’ve watched the whole training series on FCP, Motion, and Soundtrack on lynda.com (Great resources by the way.) and I’ve made a few 30 minute movies in FCP. My focus is documentaries for internet distribution.

Within FCP, I hoped that if I sent an audio clip as a STP audio project, by itself, that I could then modify the begin and end points of that clip’s audio within FCP and that when I reopened the project within STP, the begin/end markers would be updated. Instead, they were totally erased! I understand that if my audio file is from a clip that was logged and captured in the traditional way, at the beginning, using Log and capture, that every segment of audio on my time line should simply begin and end at the file’s begin and end, and that relying on markers is then not an issue.

As it turns out though, I often split clips and move them around and so I need to be able to modify both their video and audio. I need to be able to modify the audio of a newly defined clip, without having to dig through it’s original container clip, to find that portion of audio. Being tied to a clip’s begin and end point, as defined at the time of log and capture is just way to confining for me.

Is there really no way that I can retain an audio clip’s newly modified begin and end markers when returning back to STP? Honestly, If I’m the only one facing this problem, either I am missing something or my needs just don’t match this production environment and I’ve made an expensive mistake.

Thanks for everyone’s feedback so far.
Jim

[Jim Waterwash]

I returned my laptop for desktop because of heat.

I was also worried about scorching my desk’s surface during long renders. The smelly heat made me sick. I also found the monitor not as clear as my old SyncMaster 172T. Apple people put their hand over it and said it was all normal. Not for me…