[Julian Engels]

Hi John,

thanks for pointing that out. We actually have a step in our workflow, where we use Reference Movies before passing that to Compressor. Rolf set that up initially, so I wasn’t really aware of the details. Anyway, “Add Timecode Track” is set, still no Reel Name within the reference or the transcoded file. Is that a bug or are there other options I have to consider? (Worker Node 5.0b5.1035) I tried to force Reel Name with ${TP} and and that works! Thank you so very much, for helping me out.

Agreed on your last statement!

Thanks,

Julian

[Julian Engels]

Hi Bryson,

thanks for that hint, was hoping for a smaller invest, but if this is helping with my problem I’d go for it. I will check it out.

Greets,

Julian

[Julian Engels]

Hey John,

FFmbc is helping: https://code.google.com/p/ffmbc/

Use this comand with 7.rc7 (the latest as of today):

ffmbc -i /Path/to/your/quicktime_file.mov -timecode $YOURTCFROMSOMEWHERE -metadata reel_name=REELNAME -acodec copy -vcodec copy /Path/to/your/Output_file.mov

This hardcodes the Reel name into your file, but only works in conjunction with -timecode, since ffmbc clears the data (timecode) stream. What I did is take the start timecode from ffprobe first, write that into a variable and parse that into the ffmbc command.

You can use this method without reencoding, or do a transcode from one file to a quicktime file. Right now FCP 7 accepts these files, misinterprets them with field dominance upper, no luck on solving this kind of problem. Maybe someone will figure it out, or as a cli solution for it?

Hope that helps.

Julian

[Julian Engels]

Hey Jon,

we shoot a lot on DigiBeta interlaced and output to web formats. So we always have to deinterlace. We do this with compressor. To reduce render time while maintaining quality, we set the sequence to progressive and send the final edit to compressor for deinterlacing. We found that render time is half when field dominance set to “none” compared to render times of an interlaced sequence I can’t see any difference in quality, when using this method. If you do it this way, you have to make sure to set all the frame modes of each clip to what it was actually shot (DigiBeta clips to interlaced odd, HDV/DV to interlaced even, progressive material obviously to progressive etc.) Text overlays are automatically set to progressive (since sequence is progressive) and therefore will not be deinterlaced and should look nice in final output. On the other hand, if you set the field dominance of a progressive clip to interlaced it will look awful in final output, same with field dominance to a incorrect field (odd/even). With “Edit” -> “Object Setting” (from memory) you can check and correct if you have to.

Hope that helps,

Julian

[Julian Engels]

Hi John,

I am aware of the issue with broken tc, but thanks for pointing that out. I focus on the fact that an edit is taking longer in what we do, when we have to deal with 100 clips of 40 minutes footage, than have that 40 minutes in one clip (like with digibeta).

Concerning restoring you are totally right, and I don’t like the fact that we may face problems if we have to do so. Since our work is really newsworthy we do not face deleting/restoring processes a lot. But in general I have to prove you right. I will do some more research, maybe I can leave the clip-based files as they are and “virtually” concatenate them within the edit program through XML. I did a research on that and I am pretty sure it can work, I just couldn’t figure it out and been looking since for that kind of a solution.

Or, as you suggested, we just have to get used to a different workflow, which I do not want to accept for now 😉

Julian

[Julian Engels]

Hi John,

thanks for the quick reply. I understand the issue now. We face the problem of concatenating clips. With a tape you get one clip, with a tapeless workflow instead you get several (short) clips, which is not as convenient to edit with. Do you happen to know whether CatDV is capable of automatically concatenating clips of one p2/xdcam-card and at the same time preserving the audio (mono-) tracks? I would love to have this process automated.

Julian

[Julian Engels]

Hello John,

I stumbled over this thread, because I am looking into CatDV as an alternative to Final Cut Server. I allready contacted Squarebox for a rep in Germany. Google does not help really, could not find anyone. My question is off-topic:

Stitching spanned clips together, or concatenating clips together in tapeless workflows in general has been an issue for us since a long time. We still use Quicktime Pro to do that job manually. Not elegant, but it does its job. So back to my question. You said

[John Heagy] “Stitching spanned shots together can be done in FCP via L&T.”

I searched for that options within FCP, never found it. Can you specify what you meant, am I missing something?

Greatly appreciate your answer.

Julian

PS: By the way. Been a reader since 1.5 years. First post, finally I have my own account on CreativeCow. Yeah!