[Ken Pugh]

Yikes – I hadn’t considered this – what happens if I have a disc crash – I can re- instal snow and FCP7 – but will apple still update FCP to the current version, FCP 7.0.3?

Anyone got a standalone updater!

Ken.

[Ken Pugh]

Motion 5 looks great – but if you can’t send media from FCP7 and you cant import Motion 5 projects into FCP7 then its just like any other app. As a standalone sure its great, but I’m not a power user – I like to use the stabilisation and tracking features, and the titling (RIP Livetype) I use the scaling functions, PIP that kind of stuff, things FCP can’t do so well and things that are not so complex I’d use AE (only ‘cos I know it best) – so personally I’ll unfortunately have to stick with Motion 4 and the ability to roundtrip – it’s a massive timesaver.

Best,

Ken.

[Ken Pugh]

Perhaps, if it’s change for the better – but if you want that discussion here’s the place:

https://forums.creativecow.net/finalcutprox

But be warned you’ll be heavily outnumbered!

Ken.

[Ken Pugh]

Thanks – but that’s a shame – I use motion for all my titles in FCP7 – but FCPX doesn’t give me many of the edit tools I need at present – so I’ll stick with Motion 4 until FCPX gets revamped….

Cheers,

Ken.

[Ken Pugh]

Nice idea! But you are so cruel….

FCP 1 could digitise from tape
FCP 1 could lay off to tape
FCP 1 could export and EDL
FCP 1 could import an EDL
FCP 1 had a source window AND a record window

We wait for these features in FCPX

However it’s true FCP 1 didn’t have the ability to randomly move audio between tracks while moving shots in the timeline…

😉

Ken.

[Ken Pugh]

Well that’s a relief – I see from the help pages:

Create optimized media: This option transcodes video to the Apple ProRes 422 codec format, which provides better performance during editing, faster render times, and better color quality for compositing. Still images are transcoded to either JPEG (if the original file doesnʼt have alpha channel information) or PNG files (if the file has alpha channel information). If the original camera format can be edited with good performance, this option will be dimmed.

Again according to the help pages the supported codecs are:

You can import and work with the following video, audio, and still-image formats in Final Cut Pro:
Video formats
Apple Animation codec
Apple Intermediate codec
Apple ProRes (all versions)
AVC-Intra
AVCHD (including AVCCAM, AVCHD Lite, and NXCAM)
DV (including DVCAM, DVCPRO, and DVCPRO50) DVCPRO HD
H.264
HDV
iFrame Motion JPEG (OpenDML only)
MPEG IMX (D-10)
Uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2 Uncompressed
8-bit 4:2:2
XDCAM HD/EX/HD422
QuickTime formats

From the info above it seems a little more promising, this was the whole point of the re-write as far as I could see – no transcoding and multiple native codec editing. So all these codecs can be edited natively with real-time performance on the same timeline with no transcoding?

Ken.

[Ken Pugh]

It was very funny. I mean FCP is dead OK but FINAL CUT EXPRESS noooooooo………

But what worries me are the reports that iMovie Pro has to transcode all its imported media to ProRes – no native support for H264 or XDCAM etc. Just like FCP I’m sure new features will be added incrementally and in 10 years we could be back where we started. But having to transcode media on import to ProRes is not exactly a feature that can be incrementally improved – it’s at the heart of the software. Great that you can edit while the transcoding is taking place, but…..

what happens when you need to do a fast edit with say 50 hours of DSLR H264 that all has to be transcoded before you can lay off to tape – oops sorry – export to iMovie – seems like a bit of a nightmare….. and then all the masses of storage required to keep backups etc.

So after editing a quick promo the diligent editor will be left with 50 hours of H264 and 100 hours of ProRes (including the safety backup) and 5 days of transcoding while he waits to export the edit into another programme for tape delivery (which most TV stations still require).

Game changer.

Ken.

[Ken Pugh]

I don’t have the camera here right now to replicate what happened – but as I remember I set up the recapture via firewire and HDV using easy setup and all worked fine, but when I then went in to audio/video settings and changed the capture preset to HDV-Apple ProRes 422 I lost device control – and I had an error message – something about a conflict between device control and capture preset maybe?

I gave up at this point as I understood when you capture ProRes via HDV you loose timecode, so it seemed logical to me that recapturing video under timecode control would also not be possible to the ProRes codec over firewire. Should this be possible?

Cheers,

Ken.

[Ken Pugh]

But can you do this under firewire timecode control? I tried, and couldn’t get it to work… I needed the timecode as I was re-digitising an edit someone else had done in ‘offline’ mode using the dvcam codec, the client wanted a HD online. This was why I tried the RS422/addenda to pull the material in as prores via my Kona card. Of course if we had a RS422 deck instead of just the camera all would have worked out….

I could manually play the camera and record prores over firewire, and could do this via component out as well – but I needed t/c to autoconform the edit – and only HDV seemed possible.

[Ken Pugh]

I was doing an online reconform – tried to recapture through the AJA into prores via component out of the Z1, but the Z1 wasn’t accurate enough with the Lanc/Addenda RS422 interface so I had to switch to firewire control – and this worked fine. So stuck with HDV. However as per advice switched the HDV timeline to ProRes, took an hour to render but yes now I can quickly export to ProRes no problem.

Perhaps the best solution might have been to convert the HDV to Prores in software before we did the grading etc. is this possible – using media manager – or would I need to send all the individual clips through compressor?

Thanks for the all the advice, much appreciated.

Cured my slow startup problem too – had to delete all the backup sequences I had made while we were doing the finishing – and now FCP loads fast again. Maybe one of the sequences were corrupt? I had a lot of motion round trips (for optical flow slo mo and stabilising effects – excellent) maybe one of these became weird. The startup just stalled at 43% and sat there for ages – 4 or 5 minutes, then carried on. All good now.

Thanks again,

Ken.