[Lars Fuchs]

Hi David – thanks for mentioning Treasured. I wouldn’t have heard of them otherwise. What a clever systems they’ve come up with! I’m definitely adding their site to my go-to bookmarks. The ‘-av’ file question has come up a lot here on the Cow, but so far I’ve missed any mention of Treasured. (Aeroquartet’s app: ‘SimpleMovieX’ app looks interesting too.)

It’s an imperfect world after all, as you point out, and s**t happens. Its good to know there is an option. If you do try to use Treasured please let us know how it works.

Good luck.

[Lars Fuchs]

Well, I am getting a bit long in the tooth. Not much I can do about that. But one is never too old to learn. Can you be more specific about these workflows and possibilities you’re thinking of?

I’m sure ReCut is a very nice app, and that it works wonders. Undoubtedly Mr. Escandon is better off paying 89 Euros for it, than trying to do it by himself, but I was just thinking to give him another option, in case his budget was tight or whatever. You did mention as well as that you’d need to alter your program a bit and that would take some time. This way he can get up and running right away. Moreover, your workflow also requires digitizing the whole tape; manually pulling out 2-3 breaks by finding the silence visually in the waveform is crude perhaps, and old-school, but it’s effective and won’t take very long.

Can the user specify that ReCut should only find black segments? How does it handle fades to and from black? How long does it take to analyze a 30 minute clip?

[Lars Fuchs]

Mr Weiss is correct that performing this chore in a ‘linear’ edit suite, from one vtr to another directly, is the most effective way to do this.

But there aren’t many folks with linear edit suites out there any more, and who has more than one deck in their NLE?

Here are some suggestions to make the work go faster.

First, don’t digitize the segments individually. Digitize the whole show, gaps and all, from start to finish. If nothing else, this will give you a full half hour you can spend on doing something else productive. If you have a master with MANY shows on one tape, LOG them all first (again, with one clip per show) and then BATCH digitize the whole tape in one go. Now you can go away for the length of the tape.

Second, when creating sequences, drop each show’s clip into a new timeline. Enable “Show Audio Waveform” in the timeline options. Now the gaps will be clearly visible in the audio tracks. You can jump right to them and ripple-delete them out. Presto!

When its time to output select all the finished sequences and BATCH EXPORT them. Now you can leave again and do something else productive while your machine churns out your export.

Now, admittedly this technique will mean that you’re digitizing 4-8 minutes of unnecessary black. However, nowadays drive space isn’t such an issue. You will spend some of that time manually digitizing the segments, and more importantly, you can’t really be doing anything else during that time.

[Lars Fuchs]

I would definitely spend some time researching telecine/transfer options. The onsuper8.orgwebsite has tons of links (and in general it’s a great site for 8mm/super8mm info!) to telecine services.

As has already been mentioned, avoid going to DVD if possible. Its inconvenient to convert a dvd to editable footage and its quality will suffer from the uncessary compression. Look for a place that will tranfer to MiniDV at a minimum. There are many places now that will transfer straight to Hard disk. If you go to one of these, a DV codec is still an acceptable choice. However, if the company is more technically savvy and offer direct-to-disk, you could probably ask for Apple ProRes.

Even though your project is only a personal one, I strongly recommend going to a professional transfer facility. You don’t have to go in person, you can send them your film. Some place will even let you supervise the transfer via live internet feed.

With cheaper transfer services the quality is so variable. And it is often REALLY REALLY BAD – I can personally attest to that! So for you family memories I think its worth the extra coin.

Why not see if your family can all contribute to the cost? After all, your creating an heirloom for everyone!

[Lars Fuchs]

[Jeremy Garchow] “If any of the render files or other media go away, you will be left with no reference movie and you will have to recreate them.”

That’s a good point about the render files. I hadn’t thought about that. In this case Jan mentioned trying to create clips from dual system shoots, so I don’t think rendering is an issue. This is the source media for the edit, so its likely to stay online for the edit. However, if he media manages the new clips, FCP will create self-contained files.

It also occurred to me that Jan could try to create a group of multiclips from the separate picture and sound using the ‘make multi-clip sequence’ command (and uncheck the “automatically edit multiclips into new sequence” box). The resulting multiclips should be subclippable in the way Jan is looking for. It might be necessary to set the aux-tc on the various elements first, though.

I’ll be able to do a test of that on Monday and I’ll let you know.

[Lars Fuchs]

Once you’ve got all your subclips (even though they are still sequences) in a bin, select and batch export them all using File->Batch Export commmand. Export them as qt files but don’t make them self-contained, make them reference files. They will export much quicker this way. Then simply drag all the completed files you’ve just exported back into FCP. They wont relink to your original media, so you should be sure to include handles in the export. But it shouldn’t take very long, and wont really take up any significant disk space.

[Lars Fuchs]

Okay. So I got ahead of myself. The PNG trick only worked for my test clip. It didn’t work when I went back to rerender the project I’m working on. More to follow…

[Lars Fuchs]

I too have been having this shift problem (with NTSC/DV, not DVCProHD) footage not roundtripping from FCP to AE and back.

Although I have never had an AJA device, I did find two Kona Codec files in the QuickTime Library. I installed them after receiving them from a transfer house along with some film footage. I removed these: KonaUncompressedCodec.component and KonaCodec.component. Restarted FCP and AE, did the rt test, and still clips look much darker when they come back to FCP.

I’m using FCP 6.0.3 on a 15″ MBP with 4GB Ram, and AE 8.0 CS3.

I tried rerendering my test clips as a sequence of still frames using PNG, recreated the movie file using Quicktime and that worked fine in FCP – no shift!

Then I re-rendered the same clip, this time as a QT file but using PNG as the codec. That worked fine too!

Now at least I have a work-around until a definitive comprehensive solution is found. Hurray.

[Lars Fuchs]

Sorry I didn’t use the proper term for ‘acceleration handles’, but that’s exactly what I told Mark to do. I thought I was pretty clear, though perhaps I could have been clearer.

I wasn’t addressing whether it’s worth the effort in a larger sense to do something in AE or Motion vs FCP – that’s up to Mark to decide. Now at least he knows how to do it.

In my experience simple moves with just a few keyframes are fine to do in FCP. For me in these cases the overhead of switching app’s isn’t worth it. But when I need a complex move to be just right, AE makes it just so much easier to accomplish what I want. To each his own.

Although I am not a crack smoker, I appreciated the plug for your book. I’ll definitely check it out.

[Lars Fuchs]

You have to manipulate the handles of the motion path in the viewer. It’s a bear, and produces less than stellar results, which is why I second the notion of using Motion of AEfx.

If you have two or more keyframes with different ‘center’ values, you’ll see a motion path in the canvas. Its a line linking the centers of the keyframes. Each keyframe with have handles that can be manipulated. With only 2 kyfrms, it can be tough to find them because they will lie along the path itself.

Anyway, once you’ve found the handles, you can adjust the ease-in/ease-out-iness of the move by moving the handle closer or further from the keyframe center point.

Good luck!