[Llewelyn Roderick]

For what it’s worth, I hope that they wait for Snow Leopard and rewrite FCP 3! FCP3 on Leopard cannot possibly be the significant update we are all waiting for with Snow Leopard on the horizon.

Llewelyn @ Fireworks
HD for indies post production
http://www.fireworksfilms.co.za

[Llewelyn Roderick]

I could not install it either. I had to revert to an earlier version.

Llewelyn @ Fireworks
HD for indies post production
http://www.fireworksfilms.co.za

[Llewelyn Roderick]

Dear Mick

I render the SD time line before going to compressor and the reason why is best explained by Raphael in this thread:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1014150#1014154

The bottom line is FCP handles the conversion from XDCAM to SD better than Compressor as far as I can tell from the various posts I’ve read and from the results I get. NB, you must work in 10-bit uncompressed PAL (SD) to benefit from the 32 floating point processing.

Hope this helps.

Llewelyn

Llewelyn @ Fireworks
HD for indies post production
http://www.fireworksfilms.co.za

[Llewelyn Roderick]

Dear Olga

How big is your project? When FCP project files get bigger than a few hundred MB they seem to become vulnerable to some form of database corruption. If this is a possibility in your case you should create a new project with just the final sequence you want to render and see if that works.

cheers

Llewelyn

Llewelyn @ Fireworks
HD for indies post production
http://www.fireworksfilms.co.za

[Llewelyn Roderick]

Hey Lawrence

[Lawrence Robbin] I’ve run into a massive hassle trying to compress a finished project with mixed DVCAM and HDV clips (on a separate hard drive) to an mpeg 2 file.

It’s difficult to give you a comprehensive answer without knowing exactly what the “massive hassle” is. But I suspect it’s a case of different field orders for one? Can you be more specific.

how to correctly set up a new project

You’re right about the multiple settings and the easiest way to work with these is using EASY SETUP in the FILE menu. This way you don’t need a ‘technical’ background to get good results out of FCP.

In your instance I would downconvert my HDV to DV and finish everything in a DV environment.

Llewelyn @ Fireworks
HD for indies post production
http://www.fireworksfilms.co.za

[Llewelyn Roderick]

Hey Alan and Jeremy

You’ve both got a point (and thanks for the sympathy!).
He shot the doccie with his own money and HD was not an option. In fact he started shooting DV and switched over to HDV after the first year’s filming and ended up minimising the DV footage to less than 15%. If he was shooting today he’d probably shoot on the EX1 and have progressive as an option.

He also happens to be an Emmy award winning filmmaker the film in question has just been accepted into competition at IDFA, so something is workging for him. (The video finish if you ask me 🙂

But the bottom line is, as Alan said, if you want the film look you shoot in film. However, 99% of doccie producers can’t afford that in our market and so I have to constantly look for ways to give video a more organic and less “news at 9” look.

Interestingly enough, I’m finding that with the sudden explosion of new formats that there’s a growing demand for video finishing expertise. During the “DV era” every filmmaker who shot a doccie or short film bought a mac with FCP and finished their own work. Now with HDTV becoming increasingly common the demand for HD Masters is increasing and suddenly filmmakers need professional help again. I’m spending a helluva lot of hours on the phone with producers who are about to embark on a shoot to design their work-flows which is very encouraging and will hopefully avoid situations like the one I’m in.

cheers for now…

Llewelyn @ Fireworks
HD for indies post production
http://www.fireworksfilms.co.za

[Llewelyn Roderick]

This is probably too late for you but the new incarnation of iMovie (iLife08) has a work-flow built into the program! You import your final QT from FCP into iMovie, create a new project, drop your movie in there and choose “publish to YouTube” from the “Share” menu. A simple drop down menu asks for your username and password and any description/tags/etc AND you can choose between two sizes. Oh, and you’ll need a .mac (mobileme) account.

(this is a very non-pro route I know, but it is very hassle free)

Llewelyn @ Fireworks
HD for indies post production
http://www.fireworksfilms.co.za

[Llewelyn Roderick]

Hi Rafael.

My work-flow looked like this:
recaptured all HDV footage via SDI/blackmagic HD Pro using Prores HQ codec. (3 days)
manually captured rest of HDV footage riddled with time-code breaks on my HDV camera because the Sony 1500e could not play these tapes. (4 days)

converted manually captured HDV to Prores HQ.

Graded in Color back to Prores HQ

De-interlaced Prores HQ clips only, using stibs de-interlacer.

cheers
Llewelyn

Llewelyn @ Fireworks
HD for indies post production
http://www.fireworksfilms.co.za

[Llewelyn Roderick]

Sorry for the confusion! We are all sharing the same FCP PROJECT file, but some of us have different compressions of the same media.

[Llewelyn Roderick] “With a little renaming of my graded media (all the filenames in his edl refer to my filenames but with the suffix -v added to them???)”

The editor sent me his Project file of the changes he has made to the ONLINE which links back to the final online media I sit with. When I open his project and try to reconnect to the original media I hit a snag. The file names his PROJECT points to are correct, however, all the file names have the suffix -v added to them. For example. If the first shot is “g1-1.mov” (color’s naming convention) then his PROJECT is calling for a shot “g1-1-v.mov”. they way I got around this was to make a duplicate of my master ONLINE graded media and to rename all the files by adding the sufix “-v” which worked brilliantly.

Llewelyn @ Fireworks
HD for indies post production
http://www.fireworksfilms.co.za

[Llewelyn Roderick]

Dear Peter

Although Jeremy’s workflow is the correct I would strongly advise against it. I am in the middle of a 94min Documentary Online that was shot in HDV and offlined following the DV capture route. All I can say is that it’s taken us 7 days to autoconform (recapture the final EDL) with the HDV shoot tapes. It took 2 days to capture 75% of the footage and another 5 days to capture the other 25%.
First sign of trouble was FCP crashing when we attempted to batch capture one of the ‘problem’ tapes.
Eventually what I managed to figure out after many hours of reading and talking to other Post people was that the process of downconverting in-camera from HDV to DV disguises TC breaks that may exist in HDV footage. The HDV’s long GOP structure means that you do not have frame based TC but like the visual data, the TC is calculated on the fly. To the best of my knowledge and in comparing some of the tapes, this is what i found. A DV clip that was continuous in the offline was actually made up of two or more seperate HDV clips. This was only the beginning. At least 20% of the footage we digitised without hiccup ended up not being frame accurate. IE there must have been more code breaks.

Anyway, avoid if you can. Hope this helps in some way.

regards

Llewelyn

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro. Decklink HD Pro, 1.8TB raid, HDLink, Sony PVM20 and 23″ Apple Cinema Display…
Fireworks Edit

Llewelyn @ Fireworks
HD for indies post production
http://www.fireworksfilms.co.za