[Mark Scudder]

Wow, Mark. I hope I would be less surly to people who my need help in the future. I’m sure you got where you are by listening to every naysayer on the internet.

I’ll repeat myself for you: I got lost in the terminology (you can Online an edit with the “Offline” function), but other than that, I now understand that FCP does do exactly what I want it to do.

So, I got my question answered and I made you feel smugly superior – everybody got what they wanted!

Thanks to those who helped.

-mark

[Mark Scudder]

Shane, what I’m starting to understand from the link you sent is, you use FCP’s “Offline” tools for a move in either direction – offlining or onlining? So I can theoretically “Log and Capture” in whatever goofy format I want, put the edit together, and then use “Offline” to recapture in full res – essentially onlining using a function called “Offline”? If this is what I missing, then I get it now.

[Mark Scudder]

Thanks for the good tips. To answer your question, I’ve had performance problems in the past if for example I need to put text over a shot, or transitions that aren’t hard cuts. I also may have a 3-camera multicam project behind it, and the last time I tried HD multicam in FCP, I had to give up because the project wouldn’t play at more than a frame a second. I honestly don’t know if frame size has anything to do with it, or if decoding HDV (as opposed to decoding ProRes proxy) presents a performance hit. I thought it stood to reason that if I was pushing fewer pixels, that performance would increase.

I also might like to edit on my laptop away from external drives, in which case cutting with a much smaller set of files would solve several problems at once – disk space, performance, battery life, heat output, on and on and on.

My initial idea was that I could capture at some stupidly low res/quality and FCP could “remember” where this footage was (because I’d “Log and Capture”) and then at some point when the project is ready for a final render, it could go back and recapture just what I needed at full res/quality – in other words, the Media Manager downconvert in reverse. If that’s NOT true, then yes, I will simply cut what I need out of the tapes at full res and edit full HD.

I don’t do a ton of video but when I have to do it, I’m the one who has to do it… I don’t know if this is stupid to say, but I wish this sort of process was simpler.