Matt Gerard
Forum Replies Created
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Being an audio guy turned editor, it pains me to see editors stumble through trying to get audio to sound good in the FCP. While Sondtrack is no protools, it is more than adequate to use for these purposes, and provides substantially more visual feedback and easier to use controls for audio filters. Not to mention filter PRESETS!!!!! FCP audio filters provide no visual feedback as to gain reduction happening because of compression, and the numbers they use on the sliders are for the most part arbitrary and made up.
I nearly wet myself when I saw that you can export your soundtrack multitrack project BACK TO FCP and fcp will create a new seq with all of your original audio tracks turned off and your new stereo mix active. What else do you want? It took me about 2 hours to get aquainted with soundtrack, and after looking past some pretty silly assumptions by the engineering team, it does what I require for finishing my shows. This includes keyframing audio levels, and providing better sounding compression filters that are actually easy to use. Remember these 3 words- PRESETS PRESETS PRESETS!!!!
So, don’t torture yourself by trying to get a great sounding mix within FCP, its audio tools are adequate for basic level controls, but use the tools that are provided (soundtrack), and you will will be happier with the result. It might take a few hours to figure out the workflow and how to operate the app, but it was worth it to me.
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It does seem to happen on some systems, and not on others. I am running FCP 6.0.1, but i am still on a dual 2.5 G5. My boss doesn’t have the same issues, and he is on a quad core Intel box. Not sure if that is it or not. i have several laptops that we use in the field my next step is to test them to see if they have any problems or not.
Thanks for your feedback.
Matt
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Yes drive connections do change, and that is why I still have a syquest EZ135 drive sitting in my drawer!!1
For 90% of our clients, we will backup their show to a selects reel, to tape. Our biggest client, this works great for. they aren’t interested in keeping the OK shots, they just want to archive the best of the best. After the show is done, we make a selects reel to Tape(usually DVCPRO50), we archive thier show to a HD, sit it on the shelf. I have asked around the industry, and no one know the shelf life of a HD, just sitting there. I don’t know why, but I feel more comfortable with a HD than with DVD’s or CD’s. Maybe I have just had so many of them go bad on me.
The neverending debate, will, I fear, never end. But, its good to hear pros/cons and other’s ideas. My boss is a real fanatic about ease of use, and convienence. About the only way i could get him to use packet tape BU’s is to get an auto loader library system. But he just dropped 60G’s on a HPX2000 setup, so that might have to wait until next year….
Matt
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I guess no one has ventured to ask, How long do we WANT to archive this stuff?
I am now using a device from weibetech, its a trayless SATA drivebay for Hard drives. I buy 300 Gig Seagate SATA drives for about $64 each, and slip one into the drive bay,( no trays, really nice) and archive my whole project as it sits on my xraid. If I need to acess somethign from that project, I just slip the drive in again, copy what I need off the drive and take it out again. Fast, no special unaccessable formats (retrospect) and. I keep them in anti static bags, and stored well. The only problem I’ve had with drives are LaCie’s, don’t get me started on those.
Been working well so far, and with our deadlines, we can’t wait to unarchive stuff off Tape, heck who has time to spend 4 hours burning projects to DVD’s? I surely don’t. Plus I hate having to unarchive the whole project just to get a couple of files.
My .02
Matt the P2 Rat
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[jimdumm] “f we copy the P2 volumes onto portable drives so we can re-use the P2 cards, do you know if it’s possible to later transfer back from the drives to the P2 cards in order to digitise in from the camera as you describe?”
A risky venture, indeed. I wouldn’t attempt it without much testing and verification that it would work. Interesting Idea, though….
[jimdumm] “Does anyone have any idea of some software which can unpack MXF files, without unnecessarily being able to understand their contents?”
Another interesting idea, one wonders if it is worth the effort. That sounds like it would take some amazing programming tomfoolery, and again, wouldn’t attempt it without much backups. I would think that there are more capable programmers that understand QT wrappers and MXF data layouts that would be able to chime in if this would be possible. It seems, though, that the Raylight people have this problem at least halfway solved.
lest we forget that the reason we love P2 is because of the shortened ingestion times vs tape. I hate digitizing, and as long as I remember that, i will be eternally happy and gratefull to Panasonic for that workflow (and Apple, I suppose…). All the other things, new codecs, bigger cards, cool cameras (except for the HPX2000 being a battery hog) are all just icing on the cake for me. Its good icing, though, and I look forward to more….
Matt
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Well, see my other posts (to myself) in this forum. I tried everythign I could, but FCP won’t recognize AVCintra encoded clips. it will see other clips on the card, but not the AVC clips. The only way I was able to brig them in was to capture them using the camera as a deck, and digitize them via SDI through my kona card. Strange how an instant access solid state memory camera will behave like a tape based deck when digitizing. It worked perfectly, I controlled the camera through the Firewire port, but it would rewind, cue and start digitizing just like a tape deck. strange.
So, awaiting Apple to update FCP to allow us to use this!
Matt
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This whole scaling and interlacing thing, isn’t that why Graeme Nattress had to write his standards conversion filter with an Image Well taht you had to drop the original movie into, explains very well on his website that FCP doesn’t do a good job with interlacing and scaling. I dealt with the same thing doignan NTSC to PAL conversion. Used FCP and Timelines to do it, and it looked horrible, i used the Nattress standards conversion plugins, and it looked as it should, maybe just a titch softer.
Just my 2 bits..
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[hdfilmmaker] “Great answer. Why isn’t anyone using 60i?”
i=interlaced. editing and doing graphics in progressive is so much easier and cleaner. Plu about 50% of our stuff is going to hi res web output, so don’t have to worry about deinterlacing artifacts.
MAtt
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Our 3 suites have been running on 2 xserves for almost 3 years, and no problems. LaCie, on the other hand… Don’t get me started. 90% failure rate in our experiences. scads of footage gone to the wind. 5 of the 10 drives we had were power supply failures, so hte drives were recoverable, other 4 that failed, the drives crashed. I won’t work on any business related projects unless it is some sort of raid setup. we even have 2 sans digital 2 bay drive enclosures that we run raid mirrored for our location jobs.
Drives are cheap, we take the chance.
MAtt
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Ok, retract that last statement, I used thebosses computer last night, and his Intel system didn’t see the clips either, so it appears that AVC is out of range of FCP for now.
matt