[Matt Lyon]

Dustin,

Since you are working with still images, you’ll be better off using a square pixel aspect ratio. So your settings should be:

1080×1920
pixel aspect ratio: square
field dominance: none

Your choice of codec (Apple Intermediate) is also not ideal, since it uses a reduced color space. Better off using “Uncompressed 8 or 10 bit” or one of the ProRes flavors.

Since the sequence you’ve created is non standard, you will also lose all real time effects in your timeline, and your output won’t be compatible with any broadcast standards (but I figure this is for the web or a slideshow anyway, right?)

hth,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Evan, if you are entering the workforce now, you might consider trying to find a junior position at a company where they are willing to train you on the job. A few weeks doing footage ingest in the overnight shift will teach you lots. Plus, being mentored on the job, by someone with experience will always beat what you can learn by yourself. And you’ll be learning new equipment AND getting paid. Of course, this is all easier said then done….

And if every shop in town is using Macs, then you can’t swim against the tide forever. Things change, but not THAT fast. For instance, my last gig was on FCP 6.
Even if studios ditch FCP, they’ll probably try to stay on the same hardware, rather then buy all new machines and assorted Infrastructure (at least for the next few buying cycles).
My two cents,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Daniel, the method you are describing (separate media and render drives) is the way I was taught to set things up “back in the day.” The thinking was exactly what you describe: avoid read/write operations to the same drive during render. But back in those days, disc i/o performance margins were much slimmer, so you needed all the performance you could find.

So these days it is maybe less critical? But it certainly couldn’t hurt. The only downsides I see are that it means your files aren’t all “in one place” should you need to move your system. Also, if you aren’t doing a heck of a lot of rendering, then your “render” drive might have loads of free space on it, which wouldn’t be the most efficient use of your resources.

hth,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Thanks Wayne, sorry the advice was not more helpful.

You could also try dividing the film into reels (2000 feet or ~20 min per reel). This might keep things more manageable for FCP. And sometimes the act of copying and pasting your material into new timelines seems to tidy things up, but YMMV.

Have a great weekend,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Did you check the audio configuration in your sequence setting? It sounds like they got switched from “stereo” output to discrete mono output. Open the sequence in question, then hit “command-zero” to access the sequence’s settings.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Hi Wayne,

I don’t think adding more RAM will really make FCP all that faster, since it already theoretically has access to the max amount of ram it can use at once. And FCP 7 is theoretically only using one core. Adding more RAM may improve your overall system performance, especially if you notice periods of unresponsiveness as you switch between apps. This is the system swapping virtual memory off the hard disc into ram (and visa versa).

The bottleneck to me sounds like your project. How big is it, megabytes wise? Can you delete any more old timelines? Do a “save as” and then try to clean it up more. Leave all the bins, since that won’t make things much smaller. Get rid of all the old timelines you don’t need any more. You can always access them in your previous project. I find that once a project starts getting above 100-200 megs, it becomes unstable.

All the upgrades you mention shouldn’t hurt in theory (I don’t have any direct experience w/ SSD drives, though). But they won’t really matter if the project itself is too bloated.

You should also make sure all your drives have enough free space on them (10% at least), for best performance.

You could also theoretically turn the still frame cache in FCP down to zero, so the app has a little bit more RAM to use. This will disable real time stills, so you have to be willing to work without those.

Hope this helps,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Hi Vivian,

Have you read my tutorial?

https://library.creativecow.net/lyon_matt/fixing-fcp-assets/1

You may just need to re-import your audio files the “correct” way, which I describe in the second half. Once you import the audio incorrectly the first time, Final Cut takes a bit of coxing to force it to forget the “bad” setting.

Unless the 722 was doing something really funky, you shouldn’t need to jump through so many hoops to get the sync to work. It really should work right away.

Hope this helps,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

TIFF images themselves are lossless, but when you export from a video codec to tiffs, you are converting from YUV color space to RGB color space. That introduces issues, like the the fact they have different color gamuts.

There is no such thing as 10 bit TIFF files, just 8 bit per channel or 16 bit per channel (and maybe floating point? I can’t remember…). In any case, FCP doesn’t do 16 bit per channel anything, so I don’t think it is “nuts” that it is limited to 8 bit per channel TIFFs. Last I checked, quicktime player won’t open 16 bit TIFFs either.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Hi Adrian, I meant to say “colorist” instead of VFX artist. I was trying to show you a way to send “clean” footage, without introducing the artifacts. If your footage looks fine in the FCP timeline, then you need to examine how you do your exporting, because a “self contained quicktime” should theoretically be a 1:1 copy of your clip, with no re-compression (assuming you haven’t applied any filters/motion tab effects, etc). Based on your original post, the problem might be that your changed your timeline setting to “ucompressed” before you did your export … there is no reason to do that. Leave your timeline settings so they match your clip setting and simply export a self contained quicktime.

Prores HQ is generally considered overkill unless you are editing 4K footage, to answer your other question.

Your workflow involves tons of codec and color space conversion so it is not surprising that problems are being introduced. In general, you should strive for as few transcodes as possible. Changing your prores footage to 10 bit uncompressed does not make it look better. I would only do it your colorist specifically can only work with that format. Also, when you exported your whole movie as TIFFs, the image files would have been limited to 8 bit color depth.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Hi Craig,

There could be a few things going on, but first off: In AE, you shouldn’t render to the animation codec, since it is 8 bit and RGB. Render to prores, or 10 or 8 bit uncompressed 4:2:2. On my last job, we found we got the best results by checking the “Match Legacy After Effects QuickTime Gamma Adjustments” option in the project settings, but YMMV.

Hope this helps,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto