[Matt Lyon]

Hi Dhanil,

A quick google came up with this:

https://www.monkeyjob.com/DPX-TimeCode-Editor.htm

But I haven’t used it myself. You might also want to look into the command line version of Shake or imagemagick (truth be told I’m not sure if they’ll do what you want though … I haven’t played with either in a while). I’d imagine the easiest solution would be to create some sort of script that would run post-render and apply the timecode. But I’m curious why you are conforming using Color. Aren’t there better tools for this kind of job?

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

I would also vote for compressor. If you have a multi core mac and can set up compressor to use all your procs via a virtual cluster, it should smoke streamclip.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Hi Derek, you can set the in and out for one clip, then, within the browser, option-drag the timecode entries to the rest of your clips. You have to do them one at a time though.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Hi Michael,
I know every production is different, but isn’t this usually the job of the dialog editor or assistant sound engineers?
For the last show I did that used a similar workflow, we handed off our audio edls and omfs and the sound people used Titan to autoconform the multitrack diva audio from the mono mixdown we used during picture editing.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

I can think of a couple things to try off the top of my head. I dealt with these issues on one project that was using FCP 4.1.1, so please bear in mind that things may have changed since then and YMMV!

For local storage, we set everything to /Users/Shared/ since this directory is on every machine and is user agnostic. I believe you still need to make sure all sub directories and files are given full read/write permissions.

You could take things one step further and create sub-dirs within ‘/Users/Shared/’ for each user on every machine (making sure they match exactly). This is so you can be absolutely sure of having no conflicts with thumbnail/cache/whatever files that happen to have the same name (this was an issue we had from time to time).

You may also want to look into changing the UMASK setting for each user, which controls what the owner/group and read/write permissions are by default for every new file created. We opened these up so that every user’s newly created files would have full access permissions for anyone in our edit group. Of course, it is essential to train every user to have good habits and not overwrite other people’s work.

I’ve also read about people using third party preference managing tools, but I’ve never dabbled with those myself. But it may be worth looking into.

But every production team is different and everyone’s requirements are unique. It took months for us to iron out all the kinks, so be prepared for some growing pains and make sure everyone is very diligent about backing up their work. It also helps to have a few people around who are comfortable cracking open the terminal and can safely use the “chown” and “chmod” tools.

Hope this helps,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

The quick and dirty way would be to apply the appropriate speed setting directly in the FCP timeline and turn off “frame blending” — that should make FCP just do the equivalent of a “nearest frame” motion conversion. (At least in FCP 6 — I haven’t tried the new speed tools in FCP 7 yet).

The other route would be to use compressor, and set the rate conversion to “Fastest (nearest frame).”

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Kinda late to the party here:

I’ve also seen this happen in many projects over the years, possibly even going back to FCP 4 (but my memory is hazy). Like everyone else, I can’t narrow the issue down to any kind of repeatable situation. It’s happened with internal drives, external drives, still images, DV media, etc.
Unmounting an external drive accidentally while a project is open has definitely been the culprit in one case. And I think that sharing projects between computers makes it more likely to happen.

Of all the problems with FCP, I’d say this one keeps me the most paranoid! Good workflow can minimize the issue: have clip names match files names ALWAYS (but in reality not always possible, I know)… this makes reconnecting much easier. Using very conservative naming conventions helps too. Letters, numbers and underscores only if possible! (not even white spaces).

Thinking back to the last couple times this happened to me, I realize both cases involved sharing work across different machines (that DID NOT share the same storage). Maybe this is significant? What have other people’s experiences been?

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Thanks Michael and Rafael,

Good tools to keep the propeller head in me busy 🙂 I’ve already gotten some better results just simply using x264’s “Tune” options in the QT export dialog box.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

Hi Michael,

Do you find you get a better quality output from the command line version of these tools, as opposed to using a GUI that accesses the same libraries? I’m curious because I might like to give this a shot.
Thanks in advance,

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Matt Lyon]

It’s probably the keyframe setting in the export options box. Trying changing it to “automatic.” I also generally set the data rate to “automatic” and use the quality slider to control the file size. But this approach may not be suitable for everyone’s needs — try some tests and see what works for you.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto