[Mel Matsuoka]

Don’t panic (yet).

First try resetting the PMU (Power Management Unit) on your G4/G5 moboard. I’ve experienced the disappearing Firewire port problem many times, and in every case, a simple reset of the PMU fixed the problem.

Chec this link out for more details:

https://g5support.com/group/viewtopic.php?t=338

Aloha,
mel

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Matte]“If you have fully rendered your timeline, there is absolutely NO NECESSITY to use “Print to Video” at all. The quality is identical if you just PLAY the timeline.

Make sure your audio playback is set to “High Quality” and perform an “Audio Mixdown” before you dub out.

Just hit record on the deck and play the timeline.
You can add the Color Bars, tone, slate and countdown right on the timeline.
You can even very closely hit a given TC on a tape, if you are just careful when you hit the “play” on FCP. “

This is “good” advice (note my use of quotes :P) only if you are laying off a short sequence, such as a TV:30. In all other cases, laying to tape by just hitting the spacebar is BAD ADVICE. I don’t see the point of doing it this way when there are so many potential pitfalls with it that are eliminated by using PTV/ETT instead.

What is the point of “even very closely hit(ting) a given TC on a tape”, when you can hit the given TC exactly, by using Edit to Tape? What happens when FCP decides to drop frames on you, when you’re 26 minutes into a 30 minute program? What happens when you’re in the middle of laying off your program, and someone (or some-thing) accidentally hits a key on your keyboard? What happens when you forget to switch the Audio Playback setting to “High”?

The PTV/ETT tool is there for a reason. It alleviates all these potential problems, and is designed to make your life easier. To me the only advantage to hitting the spacebar for mastering out is that you save yourself the 10 nanoseconds that it takes to call up the PTV/ETT dialog box in the first place.

Aloha,
mel

[Mel Matsuoka]

I have the same gripe, but mainly only with the Log & Capture process.

I do a lot of work on FCP captured clips in After Effects, and after a large (and nightmarish) cross-platform compositing job recently, I have gotten into the habit of adding “.mov” to the actual *clip name* when I originally capture it in FCP’s Log and Capture tool. This saves a lot of time and hassle later on when you have to deal with the Media Mangler and relinking files, etc etc.

I know you can use a tool like R-Name (or “Better File Renamer” on the PC) to add extensions to files in the OSX Finder, but then you have to go back into your FCP project and force relink every doggone clip that youve renamed. Not fun when you have over 100+ clips to deal with.

Adding “.mov” to the actual FCP source clipname itself is really dorky, but it’s a real lifesaver when you have to work with those files cross-platform.

As far as the FCP projectfiles go, it doesn’t really bother me that FCP doesnt automatically add an .fcp extension, since it’s pretty easy to just add it when you do a “Save As…”

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Peter McAuley] “Not being able to copy, select, paste or move keyframes is my is one of my top three bitches about FCP. I haven’t seen FCP 5 yet. Someone please tell me it’s been addressed in 5 “

It’s not.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. It’s unfathomable how Apple can continue to ignore this BASIC feature of any professional compositing system, and yet still tout FCP’s compositing and effects prowess at tradeshows and whatnot.

Aloha,
mel

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Tom Wolsky] “You could do all that, but about 4/5 of it is unnecessary. Simply copying a sequence into a new project, will break it’s links to the material in the original. Changing the sequence presets and deleting the existing sequence in the new project will do nothing at all. If you’re doing a single sequence that’s all you need.

There are many problems with MM, but your workflow doesn’t address any of them,”

Tom,

Simply copying a sequence into a new project may break all links to material in the original, but it DOES NOT consolidate the media, and *this* is the problem which my workflow tries to address.

We cut TV:30’s, and our offline editor digitizes every frame of *every* dailies reel in DV resolution, in 5 minute chunks, and then subclips the dailies out for editing. This means that, generally speaking, only a second or two of a particular master clip ends up being used in the final product, which I uprez in 10-bit uncompressed for finishing and layoff.

I’ve tried every permutation that I can think of (clearing I/O points on clips before dragging over, Make sequence clips independent, etc etc etc) to try and get your “just drag it over” method to work without grabbing the entire original master clip when i recapture, but it just doesn’t work. I need to use the Media Manager if I want to consolidate the sequence.

Am I missing something here?

Aloha,
mel

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Shane Ross] “Need to mix formats? Capture them all with a capture card in one format: 8-bit or 10-bit uncompressed. Different formats have different dimensions, so you are going to have to resize and render in one format or another. “

To me, it’s FAR more important for FCP to be able to playback Animation codec clips in realtime than it is to have it play different resolutions at the same time in realtime.

Until the Apple/Blackmagic Uncompressed 8 & 10-bit codecs can support alpha channels, using the Animation codec to render clips with transparancy will continue to be the main workflow in most studios. It’s really frustrating to have to continually re-render clips that have an alpha channel on it, even if the clip is the same resolution as the current sequence.

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Alpha1] “I love the key framing, I hate the fact that I can’t move an entire row of keyframes all at once! And I’m not sure I’ve seen the advantage of having the keyframes stick to their assigned code unless I’m using the garbage matting – It would be nice if that was a toggle or something, as I do also get stuck on having to move keyframes to reach transitions”

This is a big problem in FCP, I agree. FCP’s keyframing engine is overall, a big steaming heap o’ doodoo. And there are no improvements to it in FCP5, unfortunately. The stupid way it insists on moving keyframes along with the clip when you use the slip tool wouldn’t be all that annoying if it weren’t for the fact that FCP will not let you move a selected range of keyframes at once. Very weak, in my opinion.

[Alpha1] “I love the compositing, I hate the fact that even if my clip is selected I may NOT necessarily be manipulating it when I go to my canvas and grab that slider! “

The best way to avoid this is to use FCP’s Playhead Sync options, specifically, “Open” mode, which I’m totally in love with. This mode is especially useful when you’re doing color correction (when you DEFINITELY don’t want to be adjusting the parameters of a clip that isn’t currently visible in the viewer). The only caveat is that FCP seems to want to take itself out of “Open” mode sometimes (I havent figured out yet if it’s a random bug, or if it’s because of a specific action that I do), so I make sure to both map a keyboard shortcut to Open mode, as well as place a Button for Open mode in all my Button wells.

[Alpha1] ” I hate that I can’t just double click my clips with option or control/command and be in slip or slide mode (that’s huge for me-it’s my number one weakness right now) “

Unless I’m missing something here, why can’t you just map the Slip/Slide tools to a keyboard shortcut? You can even slip/slide a clip, right in the timeline using the numeric keypad, so you dont even have to double-click on the clip.

[Alpha1] “Did I mention I love the compositing? I hate the fact that when I want to look at ONLY the first 10 layers of my build that the other 10 above it go unrendered. “

Yep. This is one of the best features of the Avid, as far as I’m concerned. It’s funny that the NLE that has the weaker compositing tools is the one that has the better render-caching features! I see the wisdom (as far as picture quality is concerned) in FCP’s insistence on re-rendering the entire compositing stack from the original clip on up, but this should really be a user definable behavior, in my mind. When you’re working with a client looking over your shoulder, the speed of the creative process is more important than picture quality.

One would think that with all the ballyhoo about the usefulness of RTExtreme (and in FCP5, DynamicRT) that Apple would have thought to cache renders of individual clips/layers and then composite the cached renders in realtime, instead of trying to play back the entire, uncached stack all at once.

[Alpha1] “I think all are pretty clear on the feelings towards Media Management, or lack of. “

I’m thinking of taking a Hex editor to my FCP executable and changing all UI labels that say “Media Manager” to “Media MANGLER”, because FCP’s MM is truly a Media Mangler. It works great for simple projects (i.e. with no nested sequences, still frames or speed changes), get any more complex and you’ll want to pull an Elvis on your computer monitor.

[Alpha1] “I love the fact that I can edit a sequence like a clip, OR as its original sources”

I could have sworn that Avid has always had the ability to nest clips like FCP. I distinctly remember at least Avid MCXpress-NT (a truly HORRIBLE friggen product) being able to do this, even back in 1996. It surprises me to hear this touted as a major advantage of FCP over Avid, since it’s such a taken-for-granted feature with any software package that does any level of compositing.

Your overall attitude towards FCP is the right attitude to have. The problem that many people have when migrating between apps (especially ones based on near-religious fervor, like Avid) is that they base thier opinions of the product based on what it “isn’t” or doesn’t have, compared to the app which they were previously used to using. FCP is designed from entirely different philosophy from the traditional Avid philosophy, and if you expect FCP to do things the same way that Avid does things, you will *never* be happy with it.

I was a Discreet edit* user for many years (and an Avid MCX user for several years before that), and when I first started using FCP, I wanted to throw the friggen Mac out the window, because it made no sense to me and worked in ways that seemed antithetical to the way I would previously edit with blazing speed in Discreet edit*.
It took me a full year of daily editing in FCP to really start appreciating how great it is, and now I can’t go back to anything else (although I often like to brag that Discreet edit* was able to do 9-source multicam even back in early 2001, even on a lowly single CPU 500MHz Pentium III box!).

Aloha,
mel

[Mel Matsuoka]

I’m not sure if this is related to your problem, but I have had problems with After Effects rendering a clip which has had pulldown removed on input, and then re-introduced on output (using the exact same pulldown cadence) rendering the last frame with one field of black and one field of picture. As a result, when I try to lay back the render into an edited FCP sequence, many of the shots have a “missing” frame at the end (actually, one field of black))

The way I get around this is by making my AE comps one-frame longer, then adding Time Remapping to the layer (or comp), and then simply dragging the out point of the layer ahead one frame. I’m not really sure why AE does this, but this solution seems to work for me.

My guess is that you might be having the same kind of wierd issue with 3:2 pulldown when rendering out of After Effects. It always seems to happen when I create the initial AE comp by dragging the pulldown-removed source footage down to the “Create New Composition” icon at the bottom of the AE project window.

Aloha,
mel

[Mel Matsuoka]

I think it’s safe to say that, now that Avid owns Pinnacle, the Cinewave product is about as dead as dead can possibly be.

There have been nebulous reports (mostly gleaned from nondescript verbiage in NAB 2005 press releases) that the updated Blackmagic Decklink cards will allow realtime playback of mixed codec/resolution footage within the same timeline in FCP 5.0.

I really hope this is true, but nobody from Blackmagic has yet to clarify this mysterious new “feature” mentioned in thier promo literature.

Aloha,
mel

[Mel Matsuoka]

Of course, by “Graeme”, I really mean “Andy” 😉

Not enough caffeiene for me today.

Aloha,
mel