[Mel Matsuoka]

I spoke to 2 seperate FCP engineers (actually, I *grilled* them :)) at NAB regarding this issue–as well as the inaccurate recapture of freezeframes–and both of them said that they don’t recall either issue being specifically fixed in FCP5. From all accounts the Media Manager recieved very little attention in the FCP5 upgrade. VERY disappointing…

Of course, as Graeme said, we won’t know until someone tries it…I wasn’t able to test this out for myself at the Apple booth, since they didnt have any decks that I could try a Media Manager/recapture operation on.

As I’ve mentioned before, if Avid wants to lure away fence-sitters from the purple-“A” , they need to get these Media Manager problems fixed. Multicam is cool, but a properly functioning Media Manager is oodles more important to have in FCP, not only from a functionality standpoint, but also from a political/P.R. standpoint.

Aloha,
mel

[Mel Matsuoka]

It should also be noted that, in addition to nested sequences, speed changes and freezeframes are not properly translated during a consolidate and up-rez in FCP4.

God have mercy on the poor soul who has to uprez and eye-match a music video or something that has hundreds of stillframes and speed effects in the timeline…

Aloha,
mel

[Mel Matsuoka]

What you are seeing is exactly what Frame Blending is supposed to do. There’s a tradeoff between temporal smoothness and picture sharpness when it comes to making slow-mos. As far as FCP’s native tools are concerned, you can’t really have both at the same time.

If you have the budget, however, you can use 3rd party plugins that use “Optical Flow”, interframe interpolation of slow-mo’ed clips. The plugins of choice for doing this are Re:Vision Effects Twixtor, Boris Continuum’s “BCC Optical Flow” plugin, and RealViz/Digital Anarchy’s “ReTimer” plugin.

These plugins require hardcore CPU time (as well as a significant learning curve), but they can yield amazing results that can make your footage look like it was shot on high-speed film.

Aloha,
mel

[Mel Matsuoka]

Hi Oliver,

THANK YOU for validating my feelings about professional NLE workflow. I posted a comment over on Phillip Hodgett’s blog about how I’m sick and tired of us FCP “evangelists” constantly making excuses for FCP’s completely horrible Media Management. I feel that the fact that “workarounds” like the one I posted *do* exist is one of the reasons why Apple doesn’t have Media Manager fixes/rewrites at the top of its TODO list.

I am completely disappointed that FCP5 has nothing new in terms of Media Management. Apple had a great opportunity to woo away all the Avid holdouts, but in my opinion, they blew it big time. I’d wager that more Avid people haven’t made the switch to FCP because of Media Management issues and NOT because it lacked Multi-cam.

Aloha,
mel

[Mel Matsuoka]

I’ve struggled with the consolidation process myself (btw, grabbing an entire reel of dailies as one or two clips, then subclipping them out, is not an unusual workflow. You’ll find many film editors and editors who work with a director looking over thier shoulder doing it this way, as they often want to see every frame of film/video that was shot), and although the article on KenStone’s site comes the closest in outlining a working “workaround”, I found that it did not really work the way I expected it to.

I finally figured out the process (after many many many hours of troubleshooting, manual reading and kenstone-article-studying), and as a public service, present a WORKING, step-by-step Media consolidation process cheat-sheet for FCP 4.x users (I originally wrote this for my company’s internal use, so my apologies for any snide, anti-FCP jokes you’ll find in it…my company has recently switched over to FCP after many years of being an Avid house, so Media Manager frustrations are plentiful here :P):

——————————————————–
Here’s a step-by-step procedure that’s so simple, your douchebag,
user-unfriendly software-engineer mother can follow it.

Step 1: Open the un-consolidated FCP project that has the sequences
you want to consolidate

Step 2: Create a NEW, BLANK PROJECT (“File/New Project”), then when it
asks you to “Select Sequence Preset”, you can choose anything, it
doesn’t matter.

Step 3: SAVE this new, blank project (call it “tempMM” or
something…it doesnt matter, because you’ll just be using this
project as an “in-between” project before doing the actual Media
Manager operation, and then deleting it when youre done.

Step 4: DELETE the blank sequence from the Browser window in the new
“temp” project

Step 5: Next, “tear off” the tab in the Browser window for the “temp”
project, so it appears in its own floating window (you need to do this
so you can drag-copy sequences from one Project to another)

Step 6: DRAG OVER the sequence(s) you want to consolidate FROM the
ORIGINAL project, TO the TEMP project. MAKE SURE YOU ***COPY*** the
sequence and don’t move it!

Step 7: In the Browser, CLOSE THE ORIGINAL PROJECT (leaving the “temp”
project open). Don’t save changes, if it asks you.

Step 8: In the “temp” project, HIGHLIGHT the sequence(s) you just
dragged over, then RIGHT-CLICK, and choose “Make Sequence Clips
Independent” (there is NO visual feedback that lets you know that you
made the sequence clips independent, btw…another Final Cut Novice
moment)

Step 9: Now it’s time to invoke the MEDIA MANGLER. While the
sequence(s) are still highlighted in the Browser, Select “File/Media
Manager” (you can also right-click again, and choose Media Manager
from the contextal-menu.

Step 10: These are the all-important settings to make in the Media
Manager window:

— “Create Offline” media referenced by duplicated sequence.
— Set sequences to “Uncompressed 10-bit NTSC 48khz”
— The ONLY CHECKBOX that should be checked is “Delete unused
media from duplicated sequences, UNLESS you want to add handles to the
consolidated media. Then check “Use Handles” ans set an appropriate
handle length.

Make ABSOLUTELY SURE that “Include Master Clips…” and “Include
Affiliate clips…” are NOT CHECKED! Those two options are the little
bastards that can screw up a consolidation operation.

— Base Media file names on “EXISTING FILE NAMES” (This is
SUPER IMPORTANT! It avoids the annoying “Existing file name” dialog
box that keeps popping up when you try and redigitize the sequence).

alternative: if you are the type who wants the actual media file
to have the same name as the clipname (i.e. you’ve renamed your
timeline clips, which I actually like to do when I need to bring timeline
clips into After Effects), then choose “use clip names”, instead.

Step 11: Click “OK” at the bottom of the Media Mangler window. It will
ask you for a name for the new project file it will create. Call this
“YourProjectName_consolidated.fcp” (i.e. the same name as the
original, unconsolidated project, but with “_consolidated” added to
the end.)

Step 12: Close the “temp ” project (and at this point, you can delete
the project file from the disk)

Step 13: In the new “YourProjectName_consoldated” project, DELETE THE
BIN (yes, DELETE!!!) that the Media Manager automatically created
containing all the clips for the sequences (the bin will be called
“Master Clips for blah blah blah….” .

You should only be left with the actual sequence(s) in the Browser
window (i.e. if you only have one sequence to consolidate, there
should ONLY be ONE physical item appearing in your Browser window for
the _consolidated project…in other words, you should have NO BINS in
your project. Keeping bins in your project is what causes the annoying
“duplicate item found” error message when you try to recapture.

Step 14: Highlight the sequence(s), then right click and choose “Batch Capture”.

Step 15: Rinse. Lather. Repeat (if necessary)

Step 16: Fly to NAB to hunt down the FCP engineer who “designed” the Media
Manager, and slap him/her repeatedly in the head with a large trout.

Aloha,
mel

[Mel Matsuoka]

Keep in mind, however, that Reversing a clip this way will degrade the quality of your video clip, since FCP does not properly reverse the field order.

The best solution to this if you want to uphold the best quality, is to use Graeme Nattress’ free “G Reverse” filter (https://www.nattress.com/free.htm).

btw, it was great to meet you “IRL” at the Apple training booth at NAB, Jerry!

Aloha,
mel

[Mel Matsuoka]

I figured out that this error is caused by one of (at least) two things:

1. FCP is trying to relink to a media/graphic file that it can see on
the harddrive (or over the network–ya gotta be careful about NOT
keeping network drives mounted when reconnecting media in FCP, because
it will ofterntimes find matching media filenames on network mounts
FIRST, which you may not notice if your Finder windows default to
Column View), but doesn’t have Read permissions on said file.

2. One or more media files are/have been corrupted somehow.

The best solution I found is to use the Media Mangler to select the
un-openable sequence in the Browser, then tell it to “Create Offline”,
and UN-CHECK all the available options (delete unused media, etc), and
to base new clipnames on existsing filenames. This will create a new
project with the sequence, and a bin containing all the media in the
sequence. You can then systematically go through your bin, and Make
Offline media files one by one (leaving the media on the disk–DONT
DELETE them!), until you are able to open the sequence without an
error message. Then you can check the mediafile in question at the
finder level and see if it’s either corrupted or has the wrong
permissions set on it.

Pain in the arse, but it works.

[Mel Matsuoka]

One oversight that can cause this is by accidentally setting your Viewer/Canvas to Wireframe mode.

I can’t tell you how many times I accidentally hit the keyboard shortcut for Wireframe mode (“w”, I believe), and spent the next 15 minutes trying to figure out where my video playback went.

I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that this is what happened to you. Killing your user prefs just reset all the FCP settings to thier defaults, which may have appeared to solved the problem, but my guess is that you probably didnt need to trash the prefs.

Aloha,
mel

[Mel Matsuoka]

As Kevin pointed out, you cannot draw, let alone *animate* a mask in FCP using its native tools. Masking is in fact one of FCP’s most glaring deficiencies. It has a 4/8 point Garbage Matte filter that–even though it is keyframable–is useless for all but the most rudimentary tasks.

The best alternatives that I am aware of are:

1. Boris Red (https://www.borisfx.com): A really nice package with bezier masking tools that plugs in nicely to FCP, but probably overkill if all you need to do make good mattes.

2. SilhouetteFX Roto (https://www.silhouettefx.com): This will most likely become the defacto roto/masking plugin of choice for FCP, especially since FCP 5 disappointingly has NO new masking tools in its featureset. Perry & Co. have an impressive heritage in high-end compositing and VFX, so these guys really know what they are doing. A big drawback which I have noticed is that it currently does not do any type of pulldown removal or field-level roto (it only works on whole frames). I spoke to Perry at NAB, and he said that this is high on the TODO list.

3. CHV Bezier Garbage Matte Pro (https://www.chv-plugins.com/bezierpro.html): I’ve tried the demo, and it still seems a bit awkward to use, since it has to use FCP’s filter UI. I wouldn’t want to use it for any hardcore masking tasks, but at least it’s cheap.

Hope this helps!

Aloha,
mel

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Michael Alberts] “[Rastus Washington] “The ONLY item that keeps me using Avid is the fact that I can lasso a transition on the timeline and trim while seeing the A and B side from layered video tracks. If Final Cut Pro had this functionality I’d have been gone from Avid many years ago.”

You mean the FCP trim window which pops up when you double click on an edit point. You can lasso it if you want by hitting the G key and then lasso the cut. Both methods pop up the trim window where you see your A and B sides of the cut”

Yes, but I believe he is talking about FCP’s inability to allow you to see the clips that lie *underneath* the track which you are trimming. This is a subtle, but very annoying limitation of FCP, which makes it difficult to precisely edit composited layers together using the trim window or 2-up viewer. For example, If you need to align a clip on V2 that you want to superimpose based on the occurrence of a specific frame on V1, FCP will only show you a black frame in the trim window(s) if you trime the head/tail of the V2 clip. What it *should* do is show you whats going on *under* (or above) the track which you are trimming.