Michael Alberts
Forum Replies Created
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If your sequence is at 23.98 or 24 Automatic Duck won’t work for you. The only reason I mentioned it is because you stated you edited at 12 minute “film”.
Why the need to move over to an Avid? Is there something else we could help you with to negate the need to move onto an Avid.Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc. -
We’ve used Joes Filters for this in the past, but Joes has no motion tracker built in, so it’s a manual process. Lately we’ve been using BCC 4 for all our bluring/tracking shots. Works great. Joe’s is much cheaper, however. It’s all about your time. Which costs less?
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc. -
If your intention is to run FCP on a new Intel based iMac you’ll have to wait a few more weeks. If your intention is to run FCP on the IBM chip based iMac, FCP runs fine. Apple should be shipping the Universal Binary version of FCP by the end of March.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc. -
I’ve cut many features with FCP. We’ve done a film cut on three of them. All of them perfect with not a single miscut. Just as with an Avid, you need an assistant (or yourself) who knows the details of film, the edit system, and Cinema Tools. You’ve got to understand the workflow of film to telecine to FCP. Do some quick tests if have any doubts. Take one Flex file and do an import via FCP 5 (no need to go through CT directly anymore) Batch capture using the correct Non Drop Frame preset in FCP, reverse telecine, edit some clips and pull a cut list to compare. The process is just like an Avid with a few extra steps.
FCP/CT is not good at tracking most effects. It only knows fades, dissolves and simple speed changes. It will pass by a flop without ever telling you. Many of these things you need to manually flag and keep a database of.
The trim tool still isn’t as organic as the Avid trim tool, but it’s close. Most Avid editors will complain about this but will get used to it after a week or so.
That’s about it in a nut shell. It’s a breeze to cut a feature in FCP. But like with any system, you’ve got to know what you’re doing. You can’t just wing it.Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc. -
Why are you turning off the TC option? I can’t imagine this is what the manual states. We do inserts all the time to our Digibeta A500. Works like a charm (except for the audio). Select the Editing tab at the top of the ETT window, punch in you in point, select you in/out on the timeline and Insert. No need to toggle off the tc button. FCP does not write timecode. It only reads the tc on the tape.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc. -
Other than running into the machine room and manually punching the audio insert buttons on the A500 we haven’t found a way to make this work. If anyone has any advice as to a fix for this proplem I’d love to hear it. We’re using both Aurora Pipe Studio cards and AJA Kona 2’s at our facility. AJA tech support thought it might have been that the device control was set to 4 channel, but it was set to the proper 2 channel. So that wasn’t the problem. Stumped. Glad to hear others are able to get an audio insert to work. Again, we have no problem with video insterts, it’s just the audio doesn’t lay down. Assemble edits are no problem either; both audio and pic.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc. -
Both myself an several other people have posted about this bug on this forum. I posed about it several months ago, another person posted about three or four months ago. The problem still exists. This is not a “feature”. This is a BUG.
You are correct, FCP can no longer do an audio insert. Whether or not you select audio only or audio and video it won’t work. It used to work with FCP 4.5. Ever since FCP 5 came out this has been an issue. The only solution is to Assemble form the insert point to the end of the program. This really sucks if you have a clip at say 1 minute into a 90 minute program with bad audio. That requires relaying the entire 90 minute program due to a two second audio glitch.
All I can suggest is that you send Apple feedback using the Feedback menu option. This is just one of many audio related bugs in FCP right now.Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc. -
There is no reason to make a freeze frame or render that freeze frame. Is there a specific reason why you are making a freeze frame. To export a still just load the clip into the viewer and Exprt/QT Conversion/Still. This method has never failed. I’ve probably exported 500 stills this way.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc. -
Take a chill pill. Sarcasm apparently doesn’t go over very well with you. As to your problem…
The product description you quoted is entirely correct. All the methods it discussed are delivery or distribution methods. No where in that description does it describe the codec as useful as a multimedia editing codec. H.264 by it’s very nature is extremely render intensive. For high quality H.264 the render time is about 6:1. In the near future I’m sure some company may come out with a dedicated real time hardware encoder for H.264 but that still doesn’t mean that it will be practical for editing. This would mainly be for broadcast delivery environments.
H.264 as you probably know has been ratified as one of the two codecs to be used in both the HD DVD and Blue-ray Disc formats. Again, this is a delivery medium, not editing.If you are looking for a codec to cut down on file size and still remain useful for editing the only one that comes to mind is PhotoJPEG. However, with PJPEG you won’t get any RT effects in FCP. Long ago we used to use the Aurora Igniter cards with FCP. The Igniters were fantastic. The Igniter utilized the MJPEG codec, but Apple more or less forced everyone over to DV and uncompressed if they wanted any type of RT effects. It was technically possible for Aurora incorporate on board hardware to accelerate the MJPEG for RT but that wasn’t economically feasible compared to the competition.
If you’re worried about file size why not use DV. Drives are so cheap these days. You can pack about 55 hours of DV material onto a 800GB firewire drive.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc. -
It sounds like your Compresser setting is incorrect. Compressor sometimes does this for no reason. It will switch the preset from Lower field first to upper. If you were to import the same clip into Compresser three seperate times it would likely give you three different “auto” interpretations. You should manually set it to lower then do the encode.
By the way, there is no such format as Digibeta SP.Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.