Michael Sheehan
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Also — to append my original post — having looked again at the 59.94 tape output to a 23.98 tape — it looks a little less hinky than the other 59.94 efforts, but not acceptable.
I am telling the boss there are four options — come up with the money to re-do the projects and re-render the existing material; tell them we are delivering at 59.94; deliver at 23.98 with a sub-optimal picture and live with it; or find a magic unicorn that will make all these problems go away. You already know what I am rooting for, and it ain’t the flippin’ unicorn.
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I don’t know if you’ve read through this whole thing.
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You are lucky that you are at the stage that you are, with all original material. You can simply set all the comps to 23.976, re-render, and be almost done. Duplicate your project and try it.
<< Been there, done that. You are correct, of course, that works, but that's not my question. (The answer to which -- to use your words, "This will be extremely hard to do without it looking pretty much like junk" -- is pretty clear as it was to me when I posted originally, but I was hoping someone would have some miracle cure). The problem is not whether re-working the projects is possible. That's a given. Given the constraints of time and money and the nature of the AE projects and the dozens of sub-comps, many of them with effects layers that have already been rendered at 29.97, going back through each of these couple of dozen projects and re-working each comp and its component comps to 23.98 (and then checking that the keyframing is still frame-accurate, which in some of the tests we did it has not been) is not an option. That would add as much as two weeks, and perhaps more including re-rendering material that has already been output. If we can deliver at 59.94 1080i (which FCP >>
As far as the jittery animations, it’s hard to talk about what you’re seeing without seeing it ourselves, but 24p has a much different look than 60Hz and that must be accounted for in your animation. It’s like shooting, you must adjust your shooting style if you are new to 24p and coming from 60Hz.
<< Again, I am well aware of this and not at all unfamiliar with working in 24p and specifically in animated material. If I were here when these projects were being created and easily 1/3 of the material baked in at 29.97 I would have put the brakes on at once. But we're well past that point. And yes, the 23.98 output synchs to the 29.97 audio, more or less. But on some frame-specific moments -- for example, a character goes "knock knock" and moves his hand in time with the words and a sound effect -- it's not in synch, though synch holds overall. It's perhaps a frame or two out -- because what I sense is happening is that the render, to get the comp to 23.98, is basically applying a pulldown; or the keyframes are slipping, or some combination of the above. In any event -- I pretty much have the answer to my question. And believe me, I do not want to deliver at 23.98 and in reality, there is no compelling reason to other than somebody in a suit reading it off a delivery spec that has nothing to do with where this material is going to eventually be distributed, which ironically is going to be online at 29.97 in all likelihood. -
Exactly, this is pretty much my sense of it. Short of going back in and changing hundreds of layers and spending weeks of render time that the budget just is not there for, the real route to ” problem solved” is a 59.94 deliverable which looks stellar. In answer to a previous question, this project is all animation, and pretty detailed and heavily keyframed animation at that.
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Well, as I mention in my original post, outputting the master comp
at 23.98 produces a sort of jittery result. And some minor synch issues a well. My sense from the start is that essentially all the sub-compa have to have their
fram rate changed as well – and in fact the keyframes don’t then always land on the intended frame, so a little tweaking needs to be done. The problem there is time and money. There are a couple of dozen projects and each of these has a ton of layers with animation happening on all of them. So my recommendation was not met with, shall we say, acclaim. Simply rendering out the master at 23.976 (please revisit my original post) won’t get it done. In answer to your question, I am laying back a temp mix at 29.97 initially, and later the deliverable stems for output. -
All animation.
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Hi James,
This might already be something you have considered, but until I got religion about it, the facility I worked for had the most incredibly unreal, hair-tearing bizarre FCP issues. Basically both risers have to have all the same DIMMs laid out the same way on each. 6 on each riser. I concur that adding the 1g DIMMS into the mix is not a good idea. Once I went in a reconfigure every machine to have evenly matched sets of DIMMS of the same type (3 2gs on each, 4 1 gs on each, etc) our problems disappeared.Don’t know if this will help. Hope so.
Cheers
Michael -
Hi Arnie, thanks — I am actually going to be doing the rendering of the final AE files feeding into FCP. There was banding and a gamma shift on a ProRes test output I did versus an output in Animation, but I am increasingly thinking that may have more to do with AE’s handling of ProRes and the aforementioned resolvable AE->QT gamma issue (both if which I am trying to remove from consideration as we speak, making some updates to the software). It might well be that sorts the whole thing out. Your response is pretty much what my understanding of that part of the issue is, which is why I am at present puzzling over this whole deal. Thanks for your input.
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>>??? Your workflow is shaky to say the least. For your purpose reference movies are totally useless.<< Alexander, no offense, but you are completely and massively misunderstanding absolutely everything about what I've posted (partially my fault, see below). (And honestly your tone and choice of words is sometimes unfortunate and a little insulting.) I've been post supe on this series for a long time and believe me I know what I am doing and the ill-suitedness of iMovie to this work. If I could force my own Boss to do what I tell him, there wouldn't be anything ever done on iMovie ever again. But I've gone over that elsewhere in this thread. A Boss is a Boss, and I'm offering no judgments. As far as he is concerned, this is the way he HAS to work. Since I seem to have been unclear, I'll repeat it one more time: There is no video. There is no camera. There is no capture. There is no transcoding (except for a QT output from iMovie). This is a temp audio cut for an animated show. AIFFs get imported into iMovie for temp cutting purposes. The boss cuts these AUDIO FILES together in an AUDIO ONLY SEQUENCE in iMovie. Sends the resulting iMovie project to the editor. The editor opens this iMovie project and, if it opens properly, which it sometimes doesn't (cf my original post), he can see exactly which takes are used, and where they are cut, because the iMovie sequence contains the clip names as well as all the edit points. Essentially this serves as a sort of (extremely) dumbed-down EDL for the editor -- who then CREATES A NEW DUPLICATE OF THIS SEQUENCE IN FCP, USING THE IMOVIE SEQUENCE AS A GUIDE that links NOT TO THE IMOVIE MEDIA but to the ORIGINAL AUDIO FILES. THAT NEW PROJECT IS USED GOING FORWARD. THE IMOVIE PROJECT AND ALL ITS MEDIA ARE DISCARDED AND NEVER SEEN AGAIN. >> For your purpose reference movies are totally useless.<<< I see what you are misunderstanding here, let me clarify. I am not referring to a "reference Quicktime" but a Quicktime the editor can "refer to." Poor choice of words on my part. Because there have been odd results opening iMovie projects in FCP -- which I totally expect, as iMovie is not appropriate for this, especially an old unsupported version -- the Boss also exports a Quicktime of the final audio sequence, so the editor can listen to it and compare it to the iMovie sequence opened in FCP and see if there are discrepancies. So hopefully for the last time, my point in posting here was more doing due diligence so I can tell my boss honestly I have exhausted every avenue (as requested) in finding a solution to make the iMovie HD tool stop acting glitchy and work as perfectly as he thinks it should, notwithstanding the validity of his belief. It never will, as we know. I knew this coming in the door and have long since had the independent confirmation I sought. Some day he will simply have to stop using it, because it won't even work at all. Seriously, I have explained all this to the Boss in every conceivable way and Express is even installed on his machine. He can use it any time. He just won't. Can we let this drop now please? Thanks.
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from your post:-
“Now what’s supposed to happen is an editor opens the iMovie project in FCP and basically rebuilds this cut using our in-house audio, properly referenced on our SAN. In other words the iMovie projects are little more than a really dumbed-down EDL of sorts for these audio sequences,”
I presume you/other editors HAVE FCP ( else why your above statement), your boss doesn’t have it, so use the media in FCP, hence my question re the origionals.
<<< I guess I am not sure what you're asking here. Yes, the audio files are kept here. The Boss downloads them to his machine at home, imports them into iMovie and builds an iMovie sequence with them. He saves the iMovie project and gives it (and a reference QT of the audio) to an editor. The editor opens the iMovie project in FCP and (if he's lucky) the sequence appears much as it does in iMovie. (Not always, thus my original post.) All the individual clips are in the timeline, and they will all be from different takes. However, the clips are all referencing the iMovie media in the iMovie project. Naturally we don't want the FCP sequence we'll be using going forward to reference those clips embedded in the iMovie file, nor do we want the iMovie-renamed clip names in our projects (which would cause hell when we have to make split-track outputs and so on), so the editor basically rebuilds a sequence exactly like the iMovie sequence using the local audio media and moves on from there. The Boss does have FC Express but will not use it. FCP is out of the question as you might then imagine. We can't just have the Boss dump out a QT and then use that as a basis for the "real" FCP sequence. The editors would have to listen to every take and try to pick out by ear which take was used for which word or phrase and try to duplicate the cut points precisely. But, maybe I am totally misunderstanding what you are saying? -
Well, the most important thing is the physical sequence — the clips, which takes are used, where they are cut, and so on. Just getting a QT of the sequence doesn’t give the editor any of that information. Unless I am missing something in what you’re saying.
Bottom line is, this only works at all in the first place ‘cuz of sheer blind luck. Needs to change, to Express at least. The Boss doesn’t want to change. When he started doing this show with one editor a couple of version of FC (and iMovie) ago it worked reliably all the time. He feels it still should. The world has moved on.
My intention in posting this was not really to have that information confirmed — I already knew all that, but it’s nice to hear others say it of course — but to see if there was some weird setting or something I might be able to tweak to make this work a little better, just doing my due diligence here. My sense at the time of posting it was that there isn’t. That sense is confirmed now.
And the Boss is still using iMovie. Sooner or later this so-called “workflow” will break for good, no doubt at a time when there’s a deadline looming or some other horror show. Then he’s gonna have to switch but until then it is my job to put round pegs into square holes.