[Nick Meyers]

OK I’m going out on a limb here….

Back in FCP, you could grab clips from a timeline and drag them up into the canvas, and drop them into one of the edit type overlay windows. (Overwrite, Insert, etc)

They would then be edited back into the timeline, ALL ON THE TARGET TRACK

Everyone tells me how much PP is like FCP, so hopefully this technique can work for you.

(fingers crossed)

cheers,

nick

[Nick Meyers]

thanks, Michael.
the files aren’t phasing so i guess that means they are not sample-acuralty lined up.
and achieving that is a bit beyond what i can do in FCP (and no – FCP doesn’t offer phase reversal)
ill see if the sound team are interested in solving it.
hope you are safe n sound down in Tassie

cheers,
nick

[Nick Meyers]

hi Art,
yes that’s relatively doable in FCP.
(Art sent me a clip, so i have seen the shot – the spot is static, the image moves)
it’s tricky because its on a face which is where our human brains tell us to look,
plus the talent is moving around a fair bit.
FCP is old of course so no IA to help, just manual labour
and a perfect fix will probably require a fair bit of work, especially if its a long IV.
but ther are manny levels of what might be acceptable, and hopefully you can fix this to your satisfaction.

FWIW, i had a series of shots in film recently where the image had up to 16 spots!,
plus it was handheld with a moving background.
we did fix the shot

the basics are that you double the shot up onto V2,
and apply a 4-point garbage matte to the top layer.
you’ll want to zoom the canvas up quite a bit as this spot is really very small.
a touch of smoothing and feathering in the garbage matte will help

so now the spot is a hole, thru which you see the same shot underneath.
and the trick is to just off-set that V1 shot ever so much so that you are basically seeing a neighbouring pixel thru the hole, hopefully rendering it invisible.

MOVING, NUDGING
select the shot on v1, in the canvas turn on image & Wireframe in the drop-down menu near the top of the canvas. one of three, it looks like a frame.
better yet, the W key will toggle image & Wireframe; easier than going to that menu.
with the shot selected you can move the wireframe it in the canvas, OR
use Option + Arrow Keys to nudge (i think its a pixel at a time)
you have to be in the Canvas for this to work, otherwise you’ll just nudge the shot around n the timeline.

HOWEVER, as the talent moves their head around the will be times when the hole get lighter / darker than it;s surrounding pickles,, and becomes noticeable again.
there probably won’t be a magic offset for the V1 shot that covers all possible head positions.
What i did was find an offset that worked for the majority of the shot, then where it didn’t work, i bladed that section, and just nudged V1 into a new spot.

there’s plug in that i use for spot removal
the plugin was in a free set from TooMuch Too soon, which is is still available on line.
i used the “Hair” plugin, designed for concealing an errant hair-in-the-gate.
but its hardly less manual than what I’m suggesting, and with this guy moving around a lot, from my own experience i know my first method is a lot easier.

FCP doesn’t offer a suer speedy solution, but it is possible.

all the best,
nick

[Nick Meyers]

hi raju,

2 ways to do what you want:

one IS with markers.
you can extend makes so they have a duration
ad a marker, go to hewer you wan to extend it to, hit option `
(the ` key under the escape key does lots of marker things – look them up in the marker menu)

just a head up that i have experience extreme slow-down of FCP, when using extended markers in the timeline AND zooming in.
so, ok when you;re out wide, but when you zoom right in the timeline gets really slow with extend markers.

one way to deal with that is to turn marker visibility off in the Project Properties (edit menu)
this can be a drag, especially as you;l have different coloured markers.

or maybe you’d prefer suggestion two:
add some text over the whole song, blade it up and name / colour the different sections
colour clips in modify menu > label.
you’ll see the keyboard shortcuts in there, and it pays to use them.
LOCK that track course :
and turn it’s visibility off.

cheers,
nick

[Nick Meyers]

just hit Command F.

you lost your favourites when your trashed your prefs.
trashing prefs is OK for weird behaviour, but your previous problem was not that weird!

It can fix those ting, but it will re-set FCP to default, losing you your Favorites, Keyboard layout, etc, etc.

there’s way of saving and backing up your prefs
you can do it manually, as shown in this old KenStone page:
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/trashing_fcp_prefs.html
or you can get a preference manager
https://www.digitalrebellion.com/prefman/

as mentioned in the ken Stone page, you can save your Faves to a project.
I’ve got a project with lots of saved favourites – comes in very handy.

cheers,
nick

[Nick Meyers]

FYI what most likely happened was that your viewer had been toggled away from “Image” mode.

Both the Viewer and the Canvas have various ways of displaying the image
look under the third of the small drop down menus at the top of the Canvas or Viewer to see them.
with either window selected, hitting the W key will toggle between:
Image, Image & Wireframe, and just Wireframe.

Shift+W wil toggle the Alpha displays

Its relatively easy to hit the wrong key and have your Canvas or Viewer move to one of these display modes when you don’t intend it to.
so next time it happens just go up to that pulldown menu and re-set it.
of hit W a few times ☺

EDIT TO ADD:
the W key also toggles the Canvas when you are in the Timeline

cheers,
nick

[Nick Meyers]

[Warren Eig] “It will also be slower on a Mac system.”

groan… ok, thanks Warren, good to know , I guess !

nick

[Nick Meyers]

wow, great news. I’ll be very interested to see / hear how this works out.

thanks,
nick

[Nick Meyers]

you could go ProResLT, thats pretty decent quality.
ProRes proxy is not good enough, i’d say.

you can’t really use compressed formats like H264 in FCP7, so just forget those
hard drives are not too expensive these days… ☺

cheers,
nick

[Nick Meyers]

yeah, that’s great advice from Shane, as usual ☺

if you are being forced to upgrade to use some other apps,
you should probably consider buying a new, or refurbed system for those,
and keep your working FCP system.

for pure editing, most ppl i know who spent a long time on FCP and have had to move away say they still miss it.

nick