[Nick Meyers]

and to make life even easier,

in QT PLayer prefs > General > Movies
tick “Use High-Quality Video Settings when Available”

nick

[Nick Meyers]

you could up the blur, but it would start to be noticeable.

better option is to open the files in photohop, and selectively blur the problem areas with the blur tool.

oh, and you should be monitoring your FCP work on an external monitor.
you wouldn’t have to wait till you;d burnt the dvd to see any artifacting.

nick

[Nick Meyers]

unless there’s a specific need (assistants using LATER versions of FCP than you) then there’ no need for XMLs.

keep it simple!

nick

[Nick Meyers]

experiment with “edge detect” filters

a bit like this:
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/basic_chalkboard_animation.html

nick

[Nick Meyers]

sure.
very simple.
good!

and if there’s no extra logging info, like descriptions or whatever,
you don’t even need to do what i suggested.

you can simply copy the files across to wherever you want,
then bring in the new files direct from there into FCP,
as long as you can easily distinguish the recently added files.

you could use colour labels for that in the finder.
you can change them at any time and it wont affect the clips in FCP.

cheers,
nick

[Nick Meyers]

yes that;s correct.

the media can easily be attached to any number of projects, AND be “Master Clips” in those projects.

there is one thing you may need to think about.
before FCP6, Master Affiliate relationships didn’t carry across from one project to another.
so if you had a bin of clips, AND a sequence made from those same clips in a project,
a Master Affiliate relationship existed: colour a timeline clip, and the browser clip gets coloured, too.
this also allows you to match back from the timeline or viewer to the bin.

but if you copied the bin AND sequence across, the link broke.
the workaround was to only ever copy one instance of a clip.
so copy the sequence into a new project, and then make a new bin n the new project.
it could get a bit complex, if the sequence wasn’t ALL the clips in the bin.

as i say this had been fixed in FCP6.

cheers,
nick

[Nick Meyers]

“I’m guessing the media manager will come into play. ”

not necessarily… keep it simple.

hook their drives up and copy the media files across to where you want them on your system.
copy the project files, too.

remove their drives, open the copied project, and re-connect the media.
now you can copy their logged clips from their project into yours.

you could use MM, but it will tie up FCP, and there’d be no real gain, in my opinion.

nick

[Nick Meyers]

we had seven systems, including 3 editors, who all needed access to the same pool of projects.

most larger projects are not just a “project” but rather a “cloud” of project files.
(as Mark Raudonis says “the SAN is the Project”)

this was a feature, and we’d broken it into more than ten sections/projects. there was also a new dailies project each day, which needed accesing by various assistants.
editors could find themselves working in any section,
and assistants would need to “top up” the edit projects on a daily basis

rather than confuse things with people having their own version of the project, and then who knows how many copies of those projects zipping around, we just made them all available to everybody.
luckily there were never conflicts about who was working in which section.

another way to approach this might have been to have the projects and other, smaller, files on the SAN, but on a separate partition.

nick

[Nick Meyers]

having the project file on the same drive as my media means i can pick it up and move it from system to system.

project backups go to a separate drive.
autosave vault is on the system drive.

in a shared storage situation, with multiple people needing access to the same projects,
i’ve also worked with the project files on the same drive as the media.

nick

[Nick Meyers]

yeah, Archive to tape.
great avid function.
my assistants have told me about that, although i’ve never used it.

again you’d think there;d be an XML solution possible.
i dont recall seeing one at Spherico.. do remember which product you were thinking of?

there would be a fairly simple QuicKeys soution, too, (for fairly simple sequnces!)
and it would go something like this:

1. play sequence out to tape

2. verify the tape TC and the sequence TC match.

3. use Media Manger to create an offline version of the sequence you’ve archived to tape.
delete unused, no handles.

(step 2 & 3 could happen in any order)

4. use QuickKeys to go thru each clip in the new off-line sequence and copy the sequence TC into the Clip TC.

5. Batch modify the clips Reel# in the browser

(step 4 & 5 could happen in any order)

or something like that…
oh, and no speed mods allowed!

nick