Nikolas Bäurle
Forum Replies Created
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You shouldn’t be using an iPhone or any automatic camera features if you want decent grades.
Keyframing color corrections to correct exposure fluctuations will pretty much never work, unless you have very slight fluctuations, and even then they will always be visible. Fiddling with it is a waste of time. In News or some Documentary work you either live with fluctuated footage or simply don’t use, or re-shoot. On high end productions you won’t run into this problem since shooting is done manually.
You could try to control your iPhone by not doing pans or get a DSLR and work manually.
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You need to make the original black&white, then apply the tint effect.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “Timeline functioning order is not supposed to require meticulous preparation.”
But in my experience I’m faster finishing sound on X than Legacy, and I’m a very fast Legacy User. Tracks don’t make organization better unless the editor is orderly. I’ve dealt with very sloppy Avid and FCP Timelines on occasion. In Track based NLEs you spend time making sure your sounds are in the right place as much as in X. For example, in Legacy you decide before you cut the sound in where its supposed to go. During editing if you start using many effects overlapping each other , for example, you end up with more tracks than the required 1 track for effects and atmo the Networks need, so you end up remapping all your effects tracks for them to export correctly.
in X you put the clips in the timeline, open the inspector, turn off the sound you don’t need, by default everything imported has the video, dialogue role tag. FX imported through iTunes is automatically tagged as effects, So if I need to use more tracks for overlapping FX, atmos or dialogue you don’t need to remap anything, simply make sure the footage is tagged correctly.
Now, adding transitions takes one or two steps more in X than Legacy, not a big deal. In the secondary you turn the clips into a storyline and your good to go. It’s just a matter of getting used to it.
Personally I prefer the primary/secondary deal. In my opinion it forces you to keep your stuff organized and compounding is a very handy tool. Tracks don’t make it easier, and there’s plenty of sloppy timelines, especially when dealing editors putting FX and footage all over the place on 15 tracks, where 2 would have been enough.
“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “You just cannot get paid to cut in X. not corpo, not broadcast, not anything here. Ronny Courtens can speak differently to parts of the EU tho. there are pockets.
Established shop owning editors, of which there are many here, can make their own choices entirely.”X establishing itself in big production houses will be a while, and might never happen. In Berlin more and more people are using it though. Most of these jobs happen through connections and so far I’ve only met shop owning editors, and then you do have a few cases i’ve heard of postproduction facilities needing to deal with producers X projects.
I just trained a FCP7/Premiere/AFX editor who never thought about looking at X until I offered him a job, it took him about a day of watching me and half a day of me breathing down his neck for him to be completely proficient. it took him half an hour to realise that he had underestimated the software.
I believe the problem its about the nature of big houses. There’s not as much room for experimentation, things need to work almost immediately. Then there is the pc vs mac deal. DW-TV for example, uses PC and NewsCutter, I doubt they will ever use macs, other than the few they have standing around to accommodate some VJs. But plenty of producers, editors and even some speakers have X at home.
I believe at some point, even if it takes a few years, X will be ahead of the game. There more things like video on demand, eBooks and cloud storage improve the more big companies will have to adapt.
“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python
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To me one of the main speed increases comes from the way X handles FX. Most of the time you don’t even need to render as long as you have the SSD iMac setup, unless of course you start adding in third party FX or several layers of color correction, but even then rendering is very fast.
In FCP 7, whenever I add a title or a corner bug or add a simple color correction I need to render most of the time, on a 12 core. If I ever dare to use basic Magic Bullet presets rendertimes increase drastically, and FXFactory effects are very clunky on 7, especially after using them in X
Rendering a 6 second lower third on a color corrected ProRes Clip takes about 2 – 3 minutes in Legacy, in X about 10-20sec. Exporting a 6 minute unrendered sequence in Legacy takes about 25 minutes, in X about 7 to 10.
The cool thing is skimming fx, and if you click on the fx icon you can hit play and preview the effect. Very fast if a client wants to see what the effect actually looks like.
As for the magnetic timeline, I wouldn’t say that I’m that much faster as on Legacy. The nice thing though is you don’t ever have to worry about overwriting something in X. In Legacy whenever you want to move a clip with corresponding audio, say you move your clip up a track and over a few cuts the audio moves down the audio tracks, most of the time you spend time making sure you don’t overwrite anything, and most of the time you start moving video and audio seperately. If you leave your audio connected in X you never have this problem and disconnected audio will never delete another audio portion, unless you use p and move it into the primary.
In my opinion roles are faster than tracks. Audio from imported footage gets the dialog role by default, audio from the effects library is labeled as effects and music from iTunes is labeled as music. So before exporting seperate tracks all you need to do is make sure your clips are labeled correctly, unless you are using clips not inside Apples libraries, the you need to do some re labeling. Turning roles on and off is very fast. Even the last experimental feature I cut, which was a mess of sounds and footage from different sources, I never had a problem knowing where my clips were. Of course, at times a sound effect is under the music, the next one happens to be over the music and the next one I just put over a lower third generator… X shuffles clips vertically not horizontally, just a matter of getting used to where things are going.
“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python
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An SSD will make it much faster.
I would still recommend working in proxy mode even after improving your set-up. The only thing you can’t see in Proxy is alpha channel, but editing speed will improve a lot.
“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python
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You shouldn’t be working with the original H.264, you need to transcode your footage to Apple ProRes by letting FCPX optimize your media.
You can edit with the H.264 but since it is not an optimised editing format you will get dropped frames and regular crashes depending on what you are doing.
If you ned to save HD space you can consolidate your final project for archiving.
“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python
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You need to use proxies or if you are working in original quality you need to set playback to better performance.
I would turn background rendering off.
“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python
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I had the same problem with iTunes slowing down X last week.
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I always have it turned off, I only use it when If need to render the entire edit. I always render selections using ctrl+r and only if its really necessary.
If you leave BG render on and you open an unrendered project it will start rendering.