[Philip Owens]

Shane Ross as usual came up with the answer over on the Apple forums. Media manager does not wrangle clips that have no reel number, and none of these clips had a reel number, since they were disk sourced. I’ll move forward on that basis.

[Philip Owens]

This is on FCP 6.06, under 10.5.8.

[Philip Owens]

Although at this point I may only be talking to myself, I always like to find out what finally happened when I read a thread. In the end, none of my attempts to move to another format worked. Media Manager (in FCP 6.06) unreliably mangles multicam clips, and that ruled out transcoding the timeline. To transcode ~100 hours of interview dailies was going to take perhaps 10 days, and would have required another, much larger RAID, for which the show neither had the time nor the money. So, in the end, I have transcoded my single stream material (one of the stories, and all my B-Roll), stuck with the XDCAM for the multicam interviews, and broken down my timelines into sub-20 min sequences. FCP still crashes (maybe ten times a day), but not as much as before (ten times times an hour), and this will simply have to do. Not an ideal solution by any manner of means, but it’s the pragmatic solution. And a big lesson to always start in the right format. I wish I’d had that choice, but I didn’t. Oh, one last thing – never attempt a long format project in XDCAM!

Thanks to all for their helpful suggestions.

[Philip Owens]

The 800lb gorillas in the room are probably the two Walter Murch books – ‘In The Blink Of An Eye’. and ‘Conversations‘ by Michael Ondatje. The one real rule for an editor I hold by is that a good editor should know how to get out of the way and let the storytelling do its thing. In most cases, a good edit is one no-one even notices. The exception that proves the rule is GREAT edits, like the bone-to-spaceship cut in 2001.

[Philip Owens]

Well, there goes the Lost Weekend of Transcoding. All went fairly well, and at the very least I now have all my B-Roll and secondary stories in ProRes. However, I simply don’t have the space to do the same to my interviews (or time – the estimated time to transcode all that media is about 10 days!). So I’m going to live with that material in XDCAM for now.

The only significant problem I now face is that quite a number of multicam clips ‘failed’ in transcoding, and though media clips were created for them, the content of both A & V is blank. So I have to go back through my timeline, identify those, and drop back in the XDCAM clips for those again. In short, Media Manager didn’t seem to handle the multicam clips well.

Ah, the joys of Sony formats continues.

[Philip Owens]

Switching to ProRes timelines was absolutely no help at all. Yesterday it finally all became unworkable, as I would do an edit, crash, recover, re-do the edit, save, try the next edit, crash, recover… just awful. I got three edits successfully done in 40 minutes. SO I’m Media Managing as much of the project as I can to ProRes over the weekend and we’ll see how that goes. I’ve transcoded the timeline (it’s 1:20), all my B-Roll, and various selects sequences, but I’ll leave my interview dailies in XDCAM for now -I simply don’t have the space to transcode all of those. Hopefully that will at least reduce the crashing to a manageable level.

Tell me – do you think multicam cliips in ProRes will work well (or at all) off a firewire 800 G-Tech drive?

[Philip Owens]

Well, I moved all my timelines over to ProRes this morning, but sad to report it has had no effect on the crashing problem – six crashes already this morning. Tonight I’ll see if it helps the exporting problem.

[Philip Owens]

[Michael Adante] “How big is the total media? Have u considered putting together a JBod? “

I’ve already filled up my 5TB RAID and have begun overflowing onto FW drives (ugh). And of course I have a backup identical RAID set offsite. So I would need two ~20TB RAID’s to move all media to ProResHQ. Which is a little prohibitive to the show’s money…

But I’ll switch to a ProRes timeline over the next few days and see how that goes.

[Philip Owens]

[Andy Mees] ” FCP’s none too clever with mixed frame rates I’m afraid. “

That’s OK, we’re not doing finishing, this is offline only. And for those purposes, the frame rate handling in FCP fine by me.

[Philip Owens]

[Rafael Amador] “I agree very much with Andy’s suggestion about a Proress sequence. “

One other question – most of the XDCAM dailies are two cameras, which are all synced and multiclipped. Will the ProRes timeline handle that in realtime too?