Tony Silanskas
Forum Replies Created
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It’s not in the manual that I could find but I thought the same thing. I can understand how’s it hard to think about the vast uses of easily accessible metadata when we haven’t had it available in FCP before, but I see in the long run it is the evolutionary next step in all of digital media. Just open of Adobe Lightroom if you have it and see how easy it is to organize 10,000 photos, instantly putting them in many different places if that’s what you want to do. Being able to do this with video easily has been a long time coming and I’m ready for it.
tony
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If all you need is 4:3 letterbox than you can use Compressor. Just export the MASTER, bring it into Compressor, add whatever SD preset you want,and make sure Preserve aspect ratio is set in the Geometry Tab of the preset.
I would personally turn of Frame controls, too, and make sure the Resize Filter is set to best for the cleanest scaling.
Now if you’re going from a progressive HD file to an interlaced SD file you also have to add pull-down and do the rate conversion in Compressor. The preset should get you started and the manual should explain those other settings in much better detail than I can right now.
tony
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When you compress the audio to a DVD compatible format you are compressing the audio, so you will lose some frequencies.
A few things you could try:
– When using the “Dolby Digital Professional 2.0” preset in Compressor to make your audio, go to the Encoder tab then the Audio tab in that and make sure “Dialog Normalization” is set to “-31”. If not, type it in and hit enter.
– Then go to the Preprocessing tab and make sure “Compression Preset” is set to none.
Essentially all this does is make sure your original audio sounds as close to what you had in FCP after it gets compressed to AC3.
tony
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[gary adcock] “I think many of the key cmd changes were a bit too arbitrary why leave in the easy ones but why change out insert, overwrite etc.- because the actual function changed ? not really”
Totally agreed Gary. I’ve already remapped my keyboard to compensate as I couldn’t find a reason of why they changed certain ones.
tony
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Just curious how many of you still use Reference files in FCP 7. I gave up on them years ago because:
– Many errors with Compressor
– Many errors with other non-Apple programs
– For large jobs with multiple editors way too much work to make sure each editor always has the latest render files that go with the Reference MoviesUsing self-contained movies ensures that the file will always work, no matter the use since it’s its own flattened movie. Seems like a lot of hoops to jump around for saving a little drive space with storage so cheap now-a-days. And if you keep up with the organization of your project, you’re deleting no longer needed self-contained movies as you go which in turns, frees up space. Maybe I’m missing something here…
tony
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Totally agree with Simon. The strides made in organization are incredibly long over due in NLEs. I mean, I’ve been able to so this with photos for so long. And if you want to get real giddy, check the amount of available metadata for each clip. So many possibilities for the future, especially if I were a plugin maker. I also see this getting some of the features Final Cut Server has, sorry, had… so you have one program to do all your organizational stuff instead of two mostly disconnected ones.
As for you question, check out the Keyword section in the manual. Should get you up to speed in no time.
tony
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First off, thanks so much everyone for chiming in! I’ll try and answer a few of the questions brought up below:
[Simon Ubsdell] “Do you reckon this could be a template structure that can be adapted for new Events?”
Didn’t even think about that yet but yah. You could have a “MASTER TEMPLATE” Event that you would Duplicate at the the beginning of each job and go from there. Good thought. Thanks.
[Matt Callac] “For me it makes more sense to have an Event=FCP project.”
This is exactly what I meant when I said one Event for each Job. Sorry for the confusion as I should have said, like you, treat each Event as a FCP 7 Project.
[Simon Ubsdell] “I reckon that by and large we would want to be creating new Events based on where we want particular jobs to be stored, do you think? I doubt that we’d generally want to have a plurality of Events for one job.”
This goes back to the Event=FCP 7 Project idea. Once Apple lets us manually place the Events folders where we want it will make it simpler. Right now a typical folder structure for me in the Finder would be (though simplified for illustration purposes):
DRIVE > CLIENT NAME > PROJECT NAME (ex. Summer Commercial Series) > FCP PROJECTS > Each Individual FCP Project for the Summer Commercial Series (ex. ComA.fcp, ComB.fcp, ComC.fcp)
Actually, let me take a screengrab to make it clearer……… and I’m back, thanks to magic of technology. Here it is:
So once we can put Event Folders where we want, I’ll probably just store them in the FCP Projects Folder.
As for the plurality of Events for one job, I personally like to keep all versions of a particular commercial in one FCP Project so if I stick with the Event=FCP 7 Project than I only have one Event to worry about.
Also, it is finally easy to grab things from past Projects(Events) since every Event on a drive is now readily available in FCP X, searchable and all. So nice.
[Simon Ubsdell] “One question about what you’ve done here – why have you made folders to put your Keyword Collections in? Isn’t this just duplicating the same thing? Surely a Keyword Collection is a “folder” in most practical senses?”
I made Folders to put the Keywords in so I can easily collapse a group of Keywords to hide them. Yes, Keywords are folders but they are only one level deep (you can’t put a Keyword in a Keyword). Guess it would be nice to turn a Keyword into a Folder, too, so that anything you put in that folder would get whatever Keyword was associated with that folder. But for now this works.
[Noah Kadner] “The one caveat is that it’s a one way trip. In other words once you drag a Compound Clip you’ve created in the Event Browser into a Project, that becomes a specific instance of the Compound Clip and no longer updates back to the original.”
I don’t see this as an issue as it’s just how Sequences and Nest have always worked in FCP 7. Once you drag a Nest into a project it becomes its own thing and I’m fine with that though I’m hoping for some updates to the workflow which I’ll explain in a sec.
But if you just double clip the Compound Clip in the Event Browser, it opens up and acts just like a FCP 7 sequence, updating and all.
Now back to Nests… I would like to finally have an option to make a global Nest, one that I could have in many timelines, change only one instance of it, and it updates all the instances of it.
I also would like to have a shortcut to make a Compound Clip that you made in the timeline a Compound Clip that you could store in an Event. Yes, I can create an Empty Compound Clip and copy the clips I want into it, just seems like an extra step.
tony
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So Gary, what’s your take on Apple using 2:2:2:4? Are we missing something here as in that’s the best way?
tony
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So here is a screenshot of very simple test Event, 2011_04_07 TEST FCP X PROJECT, so that you may understand me better
I have 4 Main Folders I created in the Event: AUDIO, FOOTAGE, GRFX and SEQS and then created a Keyword Collection that corresponded to each Folder name. From there I just assigned keywords to each kind of clip.
And as you can see I labeled the Compound Clip “Test Sequence 02”, gave it the “Sequence” and “Commercial B” keywords and now every Sequence I do for Commercial B will be right there. I can even put the “Archive Edits” keyword on it when I decide to retire that Sequence.
Obviously I can get much more detailed with the Keywords but this is a start.
tony
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[Simon Ubsdell] “I’ll definitely be experimenting with this approach, thanks!”
Please do because I want to find some negatives if they are out there so it doesn’t come back to bite me later. I’m beginning to wonder if these new Compound Clips are meant to eventually become the “Sequences” we’ve been used to and then they’ll get rid of Projects altogether. And then the Project Library would just show you the “Sequences” that only pertain to that Event. Compound Clips also seem to be a good foundation for things like multiclips.
And the way I have my client folders organized is each job gets its own folder so each job would get its own Event. Seems much simpler than having to worry about a Projects folder, too. And once we can manually set where to save each Event we’ll be in business.
tony