T. Payton
Forum Replies Created
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I don’t know about the GH3, but I have heard that the Canon 5D Mark III will drop a frame or two of video when spanning clips.
Do some googling and see if you can find out anything else.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
I would contact Sam directly. He doesn’t consulting and if this is a paying gig, it would be worth picking his brain on collaborative workflows and of course long format projects.
For what it is worth, I have edited 2 student features in FCPX and working on a third, and here is some of my thoughts.
Events
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I have found that using a small amount of events for different tasks works best. Here is what my events look like:1 – Dailies – self explanatory, but here is all the principle photography and sound. All syncing happens in this main event. The assistant editor lives in this thing, logging, setting roles, naming audio channels, syncing with the shot logs, and handles all the creation proxies for everything.
2 – Reference/Color Grades – mainly for later in the pipeline. Stills get stored in here as well as creating color grade references to load up in the event browser. Great to getting references from the director on mood, look, etc. We will sometimes put clips from other films there too if there is a pace the director is going for.
3 – Effect Shots – Anytime I’m doing a effect shot in a compound clip I put in this event. That way I can edit the compound clip in the event and it will update in the timeline. Also, when a effect shot is locked, I’ll just export the compound clip as a master file, to cut down on the processing needs later in the game.
4 – Score/SFX – I’m still debating if this is a good idea, but just to keep things out of dailies as much a possible, I keep my score and foley here. Production sound was part of priniple photography so I will end up in Dailies.
5 – Reels – optional. IF I decide to use compound clips to whole scenes (which is a big if), I’ll put them in a separate event. Last time I made 3 “reel” events.
6 – Chapter Exports – Use for string outs optional. more below.
Projects
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I edit in Proxy. Is flawless for everything but video with alpha channels. You’ll thank yourself for editing in proxy. I can edit on 7 year old MacBook Pro in proxy and it moves like butter.At minimum I break down the show into multiple reels, not just for performance issues, but for organization.
This latest film is broken down into 20 chapters. (the writers divided it up that way) Therefore I’m going to start the edit with a project for each one of these chapters. For a string out I’ll just export each chapter individually (goes really quick if you have your keyboard shortcut setup and are working in proxy) and bring those into a chapter export event and assemble into a project. If I have updates on a chapter, I’ll export and then use relink event media to swap out the new chapter. Once the preliminary edit is done, I might move to a different workflow most likely with a project for each reel (30 minute ish each)
In the past I have edited each chapter in a compound clips, and then done a string out, but with the new 10.0.6 reference compound clip this should be handled carefully to prevent event bloat and performance issues. I”m personally going to try staying out of long compound clips for this film.
Grading / Audio Sweetening
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For these student films we just grade and audio sweeten in FCPX, frankly because I like the challenge and everything is kept in one place. But defiantly test your external grading and audio workflow to make sure your color grader, and audio mixer is good with your workflow.Stability
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I’ve never lost anything in FCPX in the last 2 years. (Okay one time I got some corrupted PDFs and it caused a kernal panic and the event got hozed, but I had was able to use the backup event db). The last student film something happened the last few days of editing that caused slowdowns but that was probably because I updated to 10.0.6 on those last few days. Not a good idea. Should have obeyed the command “Thou shall not update thy NLE mid edit”.With the film currently in production I’m using an App called Backups for Final Cut Pro. It is making backups every 15 minutes to a separate drive of my database files only. Then every couple of days, I use it to make a “snapshot” of all media and the databases to yet another drive offsite.
I can’t guarantee you will have smooth sailing, but frankly there is no guarantee of that at any time. I have 2 of these under my belt and I’m confident FCPX can handle it. Talk with Sam however, he has done many more long shows.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
FCPX is a crazy complex app under the hood. It is easily the most complicated App Apple has ever made save the OS, and it is touching so many technologies in the OS (all pretty much hidden from us) that a small anomaly in the OS, HD, Memory or GPU could cause problems. On top of that, if your projects are like mine I have hundreds or thousands of elements in an edit.
Then there is that problem of the incredibly flawed piece of equipment between the keyboard and the chair (you and me).
All together there are an almost infinite number of things that could possible go wrong.
If you are totally stuck, or just want to be talked down off the ledge, feel free to contact me at my creative cow username without the period at onecreative.net.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
Michael,
If you want, email me directly using my creativecow username without the period at onecreative.net. We can screenshare or talk in the phone and probably get this worked out quickly.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
Just to chime in here, Kernal Panics are often caused by low level stuff. Video card drivers, hardware failure, memory, etc. FCPX is accessing all that but not directly.
For example I had a kernal panic about 2 months ago when I was repeatedly plugging and unplugging my Matrox MX02 connected via Thunderbolt.
WIth that said, software can cause a kernal panic, but if it was specifically FCPX to blame then a whole bunch of us would be having kernal panics all over the place. I’m thinking it is something specific to your machine or project.
I would do this:
1. Create a new user, see if the problem persists.
2. If not, partition a drive, and do a new install with just the OS and FCPX on it. See if it persists.Also, any reason you haven’t updated to 10.0.8? It addressed some GPU issues that might be related.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
Select your multiple clips and create a compound clip. Then open that compound clip and remove the gaps. Then use that compound clip as your editing source.
Does that make sense?
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
Every edit you get a pinnwheel? Humm. I saw this quite a bit on 10.0.4 and earlier, but now it is much better. I’m guessing that is a Ram issue, or an issue with your HD.
Take a look at Activity Monitor, and view the “System Memory” area. See if the Page Outs is anything larger than a few hundred megabytes. That will send any app into spinning beach ball land.
I would run disk utility “repair” on your external drive.
What version of FCPX are you on?
What kind of media are you working on? Format, resolution, etc.
How many elements are on your timeline? Look at the timeline index and choose clips and it will show how many items you have.
How large is your currentversion.fcpproject file?– T.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
Indeed. I saw these images just ONCE when I was 6 and I still remember it 38 years later. Powerful stuff.
FYI. That is Andrea the Giant from Princess Bride fame.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
That is very funny indeed. I literately did LOL when I saw that link.
It is funny to think that we spend a ton of time on elements that might be completely unnoticed. I watch alot of old TV. Six Million Dollar Man being my current favorite. Shot to shot color matching is non-existent. Sometimes they throw in stock that we would laugh at. I just watched an scene that was set at noon, but you could tell they just ran out of time, and shot it while it was dark with a big old light on the actors. They were able to pull it off because in 1974 the best someone would have was a 19″ CRT viewing from at least 5 feet away. They knew their audience wouldn’t event notice the bad film grain. Action and story was everything.
We have a much more difficult time now because everything is so clear in HD and on our computer displays. I’ll bet however, that when your final product is scaled down to the web size (probably 720p) it’s gonna look great.
(BTW. I’m not saying we don’t strive for excellence in our craft, but we need to understand our audience, and the delivery medium before we spend a huge amount of time worrying about something that isn’t going to be noticed.)
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
1600 ISO is going to introduce noise. Personally if I am shooting over 640 I know there is going to be noise.
However, from what I see the banding is happening because of the nature of H264 compression. Very difficult to avoid.
Frankly I would wait until the edit is done and then see if you can even notice the banding. Eyes are going to follow movement, not large areas of a single color.
The banding is mostly in the luma. I was able to key a copy of the clip on a layer then blur the background slightly and got rid of it the banding completely. Of course doing this on a still image is very different from video, but I’ll bet you can make it work.
Let me know if I can help further.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque
