FCP/Compressor selective tracks

OK hive mind. A problem.

Given: A filmmaker's short films from the last 15 years (8 films) transferred over that same period to BetaSP, DigiBeta and HDCAM. Before big money is spent on new high res film transfers some promotion of recent work and various other fund raising relying on her body of work.

I get a hard drive of 8bit Uncompressed transfers of the aforementioned tapes. Bars/tone, slates, everything. Also included in the Dbeta and HDCAM sourced films are the DolbyE and other sundry audio tracks in each Quicktime. These files are backed up and are now the masters until transfers from the original films are made. (There's a box of DA88's being transferred as well but that's not my problem)

Task: Make Vimeo, DVD, and memory stick ready versions of all the films. Cut off bars/tone and slates and use only stereo mixes.

Problem: Without copying every file, how do I ignore the non-stereo tracks in compressor. We need to keep the full track files as those tapes are no longer reliable and until film is retransferred we need access to all tracks.

I can disable the tracks in QT7 but Compressor ignores that.

I have tried exporting just the required audio tracks and adding them to the H264 in QT7 but there's some duration weirdness where the exported track is always starting at a later TC.

Short of dumping them into FCP which would force me into a 1core render, I will end up duplicating the original files and deleting the unneeded tracks from the dupes and using those to make the H264s and MPEG2s.

Other suggestions?

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

Hey, Andrew.

why not drop the clips into sequences (with the same settings of course)
mute / delete audio tracks as required,
then export as reference movies, which you then use in Compressor.

A similar approach without using FCP would be to DELETE selected audio tracks in QTPlayer,
then save as a reference.

FCP seems a bit more controllable to me.

you could also Share out of FCP if you want to save a little more drive space (reference moves out of FCP do contain audio)

or use Share if reference movies give you the heebie-jeebies.
i think they are ok in situations like this.
i always add REF or something similar to the same if i'm making a reference movie.


cheers,
nick

As I am not always going to be in control of these archive files I was loathe to use reference QTs. I gave it a shot nonetheless.
For one of the 183GB HD files the FCP edit and export to reference file took, of course a couple of minutes.
Setting up the compressor que took a few seconds.
However, with the QuickCluster set up as it normally is, the first task it undertook was to copy the original source file which was looking to take about 3 hours before it started processing. I don't know if it would be the same for Share files.

I went in to QMaster prefs and changed the Shared Cluster Storage to the source drive and that seems to have eliminated the copy stage and we're looking at a one hour process over 8 cores on this old Mac Pro.

I'll probably turn the REF files into self contained files before I hand the drive back just to avoid that phone call from the assistant two months from now asking why nothing is working.

Thanks Nick.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

"I went in to QMaster prefs and changed the Shared Cluster Storage...." (etc)

i would have no idea what that's all about!
you must be a power-user


glad to be able help,
nick