Final Cut glitch Q?

I just got a memo at work and was wondering if anyone knew the answer to this:

"I'm worried about the hyphens used in the folder naming system. Please find out if the glitch has been corrected in final cut re: the use of non-alphanumerics in anything that might be
referred to during an online/edl process. I know it was still a buggy problem in 5.0, and if we find out a way to cut in low res, it might become a problem again."

We're shooting Panasonic P2 and have FCS 2. Thanks.

Correct...do NOT use hyphens in your clip naming process. Use "-" dashes. This only pertains when the hyphen will be applied to the QT file as well.

For example, you should not log your footage as "Man walks across street/dog chases him." FCP will have issues in capturing a clip with a hyphen. HOWEVER, if you captured a full tape as AJ012-A (Andrew jackson, tape 12, A camera) and then subclip, you can add hyphens all you want. When you online, FCP won't look at the hyphens there (AFAIK), it will look at the source file name.

BUT, to be safe, I alway use dashes. Goes against my habit of naming files "4/2 - Barbara enters office" (Scene Four, take 2), but...gotta do it.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]

Sorry for being thick but what's difference between a hyphen and a dash? Do you mean an underscore? I use "-" all the time, and always called it a hyphen.

WHOOPS...me and my poor language skills. A "-" is a hyphen...thus hyphenated names like Dunder-Mifflin. It is the SLASH..."/"...that you can't use. And yes, I use "-" and "_" (underscore) a as replacements.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]

okay so he mistaken calls dashes hyphens because we've been using - 's and that's what he was referring to. So we're all good with keeping the hyphens.

Example:

our captured P2 media goes into individual folders in the projects capture scratch folder, so...

Capture Scratch> Project name> Denver 101507 - A cam - card 001.mov

with folders for each card (to prevent the occasional duplicate clip name problem that sometimes happens).

But we should be fine, right? Because all the original file names on the drive are their native P2 0013PW.mov names. And as far as labels in FCP go, we don't use either - or /

Generally FCP will throw up an error 43 if you use illegal characters in file names. Those characters are

? [ ] / \ = + < > ; : " , | *

so no chicken beaks in file names.

Michael Horton
-------------------

Gotchya!

(and the > I used in my example were to represent sub-folders not full file names... those would be some crazy long a$$ files names)

Its best to keep to basic text without punctuation although it would only cause a problem with older systems accepting the EDL not FCP to FCP projects.

However forward slashes / or backslashes \ are a VERY big no no.

Also you should not use `or ? or ! or , or : or ;

or . unless before the 1 before the filetype eg: .mov

But these symbols should be ok: $ £ ~ * @ + = _ - ' | { } [ ] ( ) % &

I wouldn't use alt symbols like ? the euro and ? or other accented characters.

If you want to be really extra careful (as I am) just use alphanumeric and the _ - ~ and +


Ben



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Just to further compound things....

If your workflow requires and EDL, reel names longer than six characters often get truncated when creating an EDL. So be careful there too.

Mark

"reel names longer than six characters"

I thought most edit controllers use the old DOS standard 8.3 name+extension?

eg: 12345678.123 or filename.ext



Ben



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

$ £ ~ * @ + = _ - ' | { } [ ] ( ) % & are all ok in filenaming in FCP 6.x


I just checked incase I'd accidentally typo'd


Ben



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Really? Then Apple needs to update the technote on it. I can't find it.

Michael Horton
-------------------

Could you test it yourself? Let me know if its just my oddly useable system



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

I just used $£~*@+=_-'|{}[]()%&.mov as a clip name and it dig'd fine, no issues in capture or playback made it offline relinked it.

imported a file called: $£~*@+=_-'|{}[]()%&.PSD

and a sound file called: $£~*@+=_-'|{}[]()%&.wav

with no problems.


Mac OS 10.4.10 + FCP 6.0.1 + QT 7.2.0


Ben



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Does the EDL include the file's path? Because we're shooting a doc style show on P2 (which was a bad choice to begin with) but we're sorting all our raw P2 data into folders based on the shoot name, but they're all for the same show essentially. So if we shoot something in Memphis the master folder is "Memphis - 101807" and within that are the card folders labeled "Memphis - A cam - card 001"

Now I know right now we can only ingest P2 and therefore are always online editing, but he's worried if a way to edit offline becomes available, that the dashes in the labeling could be a problem (which we've determined they're not).

BUT you say the reel names now will also be truncated, so how can we determine which card the clip originally came from? If we simply label the cards by number "Card 001" then there's going to be a whole lot of Cards "001" possibly from different cities, some with files of the same name in them (Panasonic says its names are randomized, but we're had quite a few duplicates thus far).

So my question is, does the EDL include the path of the clip file, or just the truncated folder name?

Why are you saving the edits as EDLs?

EDLs or Edit Decision Lists are an extremely outdated way of saving an edit although we can use them from FCP to do basic transfers between linear suites and other non-linear editors.

We only pointed out that EDLs use filenames that have DOS limitations. Ignore this as you should not need to use an EDL.

The card the clip came from is irrelevant unless you are buying a new card for each shoot?

In which case that is utter madness - back it up to some good quality HDDs, in folders of your naming convention and use these for edit/archive.

Unlike Tape, P2 is not an archive medium - it is designed to be used then transferred then wiped then used again, etc, etc.

Data management is something you will have to deal with when using tapeless workflow. It also won't matter in FCP 6+ what you call these clips as long as you store them correctly and don't name them with conflicting filenames or by another extension.


Ben



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

I have no idea why he thinks we'll be using EDLs. I guess he hopes they'll have a way to edit offline P2 footage and that we'll need to reconnect via an EDL.

As for the card sitaution, we're not buying new cards (we have 4 total, 2 8gb and 2 16gb) we're just naming our folders on the HDDs their being dumped to as card 001, card 002 etc... so we know the order they were shot in for a given shoot.

The workflow we're using is to dump the card onset to an external HDD, making a project folder for each shoot and a seperate card folder for each time the cards are dumped. Then we back up the raw P2 data on blue Ray DVDs for storage. The HDD is then brought back to the editors who import the files in FCP making them .mov files and sorting the media within the capture scratch folder by mimicing the folder structure that they were in on the HDD (so clips from card 001 go in a folder for card 001, clips from card 002 into folder 001. Because if we put them all in one big capture scratch folder, if there are any clips that have the same name, FCP adds a -1 tot he filename, which would cause problems later on if the footage went offline because our raw P2 data has no such file that matches that. After the FCP import is complete, the HDDs are then erased and ready to be used back on set the next shoot day and all our P2 files are safe on the blue ray disks.

I'm just trying to figure out what to tell him if he's asking about the EDLs IF down the line there's a way to capture of ingest P2 footage at a lower rez and do an online once the edit is complete.

blue Ray DVDs for storage? Ouch thats slow and expensive at the moment isn't it? How much time do you spend doing that? Buying a system that would enable you to switch out HDDs might work out massively cheaper and very much quicker saving someones times = more money saved.


But as far as EDLs are concerned you would be using FCP project files and shouldn't have any issues if the Data management starts at the transfer end and everything is kept in separate folders and used from those folders.

You could save copies out as XML files as well which like FCP project files save the data path.

Tell him not to think EDL anymore its not relevant - if you worked at a lower resolution then your proxy files would have the same names as the actual files so you could relink the higher rez ones later. Not sure why you would want to do this as it would take longer to convert and take up additional space on another HDD and you would have other issues editing and then the time for an Online conform would have to be factored in negating part of the benefit of tapeless workflow.

Your workflow sounds ok and as long as everything stays separate and your filenaming convention stays accurate then you should have no issues.

I personnally would add a date to the folder names in dd-mm-yyyy or mm-dd-yyyy format if you wanted to make doubly sure that you had no overlap of project files. eg if you did an update for a programme at a later date.


Ben



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

I agree, but we're stuck working for people who are used to doing things a certain way and can't think outside those terms (which in a constantly evolving medium, you simply can't do).

We're still trying to figure out a) why they decided to shoot P2 on this doc/reality style show and and not on tape stock. And b) why he's chosen to use 720p60 instead of 720p24n, which is claims is for the broadcaster, yet we don't have a deliverables list of what format they need (not to mention that numerous shows shoot 24p and still boradcast in HD).

"We fear change."
~ Garth Algar

You can easily make a 24p version from your 60p whereas you can't make a 60p version look like a 60p version from 24!

Also you can do some lovely slowmotion with 60p to a 24p timeline frame for frame.

60p is a good acquisition format for DVCproHD at present until 1080p really gets going.

Just keep a good set of backups for FCP project files on separate CDs/DVDs/HDDs and possibly your webserver so if you lost the edits you have a separate location backup.

I used to have access to a 4500 tape library for one company I worked at and we had a dupe of every single tape in an offsite fireproof backup facility! Everything was logged with a production number, date, location, camera & roll number. I try to keep this level of logging in all my work as it is a few minutes more in a day of logging - but hours and hours if you have the system were to go down and nothing links to the relevant data!

I would seriously have a look at the cost vs time thing for storage on HDD as blu-ray is a newish format and like CD/DVD is prone to scratch damage.

For example the cost for a 1TB HDD (approx 18 hours of DVCproHD 720p60) is about $324 to $450 thats as low as $0.30 per minute

Compare this to a blueray disc $10 to $30 which works out $0.35 per minute and you can only store 28 minutes on a BR25GB disc... Better storage if you use a BR50 disc then you can get about 56 minutes on for about $30 to $60 but a cost of $0.54

However BR is slow to burn and to transfer whereas an HDD would be either used directly or a transfer to anther HDD would take a fraction of the time.

I'm currently using the HDD backup route as its the most cost effective most reliable at present.

Food for thought.


Ben



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]