Offline to Online Workflow

Hello,
My facility is planning on making the switch to FCP from Avid soon and as the online editor I was hoping for a little guidance on a offline to online workflow. After viewing a few posts it seems somewhat troublesome. Is it as bulletproof as Avid? What type of gotchas are luking in my future?

Thanks for any and all replys

Welcome to FCP! You'll dig it after you get past the initial shock

I too come from an Avid background. In my facility, we offline in DV then uprez to Uncompressed 10-Bit SD after cut approval. No issues here.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Thank for the welcome Joey,

We did a little test going from a 30i FCP project onlining in 1080i and had many issues with digitizing and output. I don't know if this was just because our system was not configured properly or if this is a regular occurance. All in all it made me very nervous for the switch.

Maybe if you provided specifics of your test and problems that resulted from it, we might be able to help steer you towards the cleanest workflows and potential workarounds.

Andy

That's the learning curve of configuration. Every complex system has it's pitfalls. AVID is certainly not bulletproof, neither is FCP But, being a Post Facility that runs exclusively on FCP we found the cost saving benefit of running FCP systems are quite happy. We are currently spitting out deliverables in HDCam SR 4:4:4 10bit Log which is quite taxing on bandwidth! That being said once we tweaked our config, we run nice and smooth.

I'm pretty sure I just jinxed the next job.

Some details, and we will try to help sort out your issues.

- Jackson

Jackson,
I have now heard that frame accurate layoffs are only 50% accurate.
Is this true? We have pieces that range in size from :15 to an hour.
I cannot imagine having to lay off a 25 min featurette multiple times
just to have it land on the hour.
What about insert edits? How can you be sure they will go where they
are suppose to?

Thanks,

Joel

The inaccuracy is related, IIRC, to firewire controlled decks. If you have a 9pin controllable deck and the ability to control it from FCP (AJA, BM, USB TO SERIAL) you should have frame accurate output. My old G4 has a "G3 Serial Port" where the modem used to be and it gets frame accurate output when I need it.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

Not to worry, it's not 50%. I've seen it a couple of times, it's unexplainable (always a frame and never more than a frame), and i've worked off blackmagic and aja, G5s and Intels in the past year, and seen it happen on those machines laying off to digital beta. It's fairly rare, but sometimes it happens.

Never had it when i needed an insert edit though- they always land right on the dough.

We sync our decks, (HDCam, HDCamSR, Digibeta) and our Kona 3 to house sync (AJA Gen10). We are able to make frame accurate edits (both insert and assemble edits) to our decks from FCP.

- Jackson

There's some discussion going on sometimes on the offline to online workflow where it concerns motion alteration on clips. I haven't yet had the luxury of doing online captures. But how's the accuracy on those things? I've known of places that do the whole offline to online workflow all the time, and it seems to work quite well.

Well that is reasurring , we do a lot of work with D5 also, do you think that would make a difference? I am feeling better but still a little worried about the future.

Joel

Our basic workflow does not change if we are mastering either HDCam or D-5. What we receive from the offline session differs with every editor who does a cut. Each editor has their own way of doing things. Where our conform process differs is which color grading path we are going to take.

The feature we are days away from mastering stayed Apple all the way through. FCP offline, conform in FCP, grading in Color, re-conform in FCP and master to D-5.

The project was shot on HDCam and we did a DVCPro HD 720p offline. When we did our re-batch and conform all the motion attributes remained, all the filters remained and with the slight exception of some speed fx both in FCP and 'in-camera' no tweaks we're necessary. Of course we had to dump all color correction filters and do mixdowns prior to color grading in Color but the workflow is nice and smooth.

Here is where the FCP and Color is really earning it keep...
We received an offline cut ready to be prepped for online late friday night. The Distributor wanted to do a screening for a possible TV deal and they wanted a quick and dirty one day color session. The colorist we are using for this project knows color better that any other app. So in I rendered out all the reels (fx, filters, etc.) to a single quicktime file, spit out an EDL, imported the EDL into Color as a cut list, used the single quicktime file as the source media, and Color 'notched' all the shots. The director, producer, and colorist are coloring this film right now (Monday) and we will have an output for an HD screening tomorrow. Works like a charm.

- Jackson

So Jackson,

You have had no problems with D5 layoffs of any frame rate?
That seems to be the big problem with my coworkers. They find
an offset and it seems to vary. They are running V5 if that makes a
difference.

Joel