time remapping in fcp

Hi,

Can anyone come up with a good reason for the inability of fcp to apply time remapping to the audio as well as video?
To my mind it seems logical and completely possible, as long as there is plenty of footage on either side of in and out points to compensate for the speed compensation (!!) Are the algorithms for applying this to audio more complex? Not something Apple boffins can't handle, surely? I'm sure there are other apps that do it, so why not fcp?

FCP does remap time of anything on the TIME LINE. dbl click the clip to load into the viewer then click the motion tab and go down to time remap.

However i would never use fcp to slow a clip more than 30% due to quality loss and motion problems. But never fear Motion3 is here and you can use optical flow to make SloMo at a lovely quality.

audio i believe will be pitched to show the faster or slower time.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

This information is incorrect. Audio has no motion tab.

u are right audio doesn't have a motion tab but you can right click it in the timeline and choose speed.

thanx for correcting me Tom:-)

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Yes, you can change the speed, but you can't time remap it. The question is about time remapping, not about constant speed.

ahhh i see.

it seems that i saw a tutorial on that somewhere CC maybe. they were doing it for a video and had slow mo while the music still was synced to the lip movements. May not be the same.

would that be remapping or speed? and how do you determine whether you need to remap or retime?

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

oh, you mean, Motion 3 is making slo mo at better quality than FCP? Really?

>Motion 3 is making slo mo at better quality than FCP?

Don't try 30% or below. It's still gonna be muck. When you're done with your edit, send those speed ramped/slow mo-ed clips into motion, select optical flow, and render them off as prores.



www.strypesinpost.com

yeah what he said.

motion3 is way better at slo mo than fcp. optical flow was the 1st thing i tried in motion. LOVE IT.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

That being said, make sure your clips are logged and captured or media managed with handles. Otherwise, you'll be looking at a lot of optimizing time in Motion.

Kevin Monahan
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The question was about ramping speed up and down - the way that the time remap tool only affects the video. I think there should be a choice to include the audio.
I was just asking if anyone knew the technical or other reasons that this is not the case.

The reason is "that is the way Apple designed it". Also, keep in mind that software designed in the mid-90's has some limitations today.

Kevin Monahan
Social Support Lead, DV Products
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I'd also suggest a reminder that Final Cut Pro is an editing application, not sound-mixing, not effects and compositing. Those extras are in there to help produce an idea for the cut, not to perfect things that other tools do better. Do you know any serious sound mixer or effects expert who uses FCP to do this stuff?


www.derekmok.com

Thanks but this is not a sound mixing issue.

Absolutely it is. Derek is correct; the purpose of Final Cut is to produce an edit. It can even be argued pretty persuasively that Final Cut exists to produce an offline edit, and that Final Cut's finishing tools are just a bonus. You can do a basic composite in Final Cut, but for anything more complex than a super you'd drop the shot into After Effects, Shake, Flame, Nuke or another dedicated compositing environment, then bring the finished comp back into Final Cut to overwrite it into your timeline. Tools like the time remapper and the audio mixer are there to let the editor be creative, not to take the place of something like Shake or Flame or Soundtrack or Pro Tools.

Admittedly, by moving things like Smoothcam into Final Cut, Apple's blurring the lines quite a bit. But it still helps to remember that Final Cut is where the editor gets to be creative, not where the compositor goes to do his comps, or the sound designer goes to create his mixes.

I take your point. As I see the points made by all the other contributors.
Thank you all.

simon,

i *suspect* the problem has something to do with Time Code.
Time re-mapping m ay use TC in some fundamental way,
and audio, or most audio does have genuine TC.
sure, FCP gives it some TC, starting from zero,
but on the whole that;s not real TC.

anyway, that's all postulation.
if you want to do some time re-mapping of audio in FCP,
you can put your audio in a timeline and export as a QuickTime Movie with Audio & Video.
bring that back into FCP, and now your audio has Video, and can be time re-mapped.
(i haven't done that, but it should work)


nick

One thing I noticed on one client's project was that a lot of slo-mo'ed audio will hog your memory resources. I've seen that happen in V 4.5 - 5.x. Weird Out of Memory issues, even with decent amounts of RAM - 2 - 4 GB.

Some of these happened by accident- the audio was linked to speed-changed clips and followed suit.

Haven't seen Time Re-Mapping affect linked audio but I rarely use it.

- Loren
Today's FCP keytip:

Apply your default audio transition instantly
with Command-Option - T !

Final Cut Studio 2 KeyGuide? Power Pack.
Now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

My 2 cents.

I guess serious time remapping of audio would imply subframe handling, while for video it just works at the frame (actually field) level (timecode based time remapping...)

Probably this was not intended to be a task for FCP, as Jeff and Derek and the other posters wrote.

Just my 2 cents

Piero