FCP 7: Motion 4 : Color 1.5 ect :-)))

That's the point clay...you shouldn't have to send to Motion for simple good looking titles. Motion is GREAT...but rendering Motion comps in FCP is ridiculously longer than it should be.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

And let's not forget subtitles (I just did two weeks' worth). Absolutely no point in sending those out to After Effects or Motion. Far too time-consuming. And on that front, Boris doesn't do well either on long projects.


www.derekmok.com

>Has anyone actually seen the Text tool in action in v7? Can we confirm that it hasn't changed?

Yes, and yes.

Quote
And let's not forget subtitles (I just did two weeks' worth). Absolutely no point in sending those out to After Effects or Motion. Far too time-consuming. And on that front, Boris doesn't do well either on long projects.

Derek, for goodness sake why did you not use Andreas's Title Exchange and text up pro?

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

Couldn't resist the thread hijack.

To justify it... As version 7 is out and the text tools haven't changed, I'll continue to refine this future generator/plugin:



With these controls:





alex4d

___________________________________________________
Alexandre Gollner,
Editor, Zone 2-North West, London

alex4d on twitter, facebook, .wordpress.com + .com

Quote

wonder why they chose to skip it?

Cuuuuuz, like I said, I don't really think anybody uses it. Boris's bundled title generator is superior to the FCP one, and anybody who needs more than that will create their on-screen graphics in a graphics tool and bring them over as key-fill pairs or whatever. If Apple spent ten thousand man-hours creating the greatest built-in titler in the world ? taking that effort away from other things, mind you ? I imagine a hell of a lot of people would demand to know why they spent all that time duplicating features that are already present elsewhere.

> for goodness sake why did you not use Andreas's Title Exchange and text up pro?

1. The subtitles were in Chinese.
2. They'd already positioned some of them into the timeline. I was mostly re-timing and remixing audio.


www.derekmok.com

So it seems to me that Apple is THIS close to giving you guys what you are asking for. Let's say we change the function of (control) X to call Motion, with your background video in place, and the text tool active. Create your text, and hit (control X) again to return to FCP with the background shut off and the text in place.

Isn't something like that what people are asking for with a built in Text generator? If you use Boris you have to call a separate interface too. It seems to me that the tools in the FCP UI are just not robust enough to support a "good" title tool. If you are going to another UI anyway. what is wrong with Motion. You want power, you have to have some complexity to create it. You want simple for slates, use the existing Title Tool.

I haven't used Avid in an age, but doesn't their title tool call a separate UI?

Jeff Harrell Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I don't think anybody uses the built-in text
> generator in Final Cut for anything other than
> placeholders.


I DO! I DO!

We have a gazillion subtitles in our show. Easily 100-150. The Title Tool...the built in TEXT TOOL, is perfect for this. Easy to add, easy to change, easy to keep the same justification. Title 3D we use for lower thirds, mixed with an Alpha channelled lower third graphics. Typical stuff I did with Avid and carry on with FCP.

For complex lower thirds I need to built entirely myself? Motion is there....


www.shanerosseditor.com

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

Quote

Cuuuuuz, like I said, I don't really think anybody uses it.

...aaaaand that's your opinion based on what facts / polls / stats? I use it as well for super-simple stuff and I would use it a lot more if it was more versatile.

That's 3 Mods on the "do use it" list - so there

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I wrote a lot of comments about all the text title stuff over the last hour. Pressed 'Post' Safari crashed and everything was gone. Grrrrrr.

Now I don't have time anymore. I'll be back hopefully tomorrow with my comments.

Here just in short a few of them:

Chinese? Where is the problem?
Arabic, Hebrew? Where is the problem?
Cyrillic? Where is the problem?

100-150 subtitles and keeping them under control, that's more a kind of very simple thing for FCP. The other day we got a documentary with about 2000 subtitles per language to have under control. I do have lot of them.

Not versatile? Who tells you to use the Text generator as the only option?
There is Motion 3 and Motion 4. It's no problem to build your own text generator or modify one of the existing templates. Everything is easy even when you need to change appearance for example for the 8000 subtitles I mentioned above.
There are free generators out there like the one from VideoToolShed, from Alex, Stib, from me and I think maybe from Andy Mees as well. There are commercial ones like DH_SubTitle, my TextUp Pro and any of those can be easily controlled by XML even with TextEdit.
One of the world's really big posts does edit only on Avid but they use FCS and my TextUp Pro to create their subtitles both for 35 mm laser and DCP. So quality can't be that bad and versatility obviously is fine.

Apple made everything open, so you build your own system, your can use XML to organize your workflow and there are are 100s of developers outside to make a lot of things happen. Even Adobe somehow adopted the FCP XML format.

Some quick'n dirty Motion Tutorial I did long time ago
Some free utility to create a lot of PS layered TIFFs for easy editing within FCP

My 2 cents

Andreas

Point taken, Andreas.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

> Chinese? Where is the problem?

I was being a bit brief there.

What I meant was that I wasn't the only guy attacking the project. There were two other office people who were cutting and pasting text from the script. They were doing about eight other jobs (logistics, bids, client communication, budgeting, writing...), so they didn't have time to learn a more involved workflow for the subtitles. It needed to be something simple.

This company only does projects of this length on a very sporadic basis. In fact, this was the first piece over 60 minutes I've done with them. Normally their subtitling is more for 30-to-60-second spots. So they didn't explore other subtitling options. If we were starting the project fresh and I was already onboard then, we may have looked for alternatives.


www.derekmok.com

Got just a little break and some thoughts about text within FCP.

Is there anybody who complains about missing video editing tool in Word?



Andreas

Quote
s there anybody who complains about missing video editing tool in Word?

Avid editors




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

GOOD ONE MIKE!! THANKS FOR HAVING MY BACK!!!!

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I wish they would add "text controls" to the Paste Attributes list. It's such a hassle to have to change each card in your project if the producer decides he or she doesn't like the font.

Still sitting here 4.00 in the night to get some stuff fixed and having a look at this funny thread time by time.

So Chris,
This stuff is there already. Use Motion Templates - it's free and amazingly fast. Use my TEP - it's not free but might give you more options.

Regards
Andreas - who hopefully will get some sleep the next hours.

Quote
Derek
I was being a bit brief there.

Derek I hope I was not offending you there - it wasn't meant that way if you feel like that.

Andreas

> Derek I hope I was not offending you there - it wasn't meant that way if you feel like that.

Nah, not at all...first of all:

a) You were coming off of Safari robbing you of a post. Who hasn't had that drive him/her batty?

b) You and Michael were suggesting alternate, possibly better workflows. In my mind, that's free consultation. And if I got a chance to start that project, I'd certainly love to contact you and get your input on how best to approach it. Subtitling is painful, even more painful when it's Chinese, and the most painful when whoever had done the translation didn't do such a hot job!


www.derekmok.com

Glad to hear Derek,

Here about my first subtitling job.
It was at a time where there was no FCP. I edited a 45 minute 'tourism movie' for the the region I live here in Germany. This movie was for a Japanese release - if it would have been for Egypt hieroglyphs it would have been the same for me . I got all individual subtitles paint-brushed on a piece of paper each. The deadline was one week. This was like putting hidden alien messages into a video. We eventually made it.
So I do understand all this crazy subtitling things. Just wanted to point out what kind of options you got with FCP and that's it not sooo bad - probably better than any other NLE when it comes to subtitling workflow as you can use a lot of either free or cheap third party stuff.

One big award winning Chinese/German feature film used my tools to get the subtitles into both the 35 mm and DCP release.
So again, text stuff can't be that bad with FCP.

Regards
Andreas

Just saw this buried in the FCS release notes:

Optical flow retiming improvements
Motion 4 lets you perform optical flow retiming tasks more efficiently. Optical flow
analysis is now automatically limited to just the portion of the clip you?re using.

Now that's helpful.

Andy

That is big! Now I'm hoping there's a smoothcam improvement along those lines too.



www.strypesinpost.com

Can someone please explain to me why we still can't have background rendering?
Is it just too processor intensive?

Simplified answers please.

Harry The Dope.

Harry Bromley-Davenport.

Hey Derek
A long while back I wrote a simple AppleScript to query an RTF file an turn it into bin full of subtitles, used it for quickly creating subs in Chinese from rtf docs supplied by the Chinese speaking producers ... its old (back from the FCP XML v1 days) but I've still got it around somewhere. Am blindly assuming it still works (but I don't see why not). If its helpful to you (or anyone) I could put it up somewhere.
Best
Andy

I've got two answers for you, Harry.

First, of the something like one million installed Final Cut systems, I'd guess ? and I'm just pulling this out of my ear ? that something like 95% of them are used to cut compressed video. On an uncompressed system, pretty much the only thing that can cause you to drop a frame on playback is insufficient I/O bandwidth. That's why we had uncompressed NLEs fifteen years ago, but broadcast-quality compressed NLEs are a recent development: playing back compressed footage without dropping frames requires a lot more compute power than playing back uncompressed footage. The computer power needed skyrockets when you're actually doing something to the footage. A real-time 10-bit color corrector is a relatively easy thing when you're dealing with uncompressed footage, but when you're working in a compressed format, you need a lot more compute power. And the amount you need is often non-deterministic; the amount of math you have to do to decode a given frame varies, so it's that much more difficult to guarantee you can get it done in less than 8 milliseconds. We solve the problem by throwing way more computing power at the system than we technically need, just to give ourselves sufficient overhead to guarantee realtime playback.

If you throw background rendering in there, then your guarantee of realtime performance goes right out the window. In order to get it back, you'd have to construct some kind of priority queuing system that would background-render frames only when excess CPU capacity is available, and as I said, it's tough to know when you're going to have excess CPU capacity for, say, the next hundred milliseconds. You'd have to implement a sort of resource-scheduling system which would have to be built into the operating system's kernel in order to guarantee real-time performance, or you could just go for a soft guarantee ? if you start dropping frames, eh, try turning off background rendering and see what happens ? but the user base would doubtless consider that to be a half-assed and unacceptable solution. 'Cause it would be.

So that's the technical answer as to why we "still" don't have background rendering. (I rankle at the use of the word "still" there, because it makes it sound like Apple just can't be assed to flip the switch, and that's simply not the case at all.)

The more pragmatic answer is this: Avid doesn't have background rendering. Smoke doesn't have background rendering unless you shell out for Burn and a render farm, and then only sorta. Background rendering is simply not a feature that NLE products tend to have. If I had to guess, I'd say that it's partly for the technical reasons I described above, and partly because background rendering is a technical thing and not an artistic thing. Adding background rendering would do nothing at all to help the artist practice his (or her) craft more effectively, so it's simply not a priority.

(Which naturally leads to a discussion of exactly where their priorities are, but I don't want to get into that. My take on that has always been, and continues to be, either accept that Apple is a big, diverse company and thus chooses to invest finite resources in Final Cut, or switch to Avid which is limited not by diversification but by the design decisions that went into their choice to run on Windows and Mac OS instead of building their own system, or write Autodesk a fat-ass, six-figure check and use the best editorial-finishing system in the world. Life's full of compromises, and it's pointless to whine about that fact.)

So Jeff, in FCP 7, when I export to Compressor with background rendering ... and there it is chugging away whilst I continue to edit, how is this any different to doing the same in the timeline without my sending to Compressor first?

A simple command to toggle on/off Background rendering if and when I'm trying to preview a heavy composite or some such seems entirely reasonable and worthwhile, as does a warning that this may be the problem if (and when) I suffer dropped frames on playback (although I usually keep the dropped frames warning toggled off).

Bottom line, I think that FCP is a different tool from editor to editor, and it (tries) to cater to them all. Don't be misled into thinking that just because an operation is illogical in one workflow that it would be equally illogical in another. (I don't think you are misled Jeff, you're very clearly nobodies fool).

Harry, as for why we don't have background rendering in the timeline, I'm guessing its a application codebase issue ... while Compressor and Motion are Cocoa based apps with a much more modern architecture capable of far better handling our process threads and cores, FCP 7 (and 6 etc) remains largely a Carbon based app, the same code base of its pre OS X ancestor ... among other things thats why you'll sometimes hear folks clamoring for a "total ground up rewrite". Some of FCP's functions have been written/rewritten in Cocoa, for example the Log and Transfer functionality and the HDV Log and Capture functionality is Cocoa based ... but timeline rendering is probably far more buried in the core of the app itself. I think we'll have to wait for the ground up rewrite before we get that.

Of course I could be talking out of my ass at this point.

That's a point. Quite a few times, I've been doing background encoding while i'm editing. If I'm working on a not so powerful machine (eg. dual G5), I'll set it to encode with 1 core while I edit away. I wonder if FCP is now able to directly send a sequence to Compressor to encode with quick clusters. That won't be very much different from doing a background render, except that it doesn't appear back in the timeline.



www.strypesinpost.com

It would be different in the sense that Final Cut (as far as I know) has no conduit of communication with Qmaster or its transcoder tasks. So there's no mechanism for Final Cut to say, for instance, "Hey, this dipweed wants to cut XDCAM, so I'm gonna need a lot more CPU power for a while. Chill out for me."

In other words, there's nothing stopping the editor from torpedoing his own system's performance.

Of course, that applies only to transcoding. As far as I'm aware, Final Cut still renders in the foreground, and rendering is where most of the hard math problems are done.

Exactly, and I think thats the point. FCP's rendering is very much a foreground task and many would (and do) quite reasonably wish that it be possible to push it into the background if and when required. Torpedoing ourselves? Certainly in some scenarios but a potential productivity boost in others. Honestly, I think Apple would like to offer all things to everyone too if it were humanly possible (their sales would go through the roof if they did) but they have to prioritize what they do within a given product cycle time constraint ... my guess is we'll get background rendering in FCP eventually but not until a serious rewrite (which FCP 7 isn't). 7.1 maybe, or maybe 7.5 .. oh alright maybe FCP X :-)