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h.264 & FCP 6Posted by Jewel
Hi all,
I have a newbie client who shot on a Canon DSLR & output at h.264. He didn't mention any of this when he handed over 13 hours of media to cut a promo trailer with. I didn't realize any of the workflow problems inherent in this (never encountered it before) until glitches started to happen and I conferred with the DP and he clued me to the h.264. Then a second editor sketched me a sort of workaround, but he was in FCP7, and I am in FCP6. I didn't seem to have the menus he suggested to do the workaround. So I'm looking for FCP6 workflow suggestions. Trying to move as quickly through the media as possible. Thank you very much! J
If it's for broadcast, then I would convert the h.264 to your end codec before cutting. H.264 is not an editing codec. 13 hours is awful, but if people are going to skimp on the camera end, they're gonna cop it on the editing end.
Mind you, if it's just a promo, possibly you can prechoose down to an hour or so of actual footage you'll be needing.
Go fetch yourself the newly release (last week, I think it was) EOS log-and-transfer plugin from Canon. It makes the workflow much less abominable.
You may still have issues with frame rates. If this material was shot on a 5D pre-firmware update, then it'll be at the wrong frame rate, and you'll need to conform it to either 29.97 or 23.976, depending on whether you want a virtually unnoticeable slowmo effect or a very slight slowmo effect. But like Jude said, you can't edit H.264. At least, you can't edit H.264 reliably and quickly.
I'm not sure if L&T is faster than Compressor, considering you can run all 16 processors in Compressor. Transcode everything to prores, conform to 29.97 if you have to (frame controls, set everything to fastest, as you're not doing any scaling or retiming), and go for a long lunch break.
www.strypesinpost.com
Oh, forgot to mention: client also provided media on USB 2.0(only) terabyte drive.
I wondered if USB 2.0 would be a problem... I noticed I can watch individual dailies all right, but the cut hangs up on the video when playing in the timeline. There are also a bunch of Jpegs in the media - do these still conflict w/ FCP?
Oh. Then forget the L&T plugin. It only works if the cards were properly archived to disk, which I bet they weren't. Make sure you write your ProRes files to your framestore, not to the USB drive.
They're not ideal. You can batch-convert them to 8-bit TIFFs if you want. Just make sure they're RGB, not some other color space.
For the love of all that's good and right in this world, no! Taking 1080p material shot on Vistavision-equivalent and destroying it by turning it into DV? Not the right choice. Use ProRes. It won't be quite four times the size. I think Canon's stuff comes off the camera at under 50 Mbps, which is a third the data rate of ProRes 422.
No worries - just trying to consider options.
One more problem: I noticed a lot of (different) clips have the exact same clip names - I suppose this happened when they output the h.264 media & cleared the camera memory, and then commenced the next day's shooting (?) I presume this would also create problems? I was planning on renaming the relevant media and re-importing. Good times.
Well, this is obviously non-optimal. Final Cut can deal with shots that have the same file names, as long as they're in different directories. But it's better not to ask it to, because it can get confused sometimes. For future reference, Canon DSLR footage needs to be treated like any other tapeless footage. You need to back up the whole mag, not just the shots. That is to say, the media's stored on a CF card inside the camera. That CF card is your mag. When dumping those cards to hard drive storage so they can be wiped and reused, it's important to copy the entire mag, with all of its folders and everything. That's how things like the Log & Transfer plugin work; they need the whole mag structure, not just some random clips. It's generally good practice always to copy whole mags, whether those are CF cards or SSDs or P2 cards or SxS cards or whatever. (I know it's not your fault that it wasn't done this way; I'm just sayin', for next time.)
I tend to use "media drive", coz a hard drive very generic. It can be your system drive, it can be your archival drives, etc... Media drives would be the arrays that give you sufficient real time streaming access to the media reliably and usually with built-in redundancy.
www.strypesinpost.com
I second what Andy said, use MPEG streamclip instead of Compressor; it's faster for converting the footage.
Keep the frame size (1920x1080, right?) and frame rate the same as the source clip, but change the codec to Apple ProRes. I've heard that ProResHQ won't make much difference in this case, so someone correct me if that's wrong. Streamclip can also do batches, so you can set this up to run overnight if you need to. Good luck! JK _______________________________________ SCQT! Self-contained QuickTime ? pass it on!
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