h.264 & FCP 6

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

Should we write some kind of sticky that says something like 'Yes the 5D is awesome! Great pics! And so cheap! Just keep repeating that to yourself for the next day or so while you transcode the footage into something you can work with.'

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?

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I wondered if USB 2.0 would be a problem

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.

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There are also a bunch of Jpegs in the media - do these still conflict w/ FCP?

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.

Thanks you guys -

So ... I make selects and somehow use Compressor to transform them to something more familiar, like 29.97 DV?

I understand this also takes up more space on the drive - by a factor of 4x..?

Yes. The GOOD thing about h.264 is the files are small. Now you lose that too.

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something more familiar, like 29.97 DV?

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.

>like 29.97 DV?

You really can't go much worse than that...



www.strypesinpost.com

Sorry, I didn't mean go to DV, I was just commenting (OK ranting) that even the good thing about shooting H.264 gets lost when you want to actually do anything to it other than just look at it.

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, let us be fair here. The good thing about shooting H.264 is that it looks better than pretty much any other format you can shoot on a camera that costs less than US$15,000. Big, small, whatever.

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I noticed a lot of (different) clips have the exact same clip names

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.)

Yes, it's pretty and it's cheap. So DOPs like it and Producers like it. But for us it's a lot more work, and we don't have to like it, dammit. *stomping foot*

The workflow could be worse. It could be Red.

> The workflow could be worse. It could be Red.

Jeff's real last name is McCarthy...!

Seriously, though, the tapeless workflows drive me batty. All those folders with identical names that you have to retain. And you have to archive something like three separate copies.


www.derekmok.com

"Make sure you write your ProRes files to your framestore, not to the USB drive. "

Do you mean (for example), to another firewire drive where I have some space left?



(Thanks!)

Jewel
Use MPEG Streamclip instead of Compressor. If you don't have it then go download it now, its free and its awesome. Its faster than Compressor for what you want to do.
Best
Andy

"Do you mean (for example), to another firewire drive where I have some space left? "

yes.

i think Jeff should add "you say hard-drive, i say framestore" to his sig.


nick

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

Right, yeah, I agree; I said "FW drive", so anyone reading it would know which drive I was talking about.

I normally say "hard drive" when I mean the main/first/original drive on the machine.

But if there better standard, I'm all ears - whatever works!!

Thanks for all your help...

I'm up for "Mainframe".



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

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