Control of FCP by another edit system

Does anyone know if FCP can be controlled as a source by a hybrid editor? Fastrack.HD customers wish to control their FCP's like they do with Avid or Edius, but FCP does not have an RS-422 port. Is there a third party way to achieve this?

Thanks

Not sure if I understand. Do you want a remote person to run FCP, or a remote editing system to run FCP?

I'm pretty sure what Bob is trying is to get the timeline of FCP to react under serial control as a virtual VTR. Folks using the offspring of linear style edit controllers can sync up a bunch of edit systems and servers and do interesting things with them.

I have never seen it done Bob. The only way Final Cut talks RS422 is via third party capture boards. Might want to ask over at AJA. If anyone knows it would be them.

I did this a while back, controlling a client's machine with FCP loaded, shown on my monitor, using Adobe Connect. It wasn't pretty, but I managed to raise the volume of several clips in his timeline with key commands. Mousing had annoying latency, as you might expect. Key commands made it better.

And I like key commands.

It's probably gotten easier with faster connections, and Remote Desktop, part of every Mac OS, may be useful. I've never played with it.

- Loren

Today's FCP 7 keytip:
Temporarily mix down audio tracks with Command-Option - R !

Your Final Cut Studio KeyGuide? Power Pack
with FCP7 KeyGuide --
now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

OK to Loren's point about keyboard control. If you look at something like the Countour Shuttle Pro it seems that you can stuff commands into the keyboard buffer to control Mac applications. So if you got a Keyspan serial adaptor, and wrote a program to read the serial control protocol, then translated and pushed the appropriate keys you could probably do it.

How much do your users want this function? Seems like a fair amount of engineering to get there.

Hi Bob

FCP doesn't have 'vtr emulation' like Avid. You could look at VirtualVTR which will give you 422 control of a quicktime - which could be a QT ref export from FCP.

Never saw it be frame accurate (+/- 1 frame) when testing with a Sony 9100 several years ago - allegedly the Kona cards were more likely to be able to play frame accurate Quicktimes than the Blackmagic ones we were testing with.

They were using it on Tour de France coverage a few years ago... [www.virtualvtr.com]

Glad to see that Editware still producing editors... tape linear hybrid not dead yet!

Thank you VPiccin for correctly interpreting my question. Thank you LAFCPUG for the opportunity to post my question and Jude for moderating. Thanks to trevora for the kind words. Thanks to the rest of you for your invaluable input. The consensus seems to be that this will not be easy task, if even possible. If FCP engineers monitor this Forum, maybe they can suggest a solution. Regards to all.

Well probably not Bob. Final Cut 7 was declared by apple end of life on June 21. The "replacement" is an entirely new program.

If you need it you will probably have to put your code wizards to work.