Transferring an edit from FCP 6 into Edius

I'm in a spot of bother. A new client asked me to cut a job for them and wanted me to cut it on their Edius - which I've never touched before. I spent several hours reading the manual and then about 6 hours on the machine. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was a nightmare experience.

I suggested that I would be more than happy to cut the job on my home FCP setup (PPC G5, Leopard and FCP 6.0.6). The footage was shot PAL HDV recorded straight to disk - M2T files. I re-wrapped them with Clipwrap and all has been going smoothly with the cut.

The final distribution for the job will be on the web and they tell me they usually upload .wmv files. I have downloaded the trial version of Flip4Mac, so I know that if necessary I can buy the programme and directly export to .wmv.

For political reasons (ie keping the client happy and hopefully getting more work from them !) I would really like to be able to output a full-res version that will play in Edius. I have tried making a straight QT export from the timeline but it doesn't work. Does this indicate that they haven't got quicktime installed ?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Mike

EDIUS will import QuickTime movies. I don't use it myself so I can't check but I would assume it requires QuickTime to be installed on the system. You also need to export to a codec that will be supported by QuickTime on Windows. ProRes is a safe bet here.

Also check your audio. I've heard that EDIUS can have issues with non-PCM audio in QuickTime movies.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

I know that other Grass Valley products work very well with FCP. A local news station here was running FCP and DNP and I had to do some research for them on getting them to talk to each other - here is a link to a .pdf specifically about the DNP/FCP workflow, but it bodes well for your FCP/Edius problem.

[www.grassvalley.com]

Many thanks to you both. Jon, thanks for the audio suggestion. By default Clipwrap saves audio as linear PCM so I don't imagine that's the problem. I can't get a straight answer as to whether they've got QT installed. This is a very large organisation and I would expect they have strict guidelines about what software can and can't be installed. In other words - I think it unlikely that they would make changes to their machines in order to accommodate my wishes ! Jude, that pdf is exactly what I was looking for. Not quite sure where I'll get the grassvalley.bundle plugin it mentions, but it's possible the client may have it on a CD.

In the meantime, their tech guy has sent me an email saying: "I have a transcoding cluster with masses of brute processing behind it. It's a standalone system used by broadcasters for file processing. Pretty much drop the file into a folder and it comes out the other side as I want it. The test file you sent initially worked fine."

So - I'm sorted for this first job and if I can locate that plugin I'll be exactly where I want to be in future.

I've just got one other question that's arisen in this process. The camera original M2T files were given to me on a little 500GB USB drive formatted NTFS. I have paragon NTFS installed, so I knew I'd have no trouble writing the final output back to the drive, but I have always been under the impression that there was a max file size of 4GB for NTFS. As the direct export of the timeline is 11GB, I was expecting to have to break it into 3 or 4 chunks before I'd be able to transfer it onto the drive. But the whole 11GB went across just fine. Is the 4gig limit history these days ? Sometimes gets a bit hard for us greybeards to keep up...

Many thanks again

Mike

The 4 GB limit only applies to FAT32 file systems (pre-XP). The maximum file size for NTFS is 16 TB.

There's a new cross-platform file system called exFAT that is supported by both OS X and Windows. It's supported in OS X 10.6.5 and higher, Windows XP with a software update, Vista Service Pack 1, and it ships with Windows 7 by default.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...