trim forward

Stuttering desktop preview in FCP 7.01

I recently had an issue where desktop preview was stuttering on a rebuilt Mac Pro. I attributed it to the graphic card, but today discovered that this is a widespread issue with FCP 7.01.

I found the solution here on the LAFCPUG forums. It has to do with FCP 7.01 only (systems that haven't been upgraded are fine), and is a simple fix: a quicktime component needs to be replaced from the install discs. Five minutes and you're back up and running.

Corrupted frames from Color 1.5 with RED footage.

When working with the new RED quicktime codec, I've had an issue where rendering in Color would produce quicktime files that are full of gobbledeegook. After much searching, I found the solution in the Apple forums. It seems to be related to having two monitors set up. If you do your grading, save, close Color, unplug the second monitor, open Color again, and Render, it works perfectly. Must be a video card issue, but what?

How to open a FCP 7 project file in FCP 6

Here's a problem I run across a lot these days, as people continue to upgrade their FCP systems: Final Cut Pro 7 project files will not open in Final Cut Pro 6. There is, however, a way to revert back in a pinch. It's not perfect, but it's pretty darn good.

In FCP7, do a Command-A to select all of your bins and sequences. Go to File... Export... XML. Choose "Apple XML Interchange Format, version 4". Deselect "Include Master Clips Outside Selection" (because there shouldn't be anything outside your selection anyway). Select "Save project with latest clip metadata".

Open the resulting XML file in FCP 6 by first creating a new project, then choosing File... Import... XML. Leave all settings intact, and wait a few second for it to import. The bins should all be preserved nicely, but the files are offline. If you get a warning dialogue about errors, that should be fine.

Hit Command-A to select all of your bins and sequences, and then choose "Reconnect Media" from the File menu. Once you've reconnected everything your project should be pretty similar to the FCP 7 project.

How to create and edit proxies in Final Cut Pro

(or How to edit at Starbucks... or the cottage... or the airplane...)

We've got a major heatwave going on up here in the Vancouver area, and seeing as I don't have air conditioning, I decided to do some prep last night so I could edit away from my home office.

I'm editing a 720P24 DVCPro HD project, and didn't want to lug a hard drive around with me. The solution was to recompress all of the footage into a codec that would takes up less space. A lot less space.

H.264 right?

Well, yeah, except it wasn't as straight forward as I thought it would be, due to what general googling revealed to be a bug in Compressor.

Here's the problem: Compressor 3.0.5 doesn't read timecode the same way Final Cut Pro does. Some say this is only with 24P footage. I've seen this in both DVCPro HD and RED. The result for me was that Compressor was seeing timecode as 5 seconds (!) earlier than FCP, and therefore any H.264 files created in Compressor would have the wrong timecode, and would therefore be useless.

The Solution: Use FCP Batch Export

First problem is that FCP doesn't have an H.264 sequence preset, so you can't Batch Export to H.264. You can try doing an MP4 mashup, but you won't get timecode.

So the first thing we have to do is create a sequence preset for the format we want. Then that preset will appear for us in our Batch Export settings.

(1) Create H.264 Sequence Preset

In the Final Cut Pro menu, click on Audio/Video Settings. Then click on the Sequence Presets tab. Click on DV NTSC 48 Khz (it doesn't really matter, but that one is a good start), then click the Duplicate button. A new window will pop up. Copy these settings (these settings assume you are using 16x9 footage, such as 1080P, 720P, or DV Anamorphic). Then click okay. You have now created a new setting called H.264 640x360.

(2) Batch Export your footage

Import your footage into a new project. Select it all, and choose "Batch Export" from the File menu.

In the resulting Export Queue window, hit Command-A to select all of the clips, then hit the Settings button.

First choose your destination. This is where the new files will go, and should be a different folder than where the original files are. I made a folder called "proxy".

Next, select Quicktime Movie for Format, and H.264 640x360 for Settings.

Next, click on Set Naming Options..., and click the box next to Add File Type Extension.

Then, make sure Make Self-Contained is checked, and click "OK" to return to the Export Queue window. Click the Export button to begin exporting. Depending on how much footage you have, this can take awhile, but possibly not as long as you might think. It was about 1.5x realtime for me on my 8-core Mac Pro.

(3) Prepare your project for proxy editing

This assumes you haven't done any editing yet. Logging, but not editing. (If you already have sequences going, use the instructions in section 4 in reverse.)

The easiest way to set everything up is to copy your new proxy files to your laptop (note: my 98GB of DVC Pro HD footage was now about 6GB of H.264). Then, copy over your FCP project file.

Open the FCP project file on the laptop. When asked to reconnect, find the proxy files and reconnect. Done. Go away. Go to Starbucks. Go to the lake. Go to France.

(4) Edit

You'll find that editing with H.264 files is a little different than normal. You have to render if you want to do any transitions or anything, but it's great for assembling a cut.

(5) Reconnect your HD footage

You're back in your edit bay now, so stop using those proxies.

First, in your Proxy project, select your newly made sequence (or sequences) and export to XML by choosing File, Export, XML. Use the default settings.

Next, in your OLD project Import the XML file. What you're doing here is bring in the sequence(s) in a way that you can modify the sequence settings (because we don't want 640x360 anymore!). Copy the settings in this image, but be sure to select your own settings under Sequence Settings. Click OK, and your sequence(s) will be created in your old project, with media offline.

Note: If you're not sure about what settings to use, find out by first creating a new sequence, dropping some of your footage on it, agreeing to change the sequence settings, then right click on the sequence and choose Settings....

Now, select all of the sequences that were imported, choose File, Reconnect Media, and reconnect your original footage.

(6) All done

If you did step 5 correctly, your sequence shouldn't need to be rendered. If you have a green or red bar above your timeline, simply delete the sequences and try again.

Despite this being a huge post, this process only takes a few minutes to complete (plus computing time to recompress footage).

I'll update this post when I have a chance to test the process with the new ProRes proxy codec in Final Cut Studio 3. I have a feeling it won't come close to these files sizes, but it would be much better for editing in general.

FCP Partial Log and Capture of RED footage

If you're using FCP Log and Transfer to import RED footage into an FCP project, once you click on the "Add Selection to Queue" button, don't click anywhere else. Go have lunch. Doing anything else in the Log and Transfer window or FCP will cause the current clip to get truncated, importing only a partial clip to your bin.

There is no warning, and no error message. Just a perfectly fine looking truncated clip.

Looks like we have to manually verify Media Duration in Log and Transfer with the clip durations now, and all of the time saving benefits of sorting and editing while importing clips is gone.

Compressor setting for Grass Valley Turbo

Here's a compressor setting to prep just about any HD video (720P, 1080i, or 1080p) for a High Definition Grass Valley Turbo box. The resulting 1080i MPEG-2 video files should get sucked into the Turbo without any recompression. Otherwise, you'll be stuck with the Turbo's very long compression times and unpredictable results.

Download the Compressor setting here, unzip it, and put the .setting file in your ~user/Library/Application Support/Compressor folder. Restart Compressor, and you'll see it in the Custom Folder of your Settings window.

Warning: Always do full play-through test screenings after ingesting your footage into the Turbo.

Compressor setting to output 2:1 RED footage to DVD

Problem: If you want to make a 16:9 widescreen DVD from a video project that was shot in RED's 2:1 aspect ratio (ie. 2048x1024), some precautions must be taken during the final compression in order to avoid stretching.

If just drop your 2:1 video into Compressor, and apply a DVD preset, it will stretch your video vertically to fit the 16:9 frame. The problem is that it's a somewhat subtle stretch, so it's easy to miss the problem altogether.

Solution: We need to add letterboxing to the top and bottom of the video such that when it plays out in 16:9 widescreen, everything looks normal. It's easiest to just create a new Compressor setting to do this. If you don't want to follow these steps, skip to the download below.

In Compressor, locate the "DVD: Best Quality 90 Minutes" preset folder (in the "DVD" folder). Click on it, and then click on the "duplicate" icon (the third icon in the settings window). This will duplicate the entire folder, with the video and audio presets, into your custom settings folder (at the bottom of the settings window).

Locate the new settings folder. If you click on the folder, you can rename it in the Inspector window. I just appended "2:1 to 16:9" to the name.

Now, click on the MPEG-2 setting in that folder. This will bring up a bunch of info in the inspector window. Go to the Geometry tab of the inspector (5th icon), and change Padding Top to 27, and Padding Bottom to 27. Click on the save button in the lower right of the inspector.

Now all you have to do is drag your new "DVD: Best Quality 90 Minutes 2:1 to 16:9" folder on top of your video, and you're all set to go. The final output (which you can verify in DVD Studio Pro) will be a 16:9 Anamorphic video with some black on the top and bottom, so when it stretches out to widescreen everything will look right.

Download: If you're having problems, I've zipped up my Compressor setting for you. Download here. Unzip it, and drop the folder into the ~user/Library/Application Support/Compressor folder, then restart Compressor. The preset will appear in your custom settings.

Kickin' it Old Skool: The power of cheap Sony DV cameras

I have an old Sony DV camera that I use as a firewire-to-analogue bridge between my Mac Pro and TV when I'm editing DV footage (which admittedly, is very rare these days). I set the camera in VTR mode, plug it into the computer by firewire, and plug it into the TV with a mini-RCA cable. Change the video output setting in FCP and it's set to go. Simple enough... nothing special there.

The other day I got a new (to me) Sony PVM-14L5 broadcast monitor so that I can do proper colour correction. Besides the multitude of component inputs, etc, it has an S-VIDEO input. I'm waiting for the Matrox MXO2 Mini to come out to set everything up correctly, but I tried a little experiment in the meantime: I hooked up the S-VIDEO from the camera to the monitor. Of course it worked, but what I think is cool is that it simultaneously output to the TV by RCA.

These older Sony DV cameras (I've used both a TRV-30 and a TRV-17) can be purchased for next to nothing on ebay, and they're really quite useful for this kind of application.

Another great thing about these little cameras is that they pass along timecode information when you're capturing, even though the cameras themselves have no ability to record timecode. If you have footage shot on a DVX-100 or something though, they work like a charm.

And finally, one very powerful, and little known thing about them is that they can play and capture PAL DV tapes in Final Cut Pro, even though they are NTSC cameras. The PAL footage won't play on your NTSC TV / Monitor, but it will play fine on the camera's LCD screen, and can be captured without timecode in FCP.

Status of Trim Forward

I'm going to start posting more regularly here. The initial intent of the site was to post the answers to all of the things I couldn't find online, and had to figure out myself. I'm going to expand that to more general notes of interest to the editing and filmmaking communities.

I don't have a lot of interest in posting links to every editing product that gets released... just the ones I have a personal interest in.

I'm also refocussing the @trimforward twitter account towards editing and camera banter only, so you can follow me there.

Historic fonts

Just came across some beautiful historic fonts (wild west, civil war, etc).