trim forward

Is Adobe Premiere the FCP8 upgrade we were waiting for?

So half a year or so into Final Cut X, and I still haven't tried it. It's taken me awhile to figure out why, but basically there is one reason, and one reason alone: Reverse-Compatibility, or lack thereof.

Basically what is comes down to is that I'm not interested in relying on two systems that don't talk to each other. If FCPX opened FCP7 files, I would be all over it, knowing that down the road, I would get used to it, and it would get better. But they say it's never going to open old files.

I'm an editor who decided that FCP was superior for my needs several years ago, and switched from Avid. I really invested in maximizing my efficiency with the software, getting Final Cut Studio Master Pro certification along the way. I turn down Avid projects because I don't want to waste time for no additional workflow benefit… I'm not interested in working in two environments at once, because I will become less efficient in both of them.

For those of us that have been editing more than six months, the reverse compatibility issue really sucks. Really, really sucks. It means I have to fight to keep Final Cut Studio installed on my system in the years to come in order to maintain old projects, and I know future OS upgrades will make that challenging.

I'm still working exclusively with Final Cut Pro 7. I haven't jumped in any direction because anything can happen, but I see the natural upgrade to FCP7 as being Adobe Premiere. Premiere will open FCP files, and you can get them back into FCP if necessary (the same way you would downgrade a project in FCP).

Apple has done something very strange with FCPX. They've created not an upgrade, but a new product. So it's a cross-grade. Down the road, the millions of happy FCP editors have no choice but to cross-grade to something. WHY would we cross-grade to another program from the same company that has killed multiple pro apps, when there is another program that has a very similar feature set to FCP, allows us to open FCP files, and quickly use our FCP keyboard shortcuts?

I love Apple products. Every time an iPad competitor comes out, everyone rightly says, "This is cool, but why would I get this instead of an iPad". Right now, the opposite is true for FCPX. Why would you upgrade to FCPX instead of Adobe Premiere? Why would you upgrade to FCPX instead of sticking with FCP7? There aren't a lot of reasons for either… and I feel that this is a defining moment for FCP… potentially a death blow.

I bought a copy of Premiere the other day to get in on the cross-grade price. I'm going to install it to make sure it works, but I likely won't use it at all for at least a year. Until I need it.

I'm a tinkerer. But this is also my business, and I have a family now. Every time I sit down to learn something or figure something out, there has to be a productive reason be spending time away from my family. Apple has given me no compelling reason to sit down and learn FCPX, and for that, I'm sad.

Side note: I'm focussing on Premiere here because I really think it's the closest competitor to FCP by far. Avid is great, but it's a completely different skill set, and a completely different learning curve. While it might be a worthy competitor, I don't think it's a natural upgrade/cross-grade from FCP.

Color won't open: Unable to initialize OpenGL.

The Problem:

When opening Color, a dialog box appears saying "Unable to initialize OpenGL. Make sure Video Desktop is disabled."

The Solution:

There are plenty of solutions to this problem if you have a decklink card (turn off desktop monitoring), but what if you have something else? For example, I'm using a Matrox MXO2 Mini. All of sudden the google results drop.

After a bunch of fiddling, I realized the thing that had changed since the last time I'd run Color was that I had a mini USB Mimo monitor plugged in. Turn it off, and the problem is solved.

FCP Trick: How to delete all transitions in a sequence

If you have to remove a ton of cross dissolves, cross fades, etc, from a Final Cut Pro sequence, do the following:

Open the sequence, hit Command-F, type the name of the transition, and click "Find All". This will select everything in your sequence that meets the criteria. Then simply hit delete on the keyboard to get rid of them. Magic!

Example: search for "Cross" to get rid of cross dissolves and cross fades all at once. Of course, if you've got clips with "cross" in the title, think before you delete.

This trick comes in handy when preparing video for export to another application, or in my case, to fix other people's work.

After a fruitless google search, I found this in Diana Weynand's book "Final Cut Pro 7", part of the Apple Pro Training series (highly recommended).

Save: "Operation not allowed"

I've been working with FCP for years, and just got this message for the first time when saving. You're in the middle of a project and you can't save, can't save as, or anything. From the google results for this problem, it seems to be very rare, and very random.

Solution: Create a new project and copy and paste everything from the bad project into the new one, then save that one. Not ideal, but it works. Alternatively, revert to your last saved or autosaved version.

Side note: If you haven't lost much work, just close the project and reopen it. You'll be able to save again.

Don't know what causes this and I hope I never see it again!

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.

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.

FCP Log and Transfer for RED footage

A few days ago RED quietly released a beta plug-in for the Log and Transfer tool in FCP that makes the RED workflow very similar to the P2 workflow. I tried it out yesterday, and it worked well.

Once it's installed, you can drag in a RED clip directory and it will automatically bring up that clip and all other clips in the same hierarchy, along with what you'd expect from a P2 import (thumbnail, "proxy", ability to mark in/out, etc, and a bunch more information. The Editblog has a bit of a rundown on it.