QC survived, FCPX a success-story?

So the file is with the broadcaster, we can reflect on the last 3 weeks of FCPX as in 10.0 experience.

Do we like FCPX? yes, some of it.

Does it frustrate us? yes, a lot at times.

Is it ready for broadcast. Definitely not, not on its own. You can produce good results with it, but not without help from FCP7. And that needs to be addressed fast or they lose their fanbase VERY VERY quickly.

Where can I start?

IMPORT

I speak exclusively for the stuff we imported: XDCAM EX, DVCProHD, Canon and Nikon h.264 VDSLR flavors

XDCAM EX….still the same transfertool from SONY needed; then it edited fine, although on my Macbook I felt a transcode to ProRes helped when I was mixing material. We hope there comes the day when XDCam is imported like the other formats and FCP works first native, then automatically switches to transcoded material.

DVCProHD: on my Macbook I had errors, on my Mac Pro no problems really. Only I had a clip corrupted in the timeline once ; don´t know if it had to do with the codec

h.264: works as advertised; import, edit and while you work it transcodes to ProRes

The automatic fixes during import are a waste of time and CPU energy. It is better to fix the shots that need fixing in the timeline. 

SKIMMING

skimming…..wow….how fast can you breeze through your files.

MEDIAMANAGEMENT

Once you understand the eventstructure and you buy more harddrives so you can copy the media into the event-structure, then the way FCPX organizes your media and helps you to keep it organized is great.

there is no re-connect yet, so you can´t link to your camera-media without risking losing the connection when moving these files!! Therefore I recommend using the "COPY to FCPX" structure.

The way FCPX allows you to take parts of an event to another drive and user and then get the project/timeline back and reconnect to your original event is really a nice way to allow for multiuser work, BUT there has to be a masterevent. One event has to be the one with all the footage and motionfiles.

EDITING

Editing is the one thing FCPX does best. It truly is fast and efficient. I had hardly any problems with the magnetic timeline. The connected clips help when rearranging a timeline and in fact I used a lot of secondary storylines also. 

You don´t really miss tracks IMO and I also like that the audio is implemented into its original videoclip, because it just keeps things more organized.
It is nice when you adjust things (like audiolevels) without FCP stopping to play; and you can for instance jump out to photoshop and FCP keeps playing in the background; maybe you want to hear the rest of an interview or just get a feel for the music.

Finally FCP is smart enough to know where I am with my pointer to change itself into a rippletool or a rolltool etc. I need "A" and "T" and that´s the shortcuts I use for hours. I practically never use "P" which is the FCP7-mode. Instead I add gaps (OPTION-W) to put clips further back.

There are also a few very nice new shortcuts, which I will post in another blogpost. Most have them are not originally assigned!

But there are a lot of missing pieces. Just one example: I have no clue what portion of a clip I am having in my timeline. In FCP7 you just double click on it. It opens your viewer and shows you the I/O. In FCPX you can also "reveal in event browser", but when in icon mode you have dozens of icons and need to look for the one that has a grey bar to show the I/O…..hardly recognizable; and in listview it shows you the clip, but not your I/O. 

Another weirdness:  If you have a clip in the primary storyline and a connected clip and you lift the clip from the primary storyline, then the connected clip of course also goes up one layer. BUT if you have a title connected and lift the clip, the title stays connected to the gap and is underneath the clip it was connected to.

No audio-only roll trim? No audio-only fade without being a storyline? The list is long.

These little bugs/features/anomalies and also inconsistencies in the user-interface, and there are many, are making you scratch your head and are clearly a sign this software is not finished yet. But it might be "finished" in the upper markets soon, because pros (people who earn their living with these tools) don´t have time to scratch their heads too much.

Yes, people need training, but when I have training then I expect a software to react similar throughout the interface, FCPX is far from. Every window and many working-steps within certain windows are different from each other. It seems the programmers have worked separately and everyone has tried to solve a problem without looking at what the others did to solve theirs. 

To throw away certain standard terms to create a new language is another weirdness. No more In-Point, but "Selectionstart"? What are they smoking in Cupertino. It is like "Hit ENTER" is taken from a computer-programmer. Oh well, there is no "Enter" on my iphone.....let´s say we take the "Slash" away from them, see how they like that and how they type an adress then......

PREVIEW MONITOR

the lack of a proper preview is simply stupid and dangerous, becaus when you want to have a decent grade you need to SEE IT. This is VIDEO/FILM. Apple do you listen?

If Apple had just implemented 3 more tools: the preview, the audio-track-selection and the XML-compatibility, the noise would have been much less.  

CORRECTING TOOLS / EFFECTS 

The colourboard is fast and works in great quality. But it allows for illegal colours, there is no option to make it a standard colourwheel and it lacks important features like tracking. For a 299-app it is good, but I am afraid in the long run I will have to buy something that supports colour-grading (DaVinci Resolve?!). But that again only works, if we ever get XML-out or some other tool to open the timeline in other programs.

What is amazing is the whole Motion-publishing and rigging program. It is so cool to have titles and effects made in Motion, then publish them to FCPX and work on with them there. This feature is a reason why I hope FCPX will evolve into more, because this is a killer-feature.

But then the CONNECTION TO MOTION is gone. In FCP7 how often did I click "Send to…Motion"….How they can make this Motion-highway a one-way-street is another mystery to me.

AUDIO

Well, there are many good filters out of the Logic suite now and while I haven´t used much yet, I dropped the logic-compressor onto every interview in this project. 

The lack of audio-track selections (on output) has been commented a lot so we leave it up to Apple to fix this, because this is one of the real dealbreakers for many.

 CONCLUSION

Is FCPX a proper and complete NLE? Not yet, honestly.

Can I recommend it? Not yet. Especially not to someone who doesn´t have FCP7.

Do I keep using it? You can bet on that.

Huh? Yes, I will keep using FCPX, because the one thing it is good at is editing and I like editing with it. When you get back to FCP7 you are astounded at how backwards it is; even if it works snappier and especially the output options are exactly what we need. Gone are the days when you lock tracks, select clips on 3 tracks, avoid clipcollisions 2 minutes down the line, hit RR, then S then SS, then A, sleect more tracks, then blade then RR again then …..you know what I mean. so many steps for the most basic functions.

If I wouldn´t own FCP7 I couldn´t use FCPX as much as I do now. It lacks too many features. Since Apple EOLed FCP7 they HAVE TO upgrade FCPX soon or by christmas they will have lost their opinion-leading clients and will indeed only sell this to potential iMovie-Pro-customers, even if it is much more than that.

Teaser for the first broadcast; sunday July 31st / 19.15cet

If you want to watch our programme, 95% FCPX ....follow the link:
At the bottom is the teaser

Output part 1

The output-process

The first 20 minute documentary was edited, graded and basically the soundmix was done for a normal digital distribution (file, internet).

But I had to get this program to a broadcaster; luckily file not tape, but the rules are still different than with pure internet-output; basically you follow the tape-workflow, only you don´t use a tape anymore. One step less and a 17GB upload more.

Let´s start with the image. Well the lack of proper broadcast monitoring solutions forced me to make several renders to watch the clips via FCP7 and my Matrox MXO2. I tend to grade a little dark when using the computermonitor only. So that is really a problem and I hope Apple provides Matrox/AJA/BlackMAGIC and others with hooks so they can give us access to monitors again. Liquid Edition, which also relied heavily on GPU performance,  did this via a USB breakoutbox, so I expect something thunderboltish soon. If not....might be a dealbreaker, really!

Audio….different beast in broadcast environments. 

the problem was I had to get the audio-mix to the broadcaster with up to 8 dedicated audiochannels. that was something I couldn´t do in FCPX anymore. I had to output the timeline in various versions to merge them back in FCP7.

This is the same process I do in FCP7 also, I always make one file per audio-bus there and rebuild a timeline. Only this time I had to detach audio (because much ambience sound was in the clips) and jump between FCP7 and FCPX. Not really a lot of time lost there, but still weird to have to leave an NLE to do what an NLE should do.

First I exported the film with the audiomix i had done in FCPX as ProRes Masterfile.

Then I duplicated the Project/Timeline.

I then opened the timeline-list (the list where all items of your timeline are listed in the left bottom) and selected the keyword "SONG", since all my songs and SoundFX have that keyword. I made a compound clip of this selection. That process takes 10 seconds. 

Now I soloed this compound and tried to export an AIF, but that doesn´t work. I need to look into this, but I was not able to output AIFs or WAVs  through "Share->Export Audio…"

So I  exported a ProRes file with a GAP as video. That went fast…but when opening in FCP7 it is 1 frame only….apparently outputting GAPs alone is not an option. Puuhh….that gets annoying. So drop a black generator in the timeline, extend to 20.00 and output a Prores again….ok, that worked.
This should have taken 2 minutes and it took 30. I hope in FCP10.1 it will be 2 as expected.

Then I had to break up my tidy timeline and Detach all Audio for ambience and interviews.

I used the SONG - Compound as spreader between ambience (above) and interviews (below). Whoa, now the timeline looks messy, turn off connections and turn off thumbnails and waveforms and it is better to organize what I do. 

So I made two new compounds copied all 3 compounds to a "Audio only" timelineproject and exported each of them  (toggling the others).

Now drop the resulting 4 files (Pro Res master, ambience, SONG, interviews) into FCP7, adjust the audio-track-outputbus, adjust the pan when needed and export the whole lot as Prores ready for sending via ftp. I additionally export a AIF track-collection to make sure it will work. Since I do it similar in FCP7 the only drawback (well, besides the non-functioning audio export in version dotzero) is the closing and starting of the different FCP versions.

What would help was the option to tell FCPX in the inspector which (compound-)clip should output to which audio-channel. Simple. And they should make the "Export Audio function" function!
But I guess it won´t take long to fix these audio-issues in FCPX; now all we need is OMF/XML output so we could give the audiomix on for further work, which is needed for many production houses.

My guess is, Apple has a problem with these output-hooks, because stuff like auditions are not easy to write into a list, because they overlap each other.

more F3 settings

although principal shooting is finished for now for this project (there will actually be another shoot for the long documentary with some race-participants from Scandinavia in August) we want to share more infos about the F3. Stefan is tweaking his settings based on our experiences on this project. Here´s his newest report:

well,
something was missing... something that the vdslr have and the f3 hasn't.... a baked in look i mean. well, today i hooked up my d7000 and looked at my F3-profiles. something seemed wrong - not wrong, but different.... so i started all over again, and here's the vdslr match i came up with....

PP:
Matrix
Standard
Level: -4
Phase: +2
R-G: 31
R-B: -9
G-R: -5
G-B: 8
B-R: +57
B-G: +9

!!!...this will make the reds go way too "orangeish"....!!!

so: go to multimatrix, do a region detection: select a red/orangeish region in your picture, and let the F3 detect this region
then dial in:
Axis: R
Hue: +35
Saturation: -37

i have to work with this setting to see if something goes wrong in skin tones etc, but so far i like this one...
try it out and tell me what you think!

How to take parts of a Project (aka Event) with you, edit mobile and come back.

I had to travel for a day but wanted to keep editing on this project. I didn´t want to bring the RAID, knew the project itself was too much for my MBP and decided I wanted to edit a certain segment only.

Here´s how it works:
1. Decide which part of your Event is needed for the mobile edit (e.g. one day, one set of interviews etc.)
2. Plug in a mobile drive and create a new event there (e.g. mobileEditDay3)
3. drag the keywordcollection that is needed mobile from the main-Event to the new mobile Event on the mobile disk. FCPX will copy the footage from the "original Media Folder" to the mobile drive into that Original Media folder. Double check in Finder that your media is there.....but it works ;-)
4. on your MacBook you create a new project which is linked to the Event on the mobile drive and you can do your magic in FCPX now. This project will access the event with the copied media.

Now comes the interesting part when you are back home/in your studio:
5. back on your main machine don´t open FCPX but in the Finder copy the PROJECT on the mobile drive into the Projects folder of your main drive where the main Event lies!
6. unmount the mobile drive(!)
7. Open FCPX and in the Project library you have this mobile Project now. But all media shows as offline??!!! SHREEEKKK

8. Select the offline Project and in the Inspector Modify the Event References to your original Event

9. Voila...it is all reconnected again, even the renderfiles are in place already! Now you can leave this project alone until you need it elsewhere, then copy and paste the clips out of it into your other projects when needed.

!!!!!! This workflow will also work when sharing the workload. Let´s say you are 3 editors in a project. You collect everything on one machine, then drag the needed footage (via keywordcollections) to each others mobile drive. Let´s say one guy does Scenes 1-11, one guy does the action sequence and the opening sequence and one guy works on the third act with scenes 12-25.

You simply drag the keyword collections for each scene to the according drives, they take these drives with them, create new projects (for each scene?) and in the end come back and you modify the references. Brilliant, easy, fast.

I can see FCPX as a great networking tool, when you have a fileserver (heck a macmini will do with a big tunderbolt RAID attached) and the editors only take the footage they need or use it out of the network event.

F3 settings

Stefan is so kind and shares his settings with you...

F3 Picture Profile Settings:

as promised i'd like to share my PP Settings that i use the most - essentially these are the same settings i use on my EX-1. 

check them out and tell me what you think...

Matrix: 

Hi-Sat

Level: -8

Phase: -4

R-G: +59

R-B: -6

G-R: -21

G-B: -32

B-R: -29

B-G: +13

Gamma:

Cine1

Black: -10

Cheers

Stefan

Further features, bugs and cleaned up misunderstandings about FCPX

New update 0800cet July26th, bad news section

Well, you need to read aaaalllllll of this blog to hear everything...but this post will be updated every now and then with news about the actual editing process and when I find new features.

Here are more features and bugs (or missing features) that I find while working on this project.

Good news:
- In 2-screen mode while trimming or sliding there are in fact two viewers. I have the viewer and the scopes/hostogram on the right screen. When trimming the Scopes make room for the IN-Point view. So it is a dual viewer when you need it.

- Did you know you can add keyframes to the audio by holding ALT and clicking anywhere on the audio-volume-line?

- I have Compressor rendering in the background (using 400% of my 16 cores = 1600%). FCPX doesn´t mind at all. In FCP7 a render process in another program always slowed FCP7.

- I love the icon view now - but still want a "one-line-per-clip-view". I have the duration set to 10 seconds and it is a breeze to skim through a bin/collection with dozens of clips.

- OMG. I just found a simple way to speed things up: Menu "View-> Hide Waveforms", do that for the Event and you can race through the icons even faster.....WOW! In the timeline it also helps to turn them off or just change the clipappearance in the bottom right.

- in the Project Browser you can select a project and share it (render out a version), FCPX does this in the background and you can work on another project/event. Nice...no more waiting at all

- The new colour correction tool is a great color correction tool. I don´t say grading (yet), but colour correction.- Correction often means to fix a "too cool" or "too warm"....well....minus reddish or minus blueish is what you want. It works. Easy. Grading I am not so sure yet, but fixing problems it is fast and the quality of it seems to match that of the old "Color"

Bad news:
- database stopped workin on me for two hours. did colour corrections and audiocleanups for several hours. when i realized the undo function stopped working i restarted FCPx. 2 hours lost. apparently when the CMD-Z doesn´t work and in the menu EDIT-UNDO is greyed out the database doesn´t work anymore and your work is NOT SAVED. 2 hours between 11pm and 1am lost. GRRREEAATTT...NOT
- with 5600 items and dozens of keywords it takes a while now to open and close the project. 2 minutes each way i guess.
- today I had a few crashes, don´t know yet if it is the compressor in the background (rendering for 12 hours now....)
- major flaw found !!!! you know you can´t drag an effect from clip to the next. you have to copy the clip and paste ALL its effects. Doing this you will also copy all audio-efects for example. If you have a soundcompressor on one clip you will copy it over to the next. if there was one before...messed up.....so you have to clean up stuff after this copyprocedure. if haven´t found a shortcut "copy video effects only" or "copy audio-effects". they need to find a way so you can drag an effect from the inspector onto another clip. making presets is no help either....i will end up with hundreds of presets soon. and it´s slow to scroll down to them anyway.
        !!!!!EDIT: I found some help: you can go to COMMANDS and find "Copy Color Correction from previous clip, two clips before and three clips before and copy/paste these corrections alone. I have now shortcuts for these 3 paste-commands.

- interesting tidbit: i have some synced clips (shot with 7D and H4N; synced fine in the event) and when I went through them to add keywords the program went very very very sluggish. I thought at first I had reached the point of breakdown, restarted the machine, but no help. then tried on "normal clips" and there was no problem. So apprently when the database reches this size then adding keywords to a synced clips (i guess it adds keywords to several items in the background, since there are several audiotracks involved) is a little bit of a timeeater. so it might be better to keyword synced clips first, before you reach 80+ keyword collections like me ;-)
- missing: the ability to rename corrections in the colourtab. if you have 4 or five it would be nice to call them (expose, vignette, skin etc)

My way:
- title-fades.....there are two ways to fade titles/graphics. One is to make it it a secondary storyline (CMD-G), only then can you add a transition like a dissolve. This turns the title into a clip (also in size/height in the timeline, only purple). I don´t like that because I will put the titles on the "highest track" in the end so i can create a clean version of the film easily. And when they are thinner they are easier to be identified as titles to me. So I use the videoanimator in the clip (CTRL-V), adjust the opacity fade there and then CTRL-A to collapse this video-animationtool again.

- now you ask how I will put things into higher tracks....well...I use gap-clips to adjust the magnetic timeline. It is fairly easy. At the end of the project when I go through it all anway to check audio I will add gapclips and position them where I need to lift clips higher up (or lower on audio). This is one of the setbacks of the magentic timeline....but IMO it is by far not as long as what the magnetism saves me in time during the actual edit). 

- when you want to fix several audio-tracks that are attached to a video, don´t detach audio, but instead open the clip in a timeline of its own. I made myself a keyboard shortcut for that. there you can toggle and edit the audio without losing sync and then collapse it back to the videoclip.

5429 items and growing, database still untested.

I have now ingested pretty much all filmclips and some songs. there will be several more audioclips and animation out of Motion or AfterEffects, but I guess 5500 will be where this project will end up sizewise.

FCPX seems to handle this load of clips easily (keep in mind it uses all of my 16GB RAM right now!).

When in List mode the Event Browser is snappy. When in Icon Mode I need to wait a little while changing keywordcollection or Folder, but nothing unusual. While I stay within a folder/collection there is no delay or lag at all.

FCP7 constantly crashed on me while scrolling, when I had bins with many clips and thumbnails activated . FCPX does not mind to show dozens of clips with waveforms in the Event Browser. That is a surprise to me for a .0 release.

Then again it crashed twice today when I imported animations (ProRes422 movs). So it is not perfect yet, but it is definitely workable.

One little feature would be useful in the Eventbrowser: Now I have listview with the selceted clip showing one line, or I have icon-view where clips simply fill the lines and then drop into the next line. that´s hard to scroll through. I would like a iconview where every clip has its own line regardless of its duration. That would be a cool addition to the slider that allows to select seconds, minutes or ALL in the icon-view settings.

I miss my MXO2

well well......while everything runs smoothly I really have to complain about the missing Broadcast monitoring. I am used to have three screens running (one for bins / events, one for timeline, viewer, scopes, one for the screen itself.

Matrox cannot provide me with drivers for FCPX to output high quality, only preview Q. That is a no-no. Apple are you listening? I have to rely on my scopes now. I wish even more I had an option to show 4 scopes in the "CMD-7 window"......or is it there and I can´t find it?

Roadtrip over, now the real editing starts and FCPX is working still

We are back home, the race is over. Over are the long days on the motorbike/in the trunk of a car.

As you have noticed we only did some basic editing on the road. Those clips were mainly made to show the racers at their prizegiving. So it was not artistic editing and we had no time for audioediting, but killed the atmosounds and put music on top. The goal was to see how fast FCPX can be, and if you consider we had shooting days that lasted up to 15 hours, then ingested 500 clips and more and then edited a 2,5 minute piece (still the same people working, no assistant editor on set etc) all in a few hours on two macbooks then those "webclips" are great and they helped to motivate the racebikers to saddle up the next day again. I doubt Avid could have been faster.....or premiere....maybe Edius has the same speed.

BTW we shot a few nice interview-sets beside the race also...so don´t worry, just because there are none in our small daily clips. doesn´t mean we didn´t shoot any.

Ok, what happened FCPX-wise: Once I got home I mirrored the BEAST working disk...again.
Our workflow is finally set and I learned a lot these days. Here´s how my plan would be now and is for the future:

1. Offload all original data from cameracards into main RAID "BEAST" (WD MyBook SE 4TB RAID-0). I sorted the Folders by "Day-Shooter-Camera".
2. On XDCam material: send it through XDCam transfer into a new directory "Day-Shooter".
3. On h264...leave it where it is.
4. Now back all these files up onto a small 2,5 inch drive
5. Format camera cards
6. In FCP import the material and click "Optimize Media". I wouldn´t click "Copy media" anymore. That would mean (and does so on a few days of this project) that I have on the same drive the native footage, then the Copy of the native footage and then the Optimized media. Not necessary when I have a mirrored image of my Events and Projects folders with all optimized media anyway.
7. Mirror "BEAST" to a 3,5`` backup-drive.
8. Every now and then I also copy the "CurrentVersion" Final Cut Files from the Events and Projects.

So in the end I have the native camerafootage, a copy of that, then the FCPX structure and a copy of that as well. 4x safety......and preferably transport the copies in different bags/cars ....we didn´t do that though.

Ok, when we got home as I said we mirrored the project to a brandnew disk. Now I have a Status Quo after the race, which I leave in the closet and work on as before with the other disks.

And finally move to the MacPro.....aahhh...nice. As I said 64-bit is hungry and my Macbook might simply be too old now for 1080p work with thousands of clips. It is still great for dailies and such though.

The BIG TEST....MERGING AGAIN
Then....I had to merge the main project with the daily Events from Stefan. If you read all of the blog you remember this didn´t work to good last time. I started with his "stage one". It took an hour...spinning beachball and all. When it was done....I had lost all folders and smart collections as expected. But the keyword collections from the Events "Peakbreak" and "Stefan Etappe 1" were there. So far so good.

Now I selected all other dayevents from Stefan (2-6) and dragged them onto Peakbreak and started the merge. I left it running overnight.......came back in the morning and it looked good, but it felt terrible. Clicking an icon meant a spinning beachball for a minute......so did we now finally break FCPX and my Mac Pro? The RAM was used up...I have 16GB installed and had 23MB left.

No, we didn´t. I quit FCPX which gave me my 16GB back, restarted the machine and started FCPX again. Now it is running happily again. This database-merging stuff seems to be hard on the machine.

Next step....importing the last stage and importing all material from the third camera. This is the P2 stuff that we didn´t have time to ingest yet. This is currently happening and I am well beyond 4500 quicktime clips, add audio, synced compound clips, grafx and so on.....the project is relatively big now. Not a feature film yet, but a shortfilm easily. During the P2 import I am left with 300MB RAM....so apparently the RAM and GPU do a lot of work, while the CPU is almost idle right now.

What´s interesting on the P2 DVCProHD import is the fact that I had errors on my Macbook...but not on my Mac Pro. No idea why, but wanna share the info.

NOW the REAL EDIT STARTS
Ok, ingest should be over soon. a few more GoPro Shots need to be transcoded (I do that in MPEG streamclip. because I don´t want to have 80GB of GoPro rubbish in my project but select them outside FCPX).

Then we start the edit - teh real edit - where broadcast rules apply....the audio needs to be proper, the colours need to be legal and the story needs to be in place.

We have 2 deadlines looming and need to be ready to output to tape. So we will have to leave the FCPX universe one day for that. I will keep you guys updated with screenshots and findings and also have a few more features I would like and miss now. So maybe Apple listens in here and takes notes.....

3400 clips and counting....

Ok, one worry we had seems not to be justified. We have now reached almost threeandahalfthousand clips in the main project (oops...I mean event). Besides we have now 6 day-events from Stefan with about 300 clips each.

FCPX didn´t crash on me for 2 days....so maybe it wants to be pushed a little ;-)

But...I do still have spinning beachballs when jumping between events and also when I am transcoding new material in the background, while editing a project. Sometimes 10 seconds, sometimes 2 minutes. I am quite sure it is a limitation with my laptop and the 4GB it has. They are maxed out all the time. 64-bit is hungry!

Another thing we noticed: when you transcode material to ProRes it is just smooth. You can edit XDCam just as smooth. When you mix them.....FCPX strats thinking or drops frames. Again I can tell you more when I am on my MacPro, because I also think this is a problem with my 2008 MacbookPro. 1080p is just too much for that "old machine".

We are having the last stage today, will wrap with about 10 more interviews tonight. Then we will merge the whole Event library to about 6000 clips and items on the big machine. I will tell you what happens, because now come the interesting days: edit for TV networks is a little bit more challenging than webclips.....but we will get some sleep in between, so I am confident it will be a breeze :D

P.S.: Daily tip: I had problems at first with the organization of events and imports. I used the FCP7 method and imported folders and said FCPX should make the foleders to keyword collections. So for instance I ended up with DCIM and 7DEOS folders everytime.....that bugged me. Now what i do is this: create a folder for the day (e.g. Etappe 1), then make a keyword-collection "E1Alban7D" (that means stage 1, cameraman Alban, camera 7D) and now rightclick here and import files right into this collection. Somehow this makes the initial import into an EVENT cleaner for me on such a huge PROJECT (which they call EVENT the stu.....aaaahhh I won´t go there now)


Anyway...stage 5 is online now
http://vimeo.com/26501122

The F3 experience and some lost items.

Today I lost something precious....noooo not in FCPX...I lost the rubber on the viewfinder of the EX3. According to the rental house SONY charges 136 Euros for that piece. And there are people complaining about the 300-Euro FCPX? Sheeesh, where´s common sense nowadays?

We didn´t only bring FCPX as a test-tool this week. Stefan also brought his brandnew F3 as you know. Since I do most of the editing and he hardly allows me to touch it - ever-  I can only say the files are treated just as EX files and the images are gorgeous. It has this lush look that I miss with the FS100 and the AF100. F3 is just a different league. A 5D with videohousing.

Anyway, here´s Stefan´s report about using the F3 in a racesituation: 

first off: i got mine about a week before this project, and i had no time whatsoever to really dig into all the features - especially picture profiles and how she reacts to different settings. 

so all of this using the f3 in a sports documentary is more "let's see what happens if we use it" kind of thing.

so how does it work in such a run'n'gun scenario?

perfect. period. 

i didn't expect it to be that great. really. 

workflow/speed: it's just like working with an EX-1.

color: as i had no time to prep i downloaded the abelcine-settings for the picture profiles and ran with them. until today. i copied my own ex-1 settings to the f3 and will be testing them tomorrow, for i'm not too happy with the colors yet. i like a neutral flat image. a matter of taste, really

but how well the F3 resolves in the blacks is mind blowing. if you look in the EVF you might think that all the info is gone in the blacks, but once you watch it on the computer you can see stuff in the blacks you never dreamed of. we often had to shoot straight into the sun and the F3 resolved the shadows very nice.

the ex-1 is a very decent camera for what it is, but the F3 is a different league.

i took off my 3 Stage Matte Box 4x5,65" for the setup is just too big to be

constantly be pulled out of my bag, shot handheld, then put back, then pulled out again… the F3 is heavier than the EX-1. you feel it.

as my MTF adapter isn't "powered" i have no VR on my Nikon Glass. i was worried for shakiness, but as it turned out the camera is heavy enough that you can work without VR very well! (still i wish i had VR as an option… ;-) 

this is one of the reasons why i don't like the VDSLR/RED Epic Form factor. you always need some form of support to work with it handheld. 

the glass i use mainly is a tamron 28-75 2.8 

as you already have seen i also used a sigma 10-20 3.5 for more extreme pictures.

both are wonderful glass but i was worried about pulling focus.

i use a TRUSMT T3 Follow focus which works really great for the price. it feels and works very solid. i found it 2 weeks prior to this project on ebay and am very happy with it.

i wish i had the samyang 85mm and 35mm 1.4, for Samyang does what i miss on my glass: the focus-ring has a much longer focus throw…. and the glass is wonderful! (ed. Alban: Ha, thank god I have the Samyang 85 on my 7D)

so, the f3 performs very very well, even in this challenging situation.

what was meant as an experiment turned out to be perfectly suitable.

i sure will get the s-log option sooner or later, because this is what this camera 

really needs to unleash it's full potential.

but i must confess that it will take me some time to really squeeze out the best picture possible with this beast. it took me 2 months on the EX-1 to find settings that i was happy with - so i think that there's some room for improvement to what i see 

now.

so i'm very happy with it. the pictures are wonderful - a huge step-up in picture quality comparing it to my EX-1 and D7000.

But do you need it? That's the question, i know…

i think nowadays you don't buy the gear for the client any more. heck, if commercials are shot on a 5D and the client is super happy, why should i spend 5 times the money on a F3?

 i bought it, because i think it makes my work better. it has the handling of an EX-1 and that's what i miss with DSLRs. Does the client see the difference? i don't know. in fact, do i care? I want a tool that i have fun with, that can face a lot of challenges, and challenges me to become a better photographer.

and the F3 has all that i missed on a feature film project i did last year with my EX-1.

btw, the mic that comes with the camera is superb.

what bugs me:

there's no joystick any more and that in run'n'gun situations you can't easily reach the ND with the monitor flipped out.. but hey, just dial in 6db or 9db gain - you won't notice at all ;-)

and i'm not too sure if i will use in the rain because i can see the internals beneath the ventilation shafts and i have no decent rain cover yet.

The battery drain is much higher than on the EX-1, I guess double energy consumption.

Stage 3 online

http://vimeo.com/26412084

All F3, all with the Sigma 10-20

If FCPX would already allow for native XDCam editing we would be happy campers. But we are anyway.

Stage 2 is online - FCPX is rocking our workflow

New clip online. We are getting the groove of FCPX. It rocks pretty bad. We are shocked how fast you can shoot out such a clip.
http://vimeo.com/26401989

We might have a little time to post here today.
In short. FCPX is fast, very fast.

Watch the clip and guess how long it takes to edit such a piece. I tell you it takes half the time.

here´s the clip for stage 1

http://vimeo.com/26342577

FCPX is still working and we get deeper and deeper into the features

Hey again…..after 450kms and 11.000 altitudemeters on a Yamaha or shooting out of a the open backdoor of a car, at 100km/h downhills and edits throughout 4 nights we are pretty tired already.

But it is fun, at least as long as the weather is dry. And FCPX does treat us well so far. After the little merge problem everything went fine. 

This is our modern TV studio packed into one petrol bag: 2 MacBooks, 8 TB of harddrive space on 3 devices (more on our backup system later in the blog), IPads as secondary monitors (via AirPlay app).

We know you want to see a shootout between the F3 and the DSLRs....but at the moment all you get is the allmighty GoPro:

A screenshot from one of the downhills today between Austria and Italy

Great stuff in the new FCPX

- it is just great the way Final Cut X allows an editor to edit away while the ingest/re-wrap/transcode runs in the background. No more waiting for files to be ready, just edit away. 

- the option to share events and then move and (if you are lucky) merge them is saving a lot of time.

- Trim-Start/Trim-End are now on my keyboard as "1" and "2" and it is my favorite editing and trimming tool. 

- This is how I make a Roughcut with Trim-Start and Trim-End commands: 

1. Point FCPX at folder where new dailies are. Tell FCPX to import/copy and create optimized media.
2. Start editing immediately; throw all clips into a new Project called DayXroughcut; FCPX will automatically switch to the ProRes files once they are ready.
3. JKL through timeline/project and hit "1" and"2" when I want a file to start/end; clips I don´t want are selected and thrown out with backspace; FCPX will always close the gaps for me.
4. DONE. 300 dailies are done in 20 - 40 minutes 
5. yes, if I now needed to output to tape i´d be busted with the current audiotools, but I don´t have to, so leave me alone.......

- the new colour is maybe more powerful, than we thought at first glance. I don´t like the colourboard, but as an option for people who use it little, because all they do is newsstuff or colourmatched cameras, it is fast. And it is very deep once you start digging into it. But no replacement for colour really. Just a MUCH better Colourcorrector within an NLE. 

- Background Render is GREAT, but we turned it up to 20 seconds delay, so it waits 20 seconds before starting. Background render causes spinning beachballs on my MacBook (late 2008; 4GB RAM), but didn´t so in my test on my MacPro (early 2009; 16GB RAM)

- when you crop and press ALT, you crop centered - nice…at least that is consistent

- when you add a STILL to your timeline, you can then adjust it to any length; in FCP7 it stuck to a certain length. So defaulting an imported STILL to 4 seconds doesn´t stop you from making it 1 minute long in the timeline; 

- 64-bit: FCP and Compressor are maxing out the machine constantly, using all RAM and CPU…..finally the investments in the hardware paid off in time-saving

Not great at all

- when I have a disk that contains FCP events plugged in, I cannot eject it from my Mac without quitting FCPX first

- in some dialogues you can apply setting numerical, in some not. We are missing the option to change settings with the mousewheel. All this is not consistent throughout the UI at all.

- VERY BAD is the screenlayout. It is not made for a laptop, which seems weird, since everyone says FCPX is made for MacBooks. It is not workable. When you do a colorcorrection you have 4 windows open and we wonder why they chose a one-viewer layout when you cant use the gained space by clicking away the libraries and put the colortools (waveform, vectorscope etc) there. We want a two-screen layout and the option to click away parts of the screens to put others there. Same goes for Motion BTW, which is one-screen program now and that is just so wrong.

Look at this photo....the Event library on the left is not needed during colourcorrection or audioediting. But I can´t make it smaller or click it away. WASTED SPACE!

- at the moment FCPX is quite unstable. It crashes more frequently than FCP7; but that crashed often on me also; twice a day I´d say; now it´s 5 times a day)

- Curves and Levels would be nice in the colorcorrector….and pleaseplease Apple, we know you read this :D…please make the colourboard a colourwheel again (optional is fine with us)

- all the automatic stuff is useless: match-color? we tried on different clips and it shifts the Hue to weird colours. Why stabilize all your imported clips? Audio enhance the same…it is much better to do these tasks on the few clips that need fixing instead of wasting the time and rendertime. These bells and whistles are really not for us pros. 

- MOTION: make a text layer. Open the inspector and there are lots of attributes to be adjusted. Sometimes you need some space in the inspector so you hide various attributes. Now go to another layer and get back to your text-layer....there are all the attributes tabs open again....so Motion doesn´t remeber your settings......annoying....

Clip follows soon......

We are back online....

Sorry, but we have been in an internetfree zone for two days, hence we could´t upload our first clips, because even the organization of the race was blacked out.

Here is the first clip we created…..

http://vimeo.com/26287915

hope you like it. 

BTW the MOVE EVENT command works. If you read our earlier blog-entires from this project you know we had trouble merging Events.

We have not tried to move from the same drive, because there is not much time for testing right now anymore. 

After working with FCPX for 2 weeks in tests and now several days in a real-world project there are some more findings:

The EDITOR is extremely powerful. It is quick, intuitive and does help to shorten editing time - a LOT. The new shortcuts seem to work good also, but if you can´t give up your old ones just remap the keyboard.

The media management is very very helpful, but it requires a new way of organizing.....

But there are some thing in FCPX we would like to have changed/optimized. 

A small list:

- what really annoys us is the way you pick and drag in FCPX especially in the Event Browser. Often you wanna drag a clip to the timeline or a keyword, but instead you select a range. And if you want to move, for instance, a keyword and drag it into a folder a few lines below I often select a bunch of lines. I need to drag left first to detach the line/keyword collection/folder and then can move it. 

- another HUGELY annoying "feature": In and Out points are lost when you click elsewhere. Yes, you can select a favorite for the clip and keyword it and all that is great and fine, but if I want to set an I and O then that´s all I want and when I get back the last I/O should still be there. 

- spinning beachball quite often. it recovers after a few seconds, still the software seems to think a lot and stops responding…..

A little tip: I ran into this problem: I had a song and needed to shorten it. So I cut out a piece. The Song was below the primary storyline. So when I cut it I have a second audioclip connecting to the primary storyline. Now I wanted to move the clip it was connected to. Well, the audio went with it. 

Solution: right-click the clip from the primary storyline and detach it from there. It becomes a secondary storyline. The primary gets a GAP clip, and your song connection stays. Replace the gapclip with a new filmclip.

The race starts, we have the first setback with FCPX

Today we imported footage in a new flavor: P2, DVCProHD Material shot as 1080p and 720p with 32 frames per second.

When importing P2 you have to use "File>Import from camera", and not "Import Files". We left the "Remove Pulldown" on. We chose to also click on "Optimize Media".

 The import took a while and we got several error-messages that stalled the import, so we had to sit next to it, but all clips ended up in the Event. The 1080p material was quicktime files and the 720p slomo-stuff showed up as P2-plugin files in my Event.

Then we ingested also XDCam and h.264 like yesterday. All seems to run smooth so far (as expected). The Merge Events works also. The only delay we had was when my h.264 was transcoded, I could´t merge the events but had to wait for that task to finish. Apparently the database needs to be in a quiet state before messing with it……that´s why you can´t rename folders or delete folders when background tasks are running.

The funny part is now the transcoding and re-wrapping takes a lot of time…the selection of your favorites and the edit itself is a "small part of the job". 

The new keyword selections are great for a race like this. We give every rider his racenumber (bibnumber) as a keyword (e.g. #112). Then created a folder Riders and now whenever we select a shot we keyword the number to it and can easily identify all shots for every participaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

major breakdown.

what happened now?

we did the same as yesterday. Stefan made his new Event with today's footage, copied it onto the Transfer Drive and Alban merged the Events onto Beast.

after a while, spinning beachball while merging. what to do? wait it out? force quit? after a while we decided to force quit FCPX.

So we reopened FCPX and tataaa, we have our original Event without files and collections, and the same event with the suffix "temp" with all the collections but without the media….and now?

we decided to close FCPX, and reopen it. This time our original Event found the files, but all the tags/metadata/keywords and collections were gone but still present in the "temp" project.

at that moment the producer - alban - was ready to pull the plug on our little project here and restart with fcp7. i disagreed.

thanks to the decision to copy all media into the event all the files are still there. the only thing missing is the metadata in the original Event.

in the "temp" Event we have all the metadata, but not the connection.

now we tried to copy one file from the original event into the "original media" folder of the "temp" event, and after reopening FCPX the "temp" event reconnected this file correctly.

so we thought we just copy the FCPX "currentversionFCP" of the "temp" event into the folder structure of the original event and thereby getting our metadata structure back.

this worked.

now we retry merging stefan's Event of today with the Master-Event on Alban's Macbook Pro

and are still waiting for the spinning beachball to disappear…

hmmm…

again dead…

forced quit, and then - same again…

so we again replaced the "currentversionFCP" of the original event with the "currentversionFCP" file from the suffixed "temp" event and all is back except for the projects already prepared. so be it.

now, instead of merging the two events we MOVE stefan's event onto Beast and will try to merge later… 

stefan's event moved without any problems.

well… 

more on this tomorrow, because it's after midnight now, we have to finish the dayclip somehow and pack our stuff for tomorrow at 8am the next stage begins

moving all of us to italy….

Day minus 1, setting up the project - merging logged events

That was the easy day; traveling, shooting some beauties around Millstaetter See, a lake in southern Austria, where Peakbreak will start tomorrow, and then capturing material from the F3 and the EX-3 and two DSLRs.

It wasn´t much so we tested the sharing of events.

We are 3 shooters and 2 editors with MacBooks.

What we try to do is this: 

Macbook Pro A has the main drive, we called her BEAST, and the main Event on it, we called it Peakbreak 2011, what an inventive name.

 On Macbook A Alban imports his footage. EX-3 material gets transcoded via SONY XDCam Transfer and then imported as a folder, h.264 files get transcoded within FCP-X.

On Macbook B Stefan transcodes his F3 material via XDCam Transfer and imports the clips into an Event he called Stefan Peakbreak Transfer.

Here´s what we tried and what happened: Stefan copied the event (File>Duplicate Event) onto a mobile-drive. We took the drive with and connected it on MBPA. FCPX recognized the event on the drive and showed it with the content in the event browser. Now I dragged that event on top of my event and FCPX responded with a "Merge Events" dialogue. 

FCPX MOVED the event´s files onto Beast and in the main event I ended up with the one keyword selection and the material from Stefan´s day. That was easy!

All that was good. Problem. The material was moved, so when we plugged in the drive with his Mac again (BTW, needed to close FCPX to unmount that drive), the event was gone (it had been moved after all). 

Tomorrow he will make a new event and keyword collection (with his favorites) and we will merge that again into the main event on my machine.

In the end I will have all in one event in my drive and FCPX, he will have 9 or 10 events on his machine. In the end Stefan will have to merge all his events into one, by simply dragging their icons onto a master event.

There´s one problem. Stefan tagged his best clips as favorites. Then made a smart collection called "FavsDay-1" based on the tag: "Rating is Favourites"

Ok, now he made a second Event to test what would happen tomorrow. There he imported different clips and again created a Smart Collection  called "FavsDay-2" based on the tag: "Rating is Favourites"

NOW comes the bad news: when you merge these two events, the smart collections BOTH disappear instead of merging into one based on the tag "Favourites". Keyword collections carried over in merged events, but smart collections don´t. Apparently you need to have unique smart collections for every event. 

So we are just asking ourselves if we ever use smart collections, because you never know if and when you need a merge of events. Workaround would be to put a keyword on every smart collection before merging events. 

Using Peakbreak as our first FCP-X Megatest

We are two film-producers. And we plan to put FCP-X to a real test this week.
Stefan can be found here www.krost-audiovisual.com
Alban is living here www.eggermedia.com

We are about to produce several films and formats in 1080p for this event: www.peakbreak.com

Peakbreak is a nine day bicycle race through the Austrian and Italian Alps. The riders will have to cycle 1.000km and over 19.000 altitude meters. So they are up for a huge task.
Thankfully the food is awesome in the areas we cross, so there is always the chance of a stop beside the road.....

We are following the race on motorbikes and in cars with a SONY PMW-F3, a Canon 7D, a Nikon D7000, a SONY EX-1, a SONY EX-3 and a Panasonic HVX200E. So we will get our mix of footage-formats from XDCam HD to DVCPro-HD and h.264; add audio recording via a Zoom H4N and you know we are in for a heavy load of transcoding, synchronising etc.

If you take into consideration that we will put out daily clips on the web, produce two documentaries for the national TV-networks ORF and ServusTV and also plan on making a one hour director´s cut for the Bicycle Filmfestival - all in 2 weeks, then you know we are gonna squeeze any editing system down to its knees.

We decided to use the brandnew Final Cut Pro X, X as in 10.0 , ten-ZERO! Yes, we use a dotzero software. Why? Because we tried it and since then hate everything else. It is SOOO fast, at least we believe so. Until now. Ask me in 3 weeks what it is about. Basically we think it is the future. So why wait, if it´s already around the corner?

Problems we will have to solve:
- how do we import and manage hundreds of dailies that have to be tagged with dozens of rider´s-numbers/names and streetcorners etc
- ingesting and mixing tons of different formats
- editing itself
- compositing, tracking, effects
- grading without color?
- output without dedicated audiotracks? huh? well, we think we have a workaround inplace....and if we are lucky Apple brings an update within the next 3 weeks anyway.....how did MC Hammer sing? "PRAY!"...that was it.

We started shooting last week in Vienna where we hooked up with the bicycle-club RADCORE. www.radcore.org
They have several members in the race, and they had a great garage as a set for the interviews. We can´t wait to meet them again and shoot them racing.

Today was a shoot on Kitzbüheler Horn, one of Austria´s steepest mountains, which will be a time-trial stage in a few days.

We are importing right now and get back with results soon ;-)
Stay tuned and cross your fingers.....