ProVideo Coalition.com: the EDITBLOG on PVC by Scott Simmons

There is a lot of little things added to FCP 7. Things like being able to remove all of the “through” edits in a timeline at once:

This is major timesaver when prepping a project for online or an EDL for a color grading session.

There’s now little tic marks to indicate the 4x3 title safe areas on a 16x9 edit:

The Timecode Viewer is very clean and almost perfect with one glaring omission. It can be moved and resized and the clip info that can be displayed at the bottom can be resized as well by dragging the little divider line:

The omission is that the Timecode Viewer can’t display the source timecode for clips in the timeline. Nor does it display the information that had been added for those clips in the timeline. I know there’s the question of how it would work if you have multiple video layers but even it if would display V1 info then that would be a good start. That’s not much information in the help files about the Timecode Viewer so maybe it’s due for improvements the next time around. It’s a good start.

Oh, and Livetype has been put out of its misery but it should be left behind when doing the new install of Final Cut Studio.

And there are some fails as well

One selling point of FCP 7 is Improved render management (from the Apple website):

I can find no evidence of this improved render management in any of the operations that I have tried. The biggest render pain-in-the-ass in FCP has been when you toggle Clip Enable or turn off the visibility of a video layer you lose your render files:

There has always been the ability to get them back with an undo and my hope was this would have been fixed with this “improved render management” but it works as it always has ... as in it doesn’t. Renders aren’t preserved when performing ripple/roll trims either, be in with tools in the timeline or the Trim window. Neither are they preserved if you have a rendered clip say on V1 and you move a clip above it on V2. Immediately move the V2 clips and the render is gone. If renders aren’t preserved in any of these tasks then I wonder WHAT Apple means by improved render management. These are the most common ways that I lose a render so I would love for someone to tell me what this really means. If you know please comment below.

Speaking of rendering, you may have heard there is “background rendering” in FCP 7 but that’s not true. There are more background processes than ever before so maybe background rendering is the next step:

You can export clips in the background via the fantastic new Share menu but you can’t background render. The new Share menu is a great addition and full of options (include burning a DVD or Blu-ray disc). It will encode in the background and allow you to keep working. The app did slow down a bit when doing background encoding and the only crash I saw was this bit of madness that occurred when I tried to use the virtual cluster on my MacPro when encoding for a Mobile Me upload:

A force quit are reboot of the app fixed the issue. It didn’t occur when I encoded via share and didn’t use the virtual cluster.

The other big beef I have with this FCP7 update is in how they are marketing “Camera-native editing” support and I call bullshit:

This is simply not true, at least from the standpoint of DVCPRO HD P2 and RED media that I have here to test. There are settings in the Log and Transfer tool for “Native” RED and P2 AVC-Intra. But bring in RED footage as native, for example, and it gets rewrapped as a .mov file (as it always has) even though the clip appears in the project without the .mov extension. I’m sorry but THIS IS NOT NATIVE support if FCP has to rewrap these files. You just cannot “start editing right away” as you have to load up the Log and Transfer tool and wait for it to do its thing. Even when using the new Automatic Transfer function might speed things along so you don’t have to babysit L&T all the time you still aren’t going to be “editing right away.” If you are an editor working on-set and need to do a quick rough of a scene and the runner brings you a 32 gig P2 card full of media it is going to take time to get that into the .mov format so you can edit, even if it’s as fast a copy time from the card to your media drive. That is not native editing with media you can “edit right away.” If this process is different with XDCAM and AVC-Intra footage please leave a comment below. We discussed this very topic at length on Studio Daily recently and the comments are a good read, especially if you would like to one day really edit camera native files in FCP. But not with Final Cut Pro 7 ... despite what Apple’s marketing bullshit says.

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Hi Scott

The “Render Management” improvements are a bit hard to find, and I don’t know how deep or how far it goes, but one example of where it does show is when appying Apple’s Time Code Reader & Generator filters ... when trimming/extending/blading such clips the renders are not invalidated in part or in whole quite as easily or as often as before. I’d test more of teh same but I don’t have FCP available to me at the mo.

As for the “native camera codec” support, well Apple’s meaning is that the audio/video essence of the camera codecs is supported ie no transcode is needed ... but yes, that essence still needs to be rewrapped in a Quicktime container for FCP to recognize them. Yeah, I know it seems a bit tenuous but its just marketing. It’s native support for the codec (as stated) but NOT native support for the container.

Cheers
Andy

Posted by Andy on 07/27 at 01:11 AM

“It’s native support for the codec (as stated) but NOT native support for the container.”

This IMHO it’s not native. If it can drop into the timeline in that same format that comes off of the camera then it isn’t native. Sure we may just be talking semantics here but I think it’s important that someone takes them to task on this because it’s really bending the truth at best.

More than that it bugs me when the marketing says “you can start editing right away” which you clearly can’t. Rewrapping and/or even copying to a new media drive isn’t editing right away. Avid’s Avid Media Access allows you to edit right away, this doesn’t. Shame on Apple for marketing it like this.

Posted by Scott Simmons on 07/27 at 06:44 AM

True, it’s only marketing - but what does it matter?
Every editor knows immediately that this is BS, even if it was possible to edit all the recording formats natively.

To “start editing right away” you’d have to record DIRECTLY onto a hard drive which you then take to your editing bay to do the editing. That simply isn’t easily possible at the moment when working in the field. Even with dedicated devices like the AJA KI Pro which records in ProRes422, you’d have to transfer the files to another hard drive first. And if the transfer takes as long as the transcoding - what does it really matter?

I personally think that’s not even desirable, because then some people would start working with the native recording without any kind of backup, at least on the recording media you just copied it from.

Posted by Nino on 07/27 at 09:31 AM

I think it matter quite a bit, especially when you market and sell a tool as having a feature it doesn’t really have. Say you have a P2 card and you need to slap and edit together ASAP before you strike the set. With true native editing you can slam that cut together right off of the P2 card. Or say you have a day’s worth of P2 media that has been backed up to a hard drive and the director wants to sit down and plow through the footage before you quite for the night. It’s going to take a while to import all that through Log and Transfer where if there was true “native” editing you could load up that media instantly and being to work. And any camera that is recording to a hard drive, in theory, should be capable of native editing of some kind (providing the bandwidth requirement meet the connection) but with FCP it ain’t gonna happen, no matter what marketing says.

Posted by Scott Simmons on 07/27 at 09:42 AM

Posted this to one of the other FCP articles, but this seems like a better place:

I just have a few questions about the new FCP(to which I’m pretty sure I already know the answer). These are pretty much the only things I look for in each new FCP:

Is the QT gamma bug fixed?

Is the >8 bit RGB bug fixed?

Is the >100 IRE (or <0 IRE) to RGB bug fixed?

Is output the same through media manager as other export options?

Any word on these longstanding, hair-wrenching bugs?

Posted by Charles Angus on 07/27 at 03:02 PM

Hey Scott,
Any word on adding markers diretly to multi-clips? We do a ton of multi-camera work on our reality shows, and the wonky disappearing markers made us crazy. When you add a marker to a multi-clip (after it’s been made) do they, in fact, stick?
Thanks,
Biagio

Posted by Biagio of JokeAndBiagio on 07/27 at 03:17 PM

Just discovered one MAJOR bug when migrating projects from the Final Cut Pro 6 to 7:

When you have variable framerate clips in your projects, the new version will of course apply the new speed tools to your clips, but this results in a completely different timing and therefore different clips with different in- and outpoints!

Apple should really do something about this! I know it’s not a good idea to change programme versions mid-project, but even if you open up old projects at a later date this will happen. They need to fix this, many projects consist of dozens of variable framerate clips.

Posted by Nino on 07/27 at 04:16 PM

Hey Biagio
According to the release docs on the topic of Markers in Multicam:

“You can now prepare multicam projects faster thanks to new support for markers. Retain markers on multiclips when you switch angles, and add marker notes to make multicam projects more efficient when you’re working with multiple editors.”

... so it does sound as if that one is addressed.

Cheers
Andy

Posted by Andy on 07/27 at 06:22 PM

Has anyone used the ichat theatre feature?
We are just capturing a project in FCP6 and thinking about switching to FCP7 before editing for this feature alone. We’re in Canada and our co producers are on the other side of the country. They want daily FTP uploads up the edits and wondering if/how this works and if this may be worth the almost mid project upgrade (gulp).

Any suggestions on this???

Thanks

Posted by mikedub on 07/28 at 11:24 AM

The reason you may be running into that crash is that exporting from FCP directly to a virtual cluster is not supported:

http://documentation.apple.com/en/compressor/usermanual/index.html#chapter=B&section=3a

and for FCS2:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1099

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 07/28 at 02:38 PM

A short update:

I was contacted by an Apple Sr. Product Manager for Final Cut Pro regarding the bug I mentioned in an earlier comment.

As requested, I sent him copies of my Final Cut Pro projects and pointed him to the areas that changed in the projects.

I hope to get feedback on whether or not this is a bug.
One way or another, we can be sure they are working on a solution IF indeed it is a bug.

Thanks for listening, Apple!

Posted by Nino on 07/30 at 12:57 PM

FCP7 works just like fcp6 for xdcam footage: it needs to wrap the mp4 files with mov wrappers.

That said, the Log & Transfer has been greatly improved, so much so that I’m using it now instead of Sony’s XDCAM transfer. It gives you the ability to rename clips, number them sequentially, AND keep the original clip name. Would have been nice to assign it to other columns than NAME in fcp, but still a big help.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 07/31 at 06:01 PM

Another huge fail is that Master Templates are displaying as white screens in FCP 7. Our workflows here revolve around the use of Motion templates, that was one of the biggest selling points for us when we upgraded to FCS 2. Templates open fine in Motion 4, but even Apple’s prebuilt templates fail to display in FCP 7.

From my very limited testing before I had to revert my workstation to a backup in order to bring it back online (the template bug was enough to do that), background exporting did cause FCP to take a performance hit. While the sharing window does give the option to select a cluster for encoding, clusters still don’t work when exporting via FCP. That to me is an other fail.

I do like the colored tabs and the new markers, but overall, I’m not convinced this would be a worthy upgrade for our entire production facility.

I’ve got some pretty big gripes about Soundtrack Pro 3, which still has interface problems with external video/audio playback ... the same issues that were present with STP2. I’m not impressed.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08/10 at 07:45 AM

I need to post a follow-up.

I passed on my initial report regarding the white screen/master template issue on to our Apple Enterprise representative, who passed it on to Apple Engineering. They were unable to replicate the issue, so I began further testing. There was a problem where FCP wasn’t recognizing custom templates that were saved to the main library, instead of the user library. A system reinstall was necessary to clear this issue.

FCP 7 is currently up and running on my machine with master templates displaying properly. So, that “fail” has been resolved.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08/11 at 02:53 PM

Magic Bullet Colorista was the culprit. A system reinstall probably wasn’t necessary. That was a plugin I forgot I had installed.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08/12 at 08:10 AM

I have a couple of questions about the new final cut release. With markers, can you now see clip markers in the canvas or still just in the viewer. For timecode markers, when you rearrange clips, do the markers follow. Can you now subclip multicam clips? and do the timecode markers move with the subclip?

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08/12 at 12:42 PM

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Kicking the tires on Final Cut Pro 7

It’s the little things we love the most

And there are some fails as well