Re: DS and FCP

[paulingvarsson(at)mac.com]

Hi Phil,

I recently bought an HD capable FCP system out of curiosity, mainly due 
to my worries about DS and Avid in general.  I was very surprised to be 
asked about the availability of the system almost immediately.  I've 
already more than covered the cost of the purchase plus I now know how 
to use FCP efficiently (but not as comfortably as I would use DS or MC 
Symphony etc).

I don't know how MC proficient you are now but I would recommend a book 
called 'FCP for Avid Editors' by Diana Weynand if you're thinking of 
going down that road.

FCP is a beast not to be ignored - attach the right hardware (eg 
scope/monitors/speakers) and it stands very well - I enjoy editing on 
it it feels very natural.  You cannot expect to do everything within 
FCP. Shake for effects and compositing, Motion and After Effects for 
graphics etc.

FCP 5 now has a feature called 'round tripping' - eg you select a bunch 
of clips on your timeline, right click and say - 'send to shake', you 
then make your comp in shake, save, then switch to FCP - your clips 
have now the appearance of one clip (just like a composite container) 
that you can render within FCP.  The best bit is that you can then 
select this clip and choose to modify the contents within shake.  This 
to me is virtually exactly like the way Ds deals with composite 
containers.  This round tripping works with Motion too.  Apparently due 
to limitations of XML that is doing the leg work behind the scenes 
freeze frames and speed effects get screwed up - this can be sorted by 
replacing the speed clip with a rendered version of itself without the 
speed settings.

FCP is not a realtime system.  In Avid land we all expect realtime to 
mean 'at the quality to lay back to tape' - in FCP realtime means it 
drops resolution and frames to maintain realtime playback.  This can be 
advantageous if you are working on a multilayered seq to get the jist 
of the timings of your layers.  You might get one layer of '3 way 
colour correction' without many adjustments to play back at full res.

This brings me onto colour correction.  FCP fanatics will tell you that 
you can do everything with about 8 different plugins - but I find it 
painful to work like that.  But you can get good results, especially 
when referring to a proper scope etc.  I am looking with particular 
interest at a product called Final Touch HD from www.siliconcolor.com 
(this works with FCP using XML therefore suffers the same limitations) 
this looks great but although it says 'realtime' it is only for preview 
- you still have to render 'new' media for FCP to link to.  It works 
totally in 32bit and supports control surfaces for colour correction 
which does interest me - i've never used these as I've always graded 
with curves on Symphony or DS.

I'm really pleased that I spent the time and cash on FCP - i'm not 
totally confident on it yet but for the jobs that I do it could be 
perfect and i'm looking at this Final Touch and a Mackie MCU for mixing 
audio.

One major downside at the moment is that the world of FCP seems to be 
full of amateur grade thinking and client responsibility.  I've already 
had to hire someone else's kit and then that person as an editor for a 
job that I couldn't cover.  I did this with the understanding that my 
kit would always have priority and the client was my client.  Sure 
enough 2 weeks later I hear that that person had undercut me and my kit 
- something I had discussed with them and was assured would not happen. 
 Maybe this is just harsh business but i couldn't imagine this 
happening in the Avid world where trust, reputation and relationships 
gets you far.

Hope this helps, sure i'll bump into you soon.  PS FCP editor freelance 
rates seem to be almost half that of DS :(

Paul



On 31 Oct 2005, at 17:33, phil gadd wrote:

> Has anyway had any experience in using FCP?
>
>
> www.philgadd-dseditor.tv
> phil(at)philgadd-dseditor.tv
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ds(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-ds(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf
> Of John Heiser
> Sent: 31 October 2005 17:27
> To: DS(at)Softimage.COM
> Subject: RE: DS and FCP
>
> Agreed, Wes, and thanks for the clarification. Though I tried to gently
> pin the blame on DS, I should have also restated your product's
> reputation as a fine tool for passing projects around from app to app. 
> I
> think everybody knows this sort of situation is not the fault of
> Automatic Duck.
>
> ____________________________
> John Heiser
> Avid DS Editor
> o2ideas
> Birmingham, Alabama, USA
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ds(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-ds(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf
> Of Wes Plate
> Sent: Monday, October 31, 2005 11:00 AM
> To: DS(at)Softimage.COM
> Subject: RE: DS and FCP
>
>
> On Mon Oct 31  7:55 , 'John Heiser' <johnh(at)o2ideas.com> sent:
>
> > But a very experienced editor sent me an FCP>Duck OMF last year which
> was,
> > in every sense, awful.
>
> DS definitely has OMF import problems, this is why our web site
> specifically singles out DS as unsupported.  We are hopeful
> that eventually DS might adopt standardized AAF 1.1 import, especially
> Edit Protocol, and maybe then things will improve.
>
>
> --
>
> Wes Plate
> Automatic Duck, Inc.
> http://www.automaticduck.com
>
>
>
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Paul Ingvarsson
Freelance Editor
Avid DS / Avid Symphony
+44 (0) 7768 016948

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