Fcp4 (Final Cut Pro 4)

[Christian]

Hi All

Is anyone out there running FCP4 on a PAL project
successfully.

I would be very ineterested to hear of your experiences.

I'm also interested to hear what your impression of new features are, and how you may be using them i.e.Compression,Livetipe, Soundtrack. And what bugs etc you have found.

Christian

[Greg]

Originally posted by Christian
Hi All

Is anyone out there running FCP4 on a PAL project
successfully.

I have transfered a Pal project from FCP3 (OS9) to FCP4 and it all seems to work OK, note it is a min-Dv project. If you after bug information about FCP4, then the discussion forum about FCP4 on www.2-pop.com is a good starting point.

[
I would be very ineterested to hear of your experiences.

I'm also interested to hear what your impression of new features are, and how you may be using them i.e.Compression,Livetipe, Soundtrack. And what bugs etc you have found.

Christian [/b]

Soundtrack, is very easy to use, the main problem I see is the amount of time required to get familiar with the range of sound loops available. Searching for a particular mood is difficult, as they are not organised in mood type catergories. If you have a lot, I mean a lot of time, soundtrack could offer a lot of possibilites.

Compressor seems to have problems, mine keeps crashing, apparently their is an update, but currently you can only get the update by having your Mac connected to the internet and use live update. I believe that a download version should be available shortly.


I think that maybe the screeneditors forum could possibly have FCP & AVID and various editing forums, it could help lift the Screeneditors profile.
Greg

[Matthew]

if you think that there is enough potential for separate FCP, Avid forums etc, sure, we can do that. I just didn't want to crowd this website with a lot of empty forums from the outset.

So, keep using this forum for technical stuff, if I get a few more threads here on a similar theme I'll move them over into a new forum!

Would you think our own Screeneditors forums would/could offer something that the others such as 2-pop wouldn't? Lets face it, there are dozens of other technical websites.

Your comments are welcome!

[Greg]

Originally posted by Matthew
if you think that there is enough potential for separate FCP, Avid forums etc, sure, we can do that. I just didn't want to crowd this website with a lot of empty forums from the outset.

Agreed, a website with a lot of empty forums is not attractive . I guess we need to explore the needs of ASE members, along with the aims of the ASE.

So, keep using this forum for technical stuff, if I get a few more threads here on a similar theme I'll move them over into a new forum!

Would you think our own Screeneditors forums would/could offer something that the others such as 2-pop wouldn't? Lets face it, there are dozens of other technical websites. [/b]

Good question, very good question!
I will think about it...

Your comments are welcome! [/b]

[rachelw]

My experience w/FCP4 was a project started in FCP3...it was a smooth transition, but I found interesting was that (among all the coolio things FCP 4 does) it keeps your renders if you copy and paste into other timelines. As I sometimes use copy and paste to force certain issues regarding corruption of render files, or whatever else, I got around this new neato feature by telling the new timeline it was a different aspect ratio, then changing it back. I found that the system ran pretty well, but when it gives up it gives up with gusto. I think it needs a little more attention to system filing (media and project paths should be constantly monitored) as even the slightest hiccup can cause a reversion to default settings. Some problems printing to tape, but I suspect this had to do with hardware rather than software - but just out of curiosity has anyone else had a difficult time spitting out 52 minutes of finsihed program to DigiBeta? Due to the DV setup we had to use a bridge, which was tempermental. I blame the bridge, but I am curious to know if anyone else has had any headaches over longform media playout.

[Christian]

Rachel

A good trick I learnt playing out long form is to collpse your spools or sequence into a nested sequence. This seemed to improve the reliabilty of long form to 100%.

C

[rachelw]

I'll keep that in mind - thanks for the info :-)

R

[GavMeister]

Rachel,

some other things you may consider to improve (or in my case solve) output reliability issues are:

1) In the energy saver section of Mac system prefs switch the "put HD to sleep when can" checkbox off (and system to sleep to "never").
2) Make sure that no wondows (Viewer and Canvas) are overlapping or odd aspect ratios (this can cuase sync problems over time)
3) nest and render any composited (or speed altered) sequences / clips
4) and turn off the "Autosave" feature in FCP prefs and finally,
5) set the Number of audio tracks in the FCP prefs to 2, and render the audio of the master sequence that you are trying to output.

These steps worked for me on a Duel GB G4, 1.5 GB RAM, running FCP 4.0.1, OS 10.2.6, QT 6.3

Hope this helps,

Gavin

[Rumour]

I use both FCP 2 and FCP 4 on two different systems and while I love some of the fancy do-dads that come with FCP4, FCP2 is still far and away the more efficient and stable system.

In fact, I am struggling to keep my producer from upgrading the FCP2 system because it's so reliable - pumping out 2 x half hour TV programs a week running almost every day for the past two years.

My own system is FCP4.1 on OSX.2.6, and I just find it a bit ... "spongy" is the only word I can come up with. There are problems with little things like slow motion effects that cause crashes, and it just is not as clean feeling as FCP2.

Soundtrack rocks - you dont need to be a musician to get quick, royalty free background music that equals most production music cds I have ever had access to, and you can import your video to watch as you score so you can hit important points exactly.

Livetype is also a major improvement on the previous titler alternatives - takes a little while to figure out and is fairly limited in the fine control area, but still a useful and impressive tool for the price.

And to add to Gavin's comments above, I find it really helps to mixdown the audio of your entire project before editing to tape - since we started doing this our skipped frame problems have dissapeared and the prep time for each export has been dramatically reduced.

HTH

Rumour

[NickM]

Hey, there Rumour.

I know what you mean by that "Spongy" feel.
I reckon a lot of it is attributable to OSX itself.
But you should try Panther. It's a lot more responsive.
Windows almost pop right open, without too much of that anoying animated drop down effect.
It's almost like OS9!

Slo mo is something that I doubt will be fixed till FCP5 comes out, though.

I guess if your rocking with FCP2, then that's great.
I really use the extra features of the Media Manager in FCP3, and I love the keyboard mapping in 4.
The colour corecting alone is worth the upgrade, though, even if you just go to 3
I know all these things ad time, and i dont imagine you have much of that if you're doing an hour a week!

I'm curious: what sort of show are you doing?

Cheers,
Nick