4K@Home... a day in the life/a bullet in the head

[stevesherrick]

Wondering if you guys are running optimized Final Cut Pro systems. No doubt things get a little hairy when you cut a feature as one big project, but on short form stuff, you shouldn't see sluggishness on a newer Mac. You do have to tweak the systems a little, but once you do you should have few problems.

For cutting features, you may want to edit in Reels (15-25 minute chunks). Each Reel would be its own project. All source material could live as its own project. With the ability to have several projects open at once and the freedeom to drag and drop easily, this should work just fine.

Steve

 

[Jim Arthurs]

The whole "reels" thing makes sense as an approach, but seems like the tech is letting us down when you HAVE to think that way, as opposed to WANTING to think that way.

The first feature I on-lined NLE was a 90 minute show of around 1100 cuts done with Speed Razor on the DPS PVR way, way back. Broke it into 15 minute chunks, insert editing each chunk to a couple identical master tapes at a time. I think I was on a Pentium Pro 200, with 32megs of ram and it wasn't all that sluggish, could have pushed it to 30 minute chunks if I'd had enough drive space...

I'd LOVE to think that with the exponentially faster systems of 9 years later and that much time to improve software code, we could move a bit beyond that...

 

[Poi Boy]

I think we have moved substantially beyond that but it will never be fast enough.
Aloha
-A

 

[visceralpsyche]

I haven't edited a feature using Premiere Pro 2.0, but I can say that with its cleanup features I've never had a slow system or corrupted project file. Those of you who left Premiere back in its 6.0 days really should give it another look if you're on a PC - it's been improved out of sight and for the money is easily the equal of Final Cut Pro.

 

[Haakon]

For cutting features, you may want to edit in Reels (15-25 minute chunks). Each Reel would be its own project. All source material could live as its own project. With the ability to have several projects open at once and the freedeom to drag and drop easily, this should work just fine.

At this very moment I'm doing final color grading on my HVX short film "The Faithful." It's about 45 minutes in length total. I can't split this up effectively into smaller "chunks" because it is imperative for the composer, the sound mixer, and myself to all be on the same page in terms of timecode and sync. We are well beyond the "picture lock" stage; making even minor changes to any section would severly mess things up for everyone involved. One thing that completely boggles my mind is that if I move a clip, it must be completely re-rendered because something has "changed." Yet if I move that clip back to the very same place it was before, where nothing is different, I *still* have to rerender that entire section over again. That's just crazy! It seems that every time I even look at the timeline it wants me to re-render something, and it's just extremely time consuming to work with. With Vegas, on the other hand, I can move clips all over the place, rearrange my timeline until I find a sequence that works, and I never get a performance hit. I'm not saying that Vegas is a superior NLE (there are plenty of things about it I don't like as well), but as far as efficiency is concerned it's just in a completely different ballpark. And I'm running Vegas on a mobile Pentium laptop which I can only assume has "inferior" specs compared to the mighty Mac Pro.

The intersting thing is that everything is using Intel chips these days, so the performance of a good Apple system should be on-par with a good PC system. That leads me to think that it's not the computer that's the problem, but it's Final Cut. It's just with the way FCP caches and works with all of the footage... I'm not a programmer so I can't tell anyone what to do, but it just seems to be incredibly inefficient to me, and if I have to break apart any footage over 20 minutes into "chunks" so that FCP can deal with it - even on their "top of the line" system - ehh... I'd say they have a ways to go.

On the flip side, the color correction looks awesome and I am super stoked about this film.

Speaking of RED, are you going to be at the 4K screening on Tuesday? I'm heading up with one of my production partners to check it out.

Are you kidding, I wouldn't miss it for the world! It's just a hunch, but I think I will be pretty easy to spot. :lipsrseal See you there!

 

[Chris Kenny]

One thing that completely boggles my mind is that if I move a clip, it must be completely re-rendered because something has "changed." Yet if I move that clip back to the very same place it was before, where nothing is different, I *still* have to rerender that entire section over again. That's just crazy! It seems that every time I even look at the timeline it wants me to re-render something, and it's just extremely time consuming to work with.

The Final Cut architecture is really starting to show its age in a lot of ways. It's been scaled up far past the kind of projects it was originally developed for. As I've said elsewhere, I'll be extremely surprised if FCP doesn't get a major overhaul in the next 12 months, particularly given all the new technologies Apple has been working on which are a natural fit for Final Cut, but which the current version doesn't take advantage of.

Based on what Jim has said about the timeframe for Red deliveries, we figure if that pans out our Red (#404) will probably show up in May or June. I'd love a new version of Final Cut by then, but I can imagine it not shipping until the fall.