Color - killing my hd!! **please help**

R

Regal Productions LLC

Carbonite Member
I've edited the footage I needed in FCP, its roughly 2:30 mins long I bounce it into Color. I use the color grades, I'm trying to render it now, its taken nearly 9 hours to get 50% done, then it says I'm out of hard drive space. I had 118 gigs before I started to render the color project.

I have like 30% of it done and I'm 75gigs of 118 gigs of hard drive.

What in the world am I doing wrong, heres some photos.

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Picture8.png


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Its weird because its rendering the full video file, rather then just the video file in FC.

Any one able to help me?
 
Color has a ton of workflow problems and Color/FCP will gladly give you enough rope to hang yourself with w/o ever giving you a warning that you are doing something wrong. Basically, everything that goes into Color needs to be bare bones. Put everything on V1, no mixing of frame rates, frame sizes or codecs. No freeze frames or other gfx. No multiclips (or collapsed multiclips). No clips w/speed changes (Color will render the entire source media not just the section you used in the timeline). Only use Color 'safe' codecs such as DV, DV50, DVCpro, ProRes, or Uncompressed. If you have the latest version of Color XDCAM HD/EX and HDV are supported but they are still kinda sketchy from what I've heard. PAL footage has issues, 23.98 footage sometimes has issues, and Red footage is kinda it's own thing. If you are working w/interlaced footage that has it's own set of problems (which I can go into more detail about if you are working w/it).


I would check out this tutorial for info about how to create a 'color safe' timeline in FCP CreativeCOW. I'd also suggest getting the DVD, located on the same page, called "Stop Staring and Start Grading with Apple Color" as it does a very good job of demystifying the interface and letting you know what all the settings do. You also should read the manual and the release notes as there are a number of workflow related things in there that can be useful.


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I guess it looks like I'm going to be editing the video again, so your telling me that my video I have can not be used since I have added slow motion / freeze frames / special effects. So another words your telling me I have to re-do the video?

oh ****. I got paid to have this done by Saturday. :0
 
you just have to go through and prep your sequence before going to Color... you may want to go through and save the important grades that you've already done so that you can just apply them when you come back in.
 
Regal Productions LLC said:
I guess it looks like I'm going to be editing the video again, so your telling me that my video I have can not be used since I have added slow motion / freeze frames / special effects. So another words your telling me I have to re-do the video?
Click to expand...
Anything like that you'll have to export as a self-contained QT file and then bring the QT file back into the timeline to replace the shot w/the speed change (or whatever) on it. I have to do this all for the TV show I work on.


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It's pretty simple.

Put In and Out points around the first clip you need to export in from your Timeline. Select File->Export->QuickTime Movie (not QT conversion). Use Current Settings, select Video Only (unless you need the audio too, of course), and check "make movie self-contained". Repeat this steps for every clip in the timeline (usually I save them all into a folder called 'speed changes' or something). I also put the TC of the clip in the file name so that it's easy for me to keep track of what goes where. For example, if I have a clip w/a speed change that starts at 01:23:17;15 in my timeline I'll name the exported QT clip SpeedChange_01231715.

Once they are all done drag the folder w/all the clips into FCP and replace each original clip in the timeline w/the export QT that has the change 'baked in'. I'd duplicate your timeline though before you do this so you always have an original version to go back to.


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Ok sorry its really late for me right now, my mind is in 50 million places, whats the short cut key for in and out.

Also some clips have speed changes some don't do I export all the clips into quicktime movie and check "make movie self-contained"

edit: nvm i and o, any how do I have to export it out or can I mark my i and o's then bounce it over, whats the cause for rendering it into a quicktime file.
 
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You have to export the clip so it creates a new piece of media.

FCP and Color have problems properly handling clips that have speed changes applied to them.


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Any rendering/transcoding damages the footage technically, but whether or not there is a visible or measurable amount of quality loss depends on how extreme of a transcode you are doing. Most good, professional codecs can go thru a number of 'generations' w/o showing any quality loss.

What codec is your footage in? Your options coming out of Color are pretty limited, but if you do Apple ProRes you will end up in a high quality format w/a manageable file size.


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Well I just rip footage from the XL1 into the Mac, what file format could this be in. I apologize ahead of time Adkirmery for not knowing what I'm talking about.

How ever you've thought me a lot, I'm actually working my behind off right now exporting all the files off. I have about 463 clips to work on.
 
The quality should be fine as Apple's DV codec is on the more robust side, IIRC. I've done worse things to DV and had the end result still look okay once it ended up on TV.


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