Fcp 6 noob needs guidance

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dtzfilms

Well-known member
Hi,
I'm relatively new to FCP. I've edited some weddings and my own reels etc. But I'm now editing a narrative piece, a webisode of mine. I just have a few questions about ingesting and logging.

What's most effective or the common practice?

I started previewing my clips and naming them before ingesting them. It was taking quite a while. I've now just selected all and just ingested everything so I can go ahead and put a rough cut together in the time line. I'd then go back and replace the cuts with the best takes.

Is that generally how it works?

When I was editing videos, I generally ingested-logged in the order I was going to compile the shots in the timeline.

Secondly, I'm also curious as to how one marks good takes. I saw the multi-colored labels in the setup menu, but I'm not sure how these work.

Some guidance would be nice. Thanks for your help.
 
You've not revealed any specifics about your camera, OS and FCP versions, computer, media drive. sequence settings, or anything else.

Obviously, we can't see these particulars from here.

It would be essential to learn what you are doing with what and how.
 
David Saraceno said:
You've not revealed any specifics about your camera, OS and FCP versions, computer, media drive. sequence settings, or anything else.

Obviously, we can't see these particulars from here.

It would be essential to learn what you are doing with what and how.
Click to expand...

I'm merely asking what the general practice is. Does one ingest indiscriminately and then make subclips or does one audition the clips before ingesting. I'm curious as to why "it's essential to know" what system I'm on. I'm certain the most experienced have found a time-saving logging-ingesting practice that works regardless of one's system. I'm merely asking for quick tips regarding the general practice, conventional wisdom. There are a lot of things I discovered myself the long way, then saw a tutorial and realized I could have been more efficient. So essentially, I'm asking what's the most efficient way to log clips?

Does the practice change depending on what camera you're working with? I've come from the HPX170 which I'm comfortable editing to the AF100.

Nonetheless here are the particulars:

Snow Leopard
FCP 6
17" MBP
Momentus XT Hybrid drive.
5400 External (Original Mac drive, looking to upgrade to 7200 or another Momentus Hybrid)

AF100,
AVCHD transcode to ProRes422
 
I usually bring in everything and whittle it down once ingested- hard drive space is much cheaper than time. :) Unless of course you're turning on a camera and letting it run for hours on a locked off shot that only matters for a few minutes of good stuff.

Noah
 
Thank you all for shedding light on the ingestion practices. Anything about labeling clips? In the user preferences tab there's a stack of colors. How do these work? I've never quite understood what they're for and when to use them.

Furthermore, this scratch disk - is there any benefit to getting a hybrid over the conventional spinning 7200rpm 2.5 drives?
 
Ingesting AVCHD may different depending on which cam and which version of FCP. Ingesting p2 based DVCProHD hasn't changed materially since FCP 6.x.

As to scratch drive, a fast 7200 rpm drive makes more sense, at least to me, than a hybrid such as the Momentus XT. That caches frequently used apps, as I understand it, and for pro res, the files are much bigger.

Why throw another variable in the mix.
 
No hybrid then. 7200 rpm with high speed connection like firewire 800. USB 3.0 isn't available in mac and light peak unfortunately won't be around for quite a while yet. great advice. thanks.
 
If it's a large project, you want to take the time to add logging information. It will save time in the long run. Short projects don't matter.

Like Noah said, and many professional editors do for documentary style work, take everything then cut that in half. Then cut that in half. Cut in half until you have only what you're going to work with.

When ingesting footage, there is a place to mark a clip as "Good". This shows up as a column in the Browser. It's a simple check mark you can check and uncheck at will. Drag the column header over towards the clip names if you want to see it better.

You can also use color lables on clips for the same thing. That's what I do. Yellow are clips I hate, Green are clips I love, uncolored clips are one's I have no feelings about one way or the other. I use red for clips that are in my Sequences and locked down. I also make my Master Output Sequence red. Color labeling can really help visually getting through stuff.

Also, media management is vital. Only two places to have stuff on your hard drive. Capture Scratch where FCP puts stuff. A Project folder where you put the FCP/STP/Motion project files, photos, audio files, graphics, etc.

In the Browser, make Bins to organize things logically. And get accosted to using the Find command (Cmd+F) in the Browser and Timeline windows. And come up with a naming convention that makes sense to you, that you'll use in all projects. Really helps in the long run.

Taking time to organize at the start will save you a lot of time in the long run. The larger the project the more time it will save you.
 
Very, very helpful! Thanks a lot. I'll consider that for future projects. This is exactly what I need, BenB, thanks but where or what command do use to mark clips once I've ingested? I'm afraid I just ingested indiscriminately. Even clips I knew I'd never use and now I just want to visually see which clips I'm never coming back to or ones I can simply delete completely. And by the way, this is only a three page episode with 16G of footage.
 
Aaah. I see the check marks, but the label column says none for all the clips and I can't label them after the fact. Or can I?
 
Other hints

Other hints

I stumbled on this a few months ago; it is a convenient way to structure all your FCP folders the same way and allow you to develop a system that works for you and addresses your needs.

http://conigs.com/posthaste/

Cheers,
GB
 
The final question I have now is this: I swapped out my 5400 drive for a hybrid and the 5400 is proving to be too slow. I'm getting constant dropped frame errors when I get into the timeline. So I'm thinking of getting a 7200rpm drive. Here comes the guessing. My 17inch MBP just missed the Thunderbolt edition and I'm also seeing USB 3.0 drives out there. I'm assuming 7200rpm Firewire 800 drive is adequate for scratch disk editing? Yet I'm now seeing USB 3.0 drives and adapters exist that I think will enable me to edit with bus power in starbucks. I only have 4Gb of RAM but for this small project, I'll suffer along. So question is, does it make sense to buy a 500Gb USB 3.0 drive for $109 from OWC and find a $45 adapter and hope it's bus powered, or do I just go with a 500Gb Firewire 800 for $127 also from OWC. Which way? If firewire 800 7200rpm is adequate for a scratch disk, I might roll with that, but if the USB 3.0 will be noticeably better - a possibility. Appreciate your time.
 
Depending on how your footage was shot (if it has set breaks for each start and stop which will auto cut). I would say use sub-clips, I have found this to be much faster and efficient.

How full is your drive? and are you reading and writing to it? I have found just moving your capture scratch to a separate drive (even a 5400) where it is only 1/4 to 1/2 capacity, it will greatly decrease dropped frames and etc. Also, use dynamic playback when possible, if you are getting to a point of needing precision, you can switch to High, but most of the time dynamic is pretty solid unless your drives are slacking.
 
I don't follow. Use sub clips? I'll be using subclips anyway to whittle down what I want into the timeline, but I'm talking about playback in the timeline. If I try to play it back I get error messages and these are rough cut compilation from only three clips. Are you saying feed the timeline from subclips only?
 
Eaxactly. How I did it with tapes when they didn't automatically mark starts and stops was I would capture the entire tape as 1 clip. then go thru and make subclips and label all of them, then build the project from the subclips.

What error messages are you getting, I'm not following...
 
You will get dropped frames during playback in the Timeline, it's normal. Disable that warning, ignore it. You'll not have dropped frames when you export it, or print back to tape. Don't even worry about it, it's misleading.

RAM won't help with playback, it's more to do with drive throuhput and CPU speed.

FW800 is barely adequate for editing HD video. You'd want to get an eSATA Express card for the 17", that will be plenty fast enough. Don't bother with USB 3.0, I'm not sure if anyone even makes an Express card for the 17" MBP. eSATA is what you want. The built-in USB ports on the MBP are USB 2.0 only.

FCP "requires" 7200rpm secondary drive as a scratch disk, because the data pipe of a hard drive can't handle both the data streams of the OS and application, on top of the data streams of the audio/video files. Thus, we split between two drives for data pipe bandwidth reasons.

FCP X will perform much better on laptops.

Again, dropped frames on playback in the Timeline, especially on a laptop, is normal, and doesn't mean anything at all.

ALL hard drives an any computer ever made must have at least 15% of they're total capacity free, or you'll have problems. Sub-clips read from the same physical file on a drive, so it won't really matter if you cut something up into subclips or not. The physical act of reading the data is the same. Making the subclips like you are is simply to make editing with them easier for you, makes no difference in the reading of the data from the drive.
 
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Very enlightening, BenB, thanks. Here's the problem I'm encountering now. I guess only my scratch disk should I have put on the external drive and not all my fcp files as in:

Final Cut Pro Documents
Audio Render Files
Autosave Vault
Capture Scratch
Render Files
Thumbnail Cache Files
Waveform Cache Files


Do I put these on my main drive where the program is and only make the external drive my scratch disk?
 
You want to go with. You're 17" MBP has an Express Card slot. Go to OWC and get an eSATA adapter, and an eSATA drive. You'll be just fine. FW800 is barely enough for HD video work, and I'm just not on the USB 3.0 bandwagon yet. eSATA is about as good as it gets.

Next, you need to put your files in TWO places, and two only, to save yourself headaches.

1- On your secondary drive (it can NOT be your OS drive), make a folder called "Final Cut Pro Documents". Then in FCP, System Settings, your Scratch Disk and everything there, point to that folder you just made. That's all you have to do. FCP will take care of the rest on it's own. That's where all FCP generated files will go. FCP makes a folder called Capture Scratch in there, and when you start to Log & Capture/Transfer, FCP automatically makes a folder with the name of your project there, and puts all the .MOV's there. This is a large folder to back up with all those QT files in it. You'll need to backup/archive to another drive, DAT or LTO tape, etc.

2- On any drive you want to, make a "Projects" folder. In there, make a separate folder for each project you work on. In there you'll put the FCP project file, photos, graphics, everything not self-generated by FCP. It can normally backup to a CD or DVD, will be easy to archive. This is the folder that I use PostHaste to create for me. I've customized PostHaste to make the folder structure I want, etc.
 
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