I have a tech question for whatever FCP 6/7 gurus remain in the group. To this point, as most of my projects have been my own, I've been working with full data sets on local external drives. I'm producing a project right now that is going to have a geographically dispersed (global) post team... and THAT changes everything.
In part this is an experiment in low-budget film production attempting to work cheaply of course (i.e. to skimp on multiple copies of drives and fedEx bills) and but also to distribute labour among like-minded souls willing to work initially at least on a zero budget project while at the same time providing some measure of security for the master data sets. (Doubtless I'll run into a too-many-cooks scenario on the creative side but that too is all part of the experiment and not the issue I want to address here.)
I had intended to aggregate the project data and generate an offline version of the project folder and file that could be moved to my distant editors via the internet. Currently however, in the in the testing stages, I'm running into roadblocks. I've done extensive searches online for tutorials and trouble shooting advice. Creative Cow has a Shane Ross tutorial that is quite clear and makes it look like a no-brainer but clearly he doesn't hit the same snags. And anecdotally everyone I've consulted so far individually has had similar sorts of problems to mine when they attempted to use FCP's Offline/Online functions. And yet in the not too distant past in the wake of the advent of HD but before processors and hard drive capacities had caught up for HD, people must have made offline/online workflows work relatively reliably on a fairly regular basis.
For his offline process, rather than "offlineRT HD" codec, in his very clear Creative Cow tutorial Shane Ross's workflow among other things uses different flavours of ProRes which when run through FCP's suite of tools such as L&T and Media Manager happens--for him at least-- to generate clip and file names that match, a fact which I suspect has something to do with his success. Most of my footage is DVCPro HD re-wrapped in Raylight into a QT .mov wrapper and so editable directly in FCP, but whether I use it this way or transcode via L&T into ProResProxy for the down-converted version I run into the same issue which is that slightly different and randomly inconsistent suffixes and stacked suffixes are generated for the shrunken offline media file names. Now to be clear, that offline media does work with the matching offline project file. The big problem is later when I want to regenerate the project in its full online form using the full high-res data set: the whole thing becomes a dog's breakfast of lost references/connections when trying to "reconform" (i.e. reconnect the original high-res data) the project. With upward of 2000 files (and growing) most of which fail to reconnect even when "reconnect All Files in Relative Path" box is checked, I can anticipate this degenerating into an impossible nightmare to track down the reconnections one by one on an ongoing basis.
Has anyone developed a sure-fire approach to making the onffline/online functions of FCP work and if so could you share your advice?
Peter
In part this is an experiment in low-budget film production attempting to work cheaply of course (i.e. to skimp on multiple copies of drives and fedEx bills) and but also to distribute labour among like-minded souls willing to work initially at least on a zero budget project while at the same time providing some measure of security for the master data sets. (Doubtless I'll run into a too-many-cooks scenario on the creative side but that too is all part of the experiment and not the issue I want to address here.)
I had intended to aggregate the project data and generate an offline version of the project folder and file that could be moved to my distant editors via the internet. Currently however, in the in the testing stages, I'm running into roadblocks. I've done extensive searches online for tutorials and trouble shooting advice. Creative Cow has a Shane Ross tutorial that is quite clear and makes it look like a no-brainer but clearly he doesn't hit the same snags. And anecdotally everyone I've consulted so far individually has had similar sorts of problems to mine when they attempted to use FCP's Offline/Online functions. And yet in the not too distant past in the wake of the advent of HD but before processors and hard drive capacities had caught up for HD, people must have made offline/online workflows work relatively reliably on a fairly regular basis.
For his offline process, rather than "offlineRT HD" codec, in his very clear Creative Cow tutorial Shane Ross's workflow among other things uses different flavours of ProRes which when run through FCP's suite of tools such as L&T and Media Manager happens--for him at least-- to generate clip and file names that match, a fact which I suspect has something to do with his success. Most of my footage is DVCPro HD re-wrapped in Raylight into a QT .mov wrapper and so editable directly in FCP, but whether I use it this way or transcode via L&T into ProResProxy for the down-converted version I run into the same issue which is that slightly different and randomly inconsistent suffixes and stacked suffixes are generated for the shrunken offline media file names. Now to be clear, that offline media does work with the matching offline project file. The big problem is later when I want to regenerate the project in its full online form using the full high-res data set: the whole thing becomes a dog's breakfast of lost references/connections when trying to "reconform" (i.e. reconnect the original high-res data) the project. With upward of 2000 files (and growing) most of which fail to reconnect even when "reconnect All Files in Relative Path" box is checked, I can anticipate this degenerating into an impossible nightmare to track down the reconnections one by one on an ongoing basis.
Has anyone developed a sure-fire approach to making the onffline/online functions of FCP work and if so could you share your advice?
Peter