Thursday, August 30, 2012

Why Do I Love FCP?

I give up. Let's just make the whole movie look like this.
Why? How about because of crap like this? This is a frame from a part of a sequence which was supposed to be the closeup of somebody's eye, but instead would render like this orange matte. Thanks Final Cut!
I experimented with prerendering it without the Broadcast Safe limiters. I experimented with prerendering the video with NO plugins. Nothing would work.
Finally I went into the original sequence and re-rendered THAT. Then I prerendered with color-correction. And freakin' finally it behaved.
Turns out, FCP hated that the underlying footage had been slowed down. So that, with an additive dissolve, makes orange.
This, folks, is why we've pre-rendered the entire movie into small, flattened, chunks. And why we're keeping our fingers crossed that we don't have any trouble when we render the final version from that.
The list of movie dialog clichés.
A list of illegal characters in file names.


Aric Blue said...

Adobe's calling wants you...

And I don't know why but I just bought a Gopro HD camera that I would totally strap on to that flying machine. 120fps! Take me back to college and my trusty bolex!

Andrew Bellware said...

Does Premiere render more reliably?

Will that 'copter handle carrying a GoPro? Because I'd borrow my office-mate's.

Aric Blue said...

CS5 has been mostly a dream. I've never had non-rendering items--occasionally I've had crashes when I try to export my 2hour 4K movie...but the machine I'm editing on cost me only about $1500...

And why wouldn't it carry a Gopro? As far as I know they're not that heavy. (but I haven't gotten mine yet--ships somewhere around Sept 6th)

Lindsay Stewart said...

cs6 hasn't crashed on me so far in 4 months but i'm not shooting 4k or cutting feature length stuff. it is a world better and faster than the last useful version of final cut. i have to go back and work on legacy projects now and the and the difference is stark. my big issue is retraining my muscle memory to the new hot keys.

Andrew Bellware said...

The learning curve between FCP and Premiere is by-and-large nil. I mean, they both have practically the same interface.
We're not doing no 4K. We're 1920x1080 or whatever -- so that part I'm not worried about.
And since I'm always going back and forth between Macs and PC's my own muscles don't get a chance to memorize anything.
Why doesn't FCP have a thing where you can drop a razor blade across the entire timeline at a given point?
I may end up going to Adobe before I thought I'd need to. Maybe we'll do one more movie in FCP. Or maybe not...