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Staff BlogsFinal Cut Studio Category
Speeding up Compressor Don't export directly to Compressor from Final Cut ProAlthough sending your timeline directly to Compressor may seem faster because it cuts out the step of exporting as a QuickTime movie, it is much slower overall because Compressor needs to request each frame one-by-one from Final Cut Pro instead of just reading the data out of the movie clip. It gets even slower if you're using Frame Controls or doing multi-pass encoding.Just go to File > Export > QuickTime Movie (not QuickTime Conversion) and make sure Setting is set to Current Settings and Recompress All Frames is switched off. This ensures that the movie will not be recompressed unnecessarily.  Here's a tip - if most of your timeline is already rendered, deselect Make Movie Self-Contained. This creates a small reference movie that links to the render files on disk instead of writing the data into the file. This will be much quicker to export. If your timeline is not rendered, however, this setting is unlikely to offer any speed advantages over a self-contained movie. Once the file is exported, drag it into Compressor and set up your batch as normal. Only use Frame Controls where necessaryFrame Controls allow you to improve the quality of resizing, retiming and deinterlacing operations, however they should only be switched on when you are actually performing one of these operations. In addition, you should use Better quality instead of Best, as Best is usually reserved for extreme circumstances and in most situations gives you a massive performance hit with no benefit. Perform heaving-lifting in a separate pass to the encodingUsing Frame Controls with a multi-pass or long-GOP encoder can really slow things down because the Frame Controls processing will need to be reapplied to every frame each time it is read. Even if you're not using Frame Controls, compressing from a processor-intensive codec such as HDV or H.264 can seriously slow things down.It makes sense, therefore, to perform all these processor-intensive operations on an intermediate movie clip (ProRes would be a suitable codec for this) and then drag in the intermediate clip and encode it to the desired format. But there is an easier way. Job chaining is a little-used yet very powerful feature of Compressor that allows you to plug the output of one job into the input of another for additional processing. Here's how to do it: 1. Drag your movie clip into Compressor. 2. Drag either the ProRes 422 for Interlaced Material or ProRes 422 for Progressive Material (depending on your source media) setting onto the job in the batch window. 3. Go to Job > New Job with Target Output. This will add a new job to the batch with a chain symbol to show it is linked to the job above it. 4. Drag your desired output setting onto the chained job and set up the destination as normal. 5. Submit the batch  Use a clusterA cluster is a group of computers where each machine processes a portion of the movie simultaneously, potentially providing a massive speed boost. This service is provided by Qmaster and can be set up in the Qmaster section of System Preferences or the Apple Qadministrator utility.You will need Qmaster set up on each computer in the cluster, and all computers should have the required codecs installed and have full access to the source media and cluster storage area. If you have a multi-core computer, Qmaster can emulate the effects of a cluster by launching multiple copies of Compressor side-by-side to process the movie in a "virtual cluster". This can make a dramatic difference to encoding times. I wrote a tutorial on this a while back. ConclusionCompressor is not the fastest encoder in the world but with these tricks you can make it a lot more bearable. One important trend to note is that the simplest method isn't always the fastest - with a little extra setup beforehand you can save a significant amount of time overall.Categories: Video Editing, Software, Final Cut Studio FCPUG Amsterdam Supermeet 9-13-2009 As always, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on including:
Tickets are a steal at 15 Euros (around $20) or 10.50 Euros for students with valid ID. Doors open at 17:00 with the FCP Showcase, where attendees can meet third-party vendors and developers, and the main Supermeet lasts from 19:00-23:30. It's being held at The Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky in Dam Square in the Netherlands. This event is expected to be the largest gathering of Final Cut Studio users, Gurus and Digital Filmmakers in Europe during the annual IBC trade show. These shows are always well worth attending. More details are here. Categories: Industry, Final Cut Studio Why don't my old Preference Manager backups work on FCP 7? There is a very simple reason for this - Final Cut Pro's main preference file is called Final Cut Pro x.0 Prefs.fcset, where x is the major version of the software. So when you updated to version 7, it created a new file called Final Cut Pro 7.0 Prefs.fcset and ignored all previous files. So when you try to restore a backup created under Final Cut Pro 6, it will transfer the Final Cut Pro 6.0 Prefs.fcset file which will be ignored by the newer version, thereby having no apparent effect. You could just rename the file but there may well be side-effects to doing this. The solution, therefore, is to recreate your Preference Manager backups under Final Cut Pro 7. (Incidentally, I've heard a lot of people complain about scratch disk locations resetting and favorites being lost upon upgrading. FCP 7 does not read the old preferences when creating the new file so your preferences are completely reset.) Categories: DR News, Utilities, Final Cut Studio How to run Final Cut Studio 3 on a MacBook The only problem is that, unlike FCS 2, the FCS 3 installer refuses to continue because it requires a 128 MB graphics card. Only Motion and Color are heavy on the graphics card, so the other applications in the suite will work just fine on a lesser machine. Luckily the block is easy to work around. Here's how I got it working on my MacBook: 1. You will need to change one of the files on the DVD. As you cannot write directly to the DVD itself, you will need to create a writable copy of the disc. Put in the Final Cut Studio DVD and open up Disk Utility (located in /Applications/Utilities). 2. Select the disc in the left-hand pane and click New Image in the toolbar.  3. Set Image Format to Read/write and Encryption to None.  4. Type a relevant filename and click Save. It will take several minutes to process. 5. Open up the disk image and ctrl-click on Install Final Cut Studio. Select Show Original.  6. A new window will appear with the FinalCutStudio.mpkg file selected. Ctrl-click on this file and select Show Package Contents.  7. Navigate to Contents/Resources and ctrl-click on the Requirements Checker bundle. Select Show Package Contents.  8. Navigate to Contents/Resources and open up minsys.plist in Property List Editor (if you have the Apple developer tools installed) or TextEdit.  9. Under the heading AELMinimumVRAM change the number from 128 to a number lower than or equal to your current video memory. I changed mine to 32. Alternatively you could change block to warn and the installer will warn you but let you continue installation.  10. Save the file, close all the folders that appeared and double-click Install Final Cut Studio on the disk image. You should now be able to install Final Cut Studio without problems. Some of the applications in the studio also contain a minsys.plist file that will need to be modified. These applications are Final Cut Pro, Motion, Color, Soundtrack Pro and DVD Studio Pro (even though the latter apparently has no changes from FCS 2). 11. Ctrl-click on the application in question and select Show Package Contents.  12. Navigate to Contents/Resources and open minsys.plist in either Property List Editor (if you have the developer tools installed) or TextEdit. 13. Under the heading AELMinimumVRAM change the number from 128 to a number lower than or equal to your current video memory. I changed mine to 32. Alternatively you could change block to warn. 14. Color will still warn you about your screen resolution - however you can just select Never show again and continue.  That's it! You will need to repeat steps 11-14 whenever you update Final Cut Studio. Note: Some people have suggested simply removing the Requirements Checker application but I do not advocate deleting files. Categories: Apple, Software, Final Cut Studio My thoughts on the new Final Cut StudioHere are my first impressions: ArchitectureThis is Leopard and Intel-only, which is a little surprising because there's only a couple of months until Snow Leopard comes out, and I think many of us thought a Snow Leopard-only release in September was likely. There is no word on whether or not it takes advantage of the new features of Snow Leopard such as Grand Central Dispatch or OpenCL, nor any indication that Final Cut Pro has been rewritten in Cocoa as has been so often speculated. I noticed a lot of the screenshots in Apple's examples were taken in Tiger, suggesting that perhaps the feature list was set long before Snow Leopard was announced.Apple claims that Final Cut Studio will not work on a device with integrated graphics - such as a MacBook or Mac Mini. However, they also say that ProRes 422 Proxy is designed for editing on a MacBook or MacBook Pro, so it would appear that Final Cut Pro can at least be used on a machine with integrated graphics, if not some of the other apps in the suite. It's also worth noting that the minor applications in the suite only received minor updates, as indicated by their version numbers. So it is likely that the problems with Compressor have not gone away. Blu-rayBlu-ray burning directly in Compressor - I certainly didn't expect this. And integrating it into Compressor is significant too. Although I never really thought about it before, the majority of the DVDs I make in DVDSP are rough cuts for client approval that don't need a fancy custom menu and I never make use of any of the advanced features like scripting. I would imagine many people are in the same boat and therefore burning a basic disc in Compressor is a much faster and more efficient way to work.It is telling though, that DVD Studio Pro did not receive a significant update for the second time running. We have been using essentially the same version for the past three years (an eternity in the technology world), and it suggests that Apple may perhaps discontinue this product in the future. More ProRes optionsDon't underestimate the importance of this. ProRes 4444 (the extra 4 refers to the alpha channel) allows you to convert footage shot with a high-end 4:4:4 camera to ProRes without sacrificing color information. With previous versions of Final Cut Studio, you would have had to leave it uncompressed (using up significantly more disk space and bandwidth), use Animation (slow) or explore a third-party codec.The mastering possibilities are interesting too. HDCAM SR has long been the industry choice for HD mastering but it is expensive. Using ProRes 4444, you could create an HD master of equivalent quality to HDCAM SR but on a significantly cheaper LTO tape (LTO drives cost less than 1/10th of the cost of an HDCAM SR deck). LTO is the standard for data backup / archiving in the IT world and offers a number of other benefits such as potentially faster-than-realtime writing and also being format, frame size and frame rate agnostic. Of course, the receiver would have to have an LTO deck and necessary equipment. LiveType discontinuedLiveType has long been superseded by Motion so it was only a matter of time before it was canned. In Motion 4 you can now adjust individual letters in a text object, meaning the one advantage LiveType had over Motion has now disappeared and consequently, LiveType has been discontinued. It was inevitable really.Avid-like featuresThere are some nice new features to emulate Avid functionality, such as the new floating timecode display, global transitions and the ability to automatically import clips just by plugging in a drive. This is the benefit of competition.Faster, better qualityI am a big fan of anything that makes things faster and/or improves video or audio quality. Background rendering and exporting is a huge feature and arguably should have been in Final Cut Pro 6 because they'd already laid the foundations with background SmoothCam processing.Soundtrack Pro has a significantly redesigned architecture which improves performance and will hopefully address some of the issues I have experienced, such as working for a while on a project and then suddenly not being able to save it. It also features improved audio cleanup tools. Faster frame control processing in Compressor gets my vote too. RED supportThe RED post workflow has always had issues and Apple has clearly developed the new Color and Cinema Tools with RED in mind. The main stumbling block in the RED workflow seems to be conforming the R3Ds once the offline edit is complete, and some third-party solutions have been created in an attempt to address this.Now you can maintain the relationship between your original RED camera footage and your editing proxies inside a Cinema Tools database (hopefully CT creates and links the proxies automatically). You edit the proxies, export to Color and grade the original R3Ds using the data from the database to conform. This greatly simplifies things, although some would argue that native REDCODE support in the FCP timeline would be even better - perhaps when RED Rocket comes out? Color also now supports 4K - although Apple will still be behind if the 6K Scarlet comes out this year as predicted. Media ManagementOne thing people haven't commented much on is the improved media management, which has been the bane of every Final Cut Pro user at one point or another. Spotlight in Mac OS X indexes the files on your hard disk in a database and Final Cut Pro 7 uses that data to quickly reconnect the files, as opposed to querying them directly.What this means is that FCP can reconnect files faster (so projects will presumably load a lot quicker) and hopefully be more intelligent when a file changes. Missed opportunities
Final ThoughtsThere's some good stuff here - Apple has (eventually) listened to a lot of our complaints about media management, exports typing up the application, etc. But how well these work in reality will remain to be seen. I won't get my copy until next week.But maybe it's not called Final Cut Studio 3 because there's not really anything there to justify calling it that. Although Final Cut Studio 2 also had few major features, it did at least come with a brand new application that used to cost $20k (Color). I think the new price cut reflects Apple's recognition that selling the upgrade at $499 would perhaps not be value for money, meaning future updates may not necessarily be as cheap. Interesting LinksOfficial Final Cut Studio pageFully-indexed online Final Cut Pro manual Final Cut Studio in Depth - 66 page document from Apple detailing all the changes Apple ProRes white paper Apple KB: Installing content when upgrading MacWorld review by Mike Curtis How to Install Final Cut Studio 3 Norman Hollyn's take In-depth review by Jan Ozer Mike Jones compares Final Cut Pro 7 to his wishlist Installing Final Cut Pro 6 and 7 side-by-side Changes in FCP 7.0 XML - for developers Studio Daily summary More links from xlr8yourmac.com Categories: Apple, Final Cut Studio, Analysis Final Cut Pro 6.0.6 releasedThe release notes name only one fix: Improved Real-Time Playback on Certain Mac Pro and Xserve Models Final Cut Pro 6.0.6 improves real-time playback capabilities with Mac Pro (Early 2009) models and Xserve (Early 2009) models when working with complex sequences or high-bandwidth media formats. There are no new features, but I wasn't actually expecting any - in fact, I wasn't expecting an FCP 6.0.6 update at all. I guess this was an urgent fix. Of course, this new update will raise questions about Final Cut Studio 3 but I am confident that it is in development. Apple's ProApp developers on the pro-apps-dev mailing list are very much alive and well, and frequently ask third-party developers what features they would like to see in future versions. Some kind of official acknowledgment and a tentative release schedule from Apple would be nice though. The usual guidelines apply - don't update in the middle of a project, don't update for several weeks so that potential bugs and issues have a chance to show themselves, don't update if you don't need the features in this patch (it only applies to 2009 models), and make sure to clone your drive before you update. Categories: Video Editing, Apple, Final Cut Studio Sign the DVD Studio Pro Blu-ray petition Although it's just a series of numbers, it is a useful indicator of just how much the applications have been updated. The most notable numbers are Color 1.5, Compressor 3.5 - indicating relatively minor changes - and DVD Studio Pro 4.2.2 - indicating virtually no changes at all. So for those of you hoping for a major DVD Studio Pro update that supports Blu-ray burning, it looks like you're going to be disappointed once again. There is now a petition circulating that asks Apple to reconsider its policy. "We, the undersigned, will not buy a new version of Final Cut Studio if it is still lacking Blu-ray support." Be sure to add your signature if you agree. Categories: Apple, Final Cut Studio, DVD Compressor error - "You must enter a name for this batch submission""You must enter a name for this batch submission. This is the name that identifies this submission in the Batch Monitor and History window."  This error pops up when you drag items into the batch window in the wrong order. You must drag the clip in first and then drag in the settings and destinations. There really shouldn't be a specific order for doing this but unfortunately Compressor can be very illogical at times. Categories: Video Editing, Apple, Final Cut Studio Recently updated AppleCare docs - 5/1/09 HardwareXserve: USB, FireWire, and optical drive do not respondMacBook Pro: Distorted video or no video issues Can't connect two DVI connectors to Power Mac G5 (Late 2005), Mac Pro (Original), and Mac Pro (Early 2008) video cards Xserve (Early 2009): Use the latest version of Server Admin Tools Mac Pro: Power consumption and thermal output (BTU) information Xserve (Late 2006 and later): Configuring Lights-Out Management (LOM) Xserve (Late 2006 or later): How to configure Server Monitor to access Xserve Xserve (Early 2009): Power consumption and thermal output (BTU) information Certain optical digital audio source sample rates may not work for some Intel-based Macs Final Cut Pro / ExpressFinal Cut Express: Camcorder supportFinal Cut Pro/Express: Some imported PSD files may only contain the background layer Final Cut Pro: Speed interferes with Smooth Cam Final Cut Pro: Troubleshooting Basics Final Cut Pro: Green frames or other anomalies on render with REDCODE Final Cut Pro: Quality issue with movies you export from the Viewer with filters applied Final Cut Pro: Log and capture with DV50 sometimes does not work in French or Japanese MotionMotion: Motion quits unexpectedly when exporting to REDCODECompressorCompressor: Troubleshooting basicsLogicLogic Express: Locating the Support ID and Serial NumberXsanXsan 2: Compatibility of Xsan clients with Grass Valley SAN shared storage systemsXsan 2: Xsan Admin Setup Assistant appears when opening Xsan Admin MiscMac OS X keyboard shortcutsMac OS X: How to log a kernel panic Categories: Apple, Hardware, Final Cut Studio Incoming network connection dialogs keep appearing  But sometimes that dialog will not go away! Certain applications such as QmasterStatusMenu.app and Batch Monitor.app cause the dialog to pop up every 5 seconds (or every 20 seconds if you ignore it) which gets annoying very quickly. The reason for this is that applications like QmasterStatusMenu.app and Batch Monitor.app don't communicate on the same port each time. It is constantly changing, as this log excerpt shows:  This really confuses the very basic OS X firewall. Some people have recommended switching the firewall off but I wouldn't recommend this. There's always a trade-off between security and convenience, but this trade-off is far too big. Instead, it is much better to just obtain a more advanced firewall. I would recommend Little Snitch for this job. It gives you infinitely more options than the default firewall, lets you see where apps are sending data, doesn't bug you too often, and most importantly, it copes with applications that constantly change ports so those annoying 5-second popups go away.  The demo gives you full functionality for 3 hours, after which you just restart the firewall again. That's a lot better than popups every 5 seconds, but if 3 hours is too often, you can buy a single license for $29.99. Just install Little Snitch, restart the computer and switch the default OS X firewall to "Allow all incoming connections". Little Snitch then takes over - you can now use Qmaster and be safe at the same time. Categories: Apple, Utilities, Final Cut Studio
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