Final Cut Workflow?

[Robert Jackson]

I've been working for a few months now with Vegas 6 and Connect HD because it seemed like a viable way to use my HD-100 right now. Well, it's been a disaster. Importing the footage and converting to .avi is a breeze, but editing under Vegas has been a huge pain. It seems really buggy to me.

Anyway, I'm at a stage right now in the project I'm working on where I need to bring in a bunch of 16mm and 35mm footage that needs to be combined with the interview footage from my HD-100 and I've been wondering about moving everything over to a new Mac Pro and working under Final Cut.

Is there a format I can convert the source footage to in Connect HD or Vegas that will edit painlessly in Final Cut? I was actually thinking of upconverting all my 720p24 footage to 1080p24 and having my telecine work done at 1080p24. Is there a 1080p format that Final Cut will edit that I can render this HD-100 footage to that won't interpolate resolution like Dvcpro HD with it's "Hey, 960x720 is close enough to 1280x720 and 1280x1080 is almost, kinda 1920x1080!" workflow?

[Steve Benner]

Here is what I suggest:

Convert all the footage to AIC, 1280x720...23.98 if you can....I know that Connect HD probably cannot do this, but if you can import them into MPEG Streamclip, the conversion is easy...

Once this is done, in FCP, change the AIC 30 preset to have a editing timebase of 23.98. That will allow you to edit in 24 frames within FCP.

For the record, I don't think there is a full 1080P workflow outside of the DVCPROHD....AIC may be able to, not sure...Uncompressed probably could, but that is a lot of space and hard to edit.

[Tim Dashwood]

Hi Robert,

Wow. There are many things to consider here.

Let's address the the idea of "moving" from a Windows workflow to a Mac workflow. One thing to understand is that FCP is codec agnostic, as long as it is playable by quicktime.

At the moment, the cineform codec is not supported on the mac side. However, I have read in the Cineform forum that they are working on a mac version of the codec.
If you have used a different avi codec that will work with quicktime (just check with quicktime player,) then you will be fine, but there will probably be some rendering involved to transcode it into a workable timeline codec like uncompressed 4:2:2.
AIC might work, but you've already converted HDV to the cineform intermediate codec, and reencoding to another intermediate codec might introduce some additional artifacts. If you do convert to .mov files, then try to do it on the Windows machine, using Quicktime Pro.

As for the upscaling. FCP5 does a very good job with upscaling from 720P to 1080P, but if you really want amazing quality, then check out Red Giant's InstantHD plugin. It does wonders with standard def to HD, so I'm sure 720P to 1080P is a piece of cake for it.
Remember, as far as the codec or editing system are concerned, 1080i and 1080P are the same thing. Just use a 1080i preset timeline and drop your 720P timeline into it. It will now be nested and you can apply scaling to it, or use the InstantHD plugin.

[Robert Jackson]

Originally Posted by Tim Dashwood

AIC might work, but you've already converted HDV to the cineform intermediate codec, and reencoding to another intermediate codec might introduce some additional artifacts.

Well, I obviously still have all the source material. I can go back to the tapes if the need is there. I wouldn't mind recapturing everything on a Mac Pro if it was an option, but as far as I can tell there's no way to really do it and keep synch. I never really wanted to edit this natively in HDV, so Final Cut not supporting JVC's 720p24 format isn't as much of an inconvenience as the apparent lack of a 720p24 format that Final Cut actually *does* support. Or am I missing something? Because it seems to me that my options are DVCPro HD or uncompressed HD, neither of which really works for me. I wish I could work in something like Cineform RAW. I wouldn't mind the files being 2-3 times the size of the original m2t files, but 2 hours per terrabyte with uncompressed HD is way out of the realm of the possible for me.

[Tim Gray]

Originally Posted by Robert Jackson

I wish I could work in something like Cineform RAW. I wouldn't mind the files being 2-3 times the size of the original m2t files, but 2 hours per terrabyte with uncompressed HD is way out of the realm of the possible for me.

It might not be of the same quality of Cineform RAW, but AIC is the closest thing out of the box on a Mac. File sizes about 2-3 times that of m2t with none of the render times associated with HDV. To my eyes, pretty good quality. And free.

I think there is another (for pay) codec out there that people sometimes recommend. BitJazz or something?

[Steve Mullen]

Originally Posted by Robert Jackson

I've been working for a few months now with Vegas 6 and Connect HD because it seemed like a viable way to use my HD-100 right now. Well, it's been a disaster. Importing the footage and converting to .avi is a breeze, but editing under Vegas has been a huge pain. It seems really buggy to me.

It's important to understand that with Vegas, while you are using the CineForm codec, you are using the Vegas render engine.

If you switch to Premiere Pro, you'll have the same codec but you'll use the CineForm render engine. So the obvious solution is to simply buy Premiere Pro 2.

By the way, I'm running EDIUS 4 Broadcast under Bootcamp on a MacBook, but did not have success installing Premiere Pro 1.5. That may be because it tried to install old versions of some XP software. I'll try again with V2 when I get around to it.

[Robert Jackson]

Originally Posted by Steve Mullen

It's important to understand that with Vegas, while you are using the CineForm codec, you are using the Vegas render engine.

Well, that's good to know. Cool...

[Robert Jackson]

Originally Posted by Steve Mullen

It's important to understand that with Vegas, while you are using the CineForm codec, you are using the Vegas render engine.

If you switch to Premiere Pro, you'll have the same codec but you'll use the CineForm render engine. So the obvious solution is to simply buy Premiere Pro 2.

I clipped too much of your reply in my previous response. Yesterday was a mean day, though, and I hadn't slept in about 30 hours. So yeah, Premiere Pro. Seems like the way to go. I hate staying on a PC, but I'll deal with it, I guess. I have After Effects 5.5 and Premiere 6.5 for Mac. I emailed Adobe yesterday about Crossgrading to the current versions for PC. They emailed me back today and said that the merger with Macromedia has them swamped, but someone will get back to me sometime. Nice. Premiere, After Effects and a couple of Boris toys should get me through this, I guess.