Let me pick your brains: EXPORTING BACK TO XD

[Harley Flanagan]

Hey everyone. I'm new to this forum but I've been lurking for a while. There has been some great info on this page and considering I've had an XDCAM deck sitting on my desk for several months now, I figured it was high time I joined.

I've been tinkering with exporting back to my XDCAM from FCP for the past 2 weeks. Everything works great, but I've been given a mandate to establish a workflow for our other editors when exporting our Masters.

We are cutting half hour shows. The native video is roughly 5.25 gigs upon completion, so we are planning on placing 3 versions of (let's call it) Show #1 on an XD Master along with 4 channels of audio per version.

So essentially, we'd like the MASTER DISC for SHOW #1 to hypothetically look like this:

-SHOW #1 VERSION A
(V)Full Video
(A1)Stereo Master Mix L
(A2)Stereo Master Mix R
(A3)Stereo Mix Minus VO L
(A4)Stereo Mix Minus VO R

-SHOW #1 VERSION B
(V)Full Video (Minus Credits)
(A1)Stereo M&E L
(A2)Stereo M&E R
(A3)MONO VO
(A4)MONO M&E

-SHOW #1 VERSION C
(V)Full Video (Clean/Minus GFX)
(A1)UNDECIDED
(A2)UNDECIDED
(A3)UNDECIDED
(A4)UNDECIDED

-------

This way, when we need a dub for any purposes: air copies, globals etc etc, we have every possible version we'd want in every config ready to go from XDCAM to any 4 channel destination.

Does anyone else out there do something similar? This seems ideal to me, but actually executing it seems tricky and time consuming.

I've dug around in FCP for a few days now and do not see the type of exporting options I'd like on the audio side. Assumming I have TRK 1 VO, TRK 2 FX and TRKS 3/4 STEREO MSX will FCP allow me to route all four audio tracks to MIX OUTS 1 & 2 at the same time I'm routing everything except VO to MIX OUTS 3 & 4? This would create a one pass export to XDCAM that would create exactly what I needed for VERSION 1.

All FCP seems to allow me to do is route audio to only one output at one time, not multiple outs.

Any workarounds on this? Does anyone else out there work with episodic TV and master back to XD? What are your methods?

[Michael Knight]

Hi Harley. Welcome to the forum.

I'm new to both the XDCAM (F350) and am currently editing with FCP...also a new experience.

I have had tremendous help on this forum myself.

Others may be able to answer your questions here, but I just thought I'd mention that we have a support contract with the FCP people, and they have been extremely helpful...so if your organization can spring for something like that, or if you can call them yourself, that might be the quickest way to go.

Best.

Michael Knight

[Andy Mees]

Hi Harley

I'm afarid FCP is rather limited in the audio output front. That is also compounded by the fact that, for exporting to XDCAM, your sequenece settings for audio output need to be dual mono, dual mono.

Your best bet is to double/triple/quadruple up the audio tracks in the timeline, as required, in order to create the output mixes you need.

Then you can right click on or around the autoselect button for each of the tracks on the timeline, and choose which channel to output to from the audio output assignment popup.

I'd love to see a versatile patchbay interface in a future revision, so that we can do complex mixes withou jumping through these hoops.

Hope it helps
Andy

[Harley Flanagan]

Thanks Andy..

You kinda reinforced my suspicions. I'm a pro-tools guy first and foremost, so I'm used to some very flexible and creative routing which makes versioning very easy. I guess FCP isn't there yet.

[Greg Boston]

Originally Posted by Harley Flanagan

Thanks Andy..

You kinda reinforced my suspicions. I'm a pro-tools guy first and foremost, so I'm used to some very flexible and creative routing which makes versioning very easy. I guess FCP isn't there yet.

No, but Soundtrack Pro is. You can send your audio directly to STP, and do all your mixing there, including sub-mixes on separate bus assignments, more effects, etc. Soundtrack Pro is a quantum leap over the original Soundtrack.

-gb-

[Andy Mees]

Thanks for the suggestion Greg

An extra step, but no more so than doubling up tracks in FCP, and far more powerful. Not too shabby.

Cheers mate
Andy

[Greg Boston]

Originally Posted by Andy Mees

Thanks for the suggestion Greg

An extra step, but no more so than doubling up tracks in FCP, and far more powerful. Not too shabby.

Cheers mate
Andy

Andy, I remembered this thread, and wanted to point out a Ripple Training Tutorial Video (free) that explains almost exactly what I was talking about in terms of output flexibility.

Have a look... http://www.rippletraining.com/free_s...utorials.html#

regards,

-gb-