...and it pains me to say it. But it is the truth and I have to call it like I see it.
The past three days I have been trying to restore an old project. It's a decently complex project with green screen, tons of cuts, P2 footage and tape footage. I have not been able to get FCP to reconnect to anything properly wihtout going through file by file. This process should have taken a day at most with the recaptures and p2 reimport, instead I am on day 3.
I usually have excellent luck with Media Manager and XMLs, but this project is truly testing my patience. Also, i am totally bummed out by it all.
All the plugins are old and I have new versions of the fxplugs now which don't translate, the P2 media is giving me fits (it comes in fine, but won't reconnect to the timeline) and the things that do relink are relinking to wrong items sometimes-but-not-all-of-the-time. ALso, there were some rendered materials that I have as self contained movies, and they are playing back improperly in FCP now. It's just a low down dirty mess.
In all fairness, this project was started two OSs ago, FCP Gods only know how many verisons of QUicktime ago, and several iterations of FCP ago. Still, i have to believe that if FCP had a better database tracking system, all I would have to do is update some plugins which I would expect and wouldn't be all that bad.
For now I suffer.
Sorry for the downer, but I had to put this down in a place where someone might relate.
Looking forward to the future.
Jeremy
Digg it
And this is why the huge houses still buy and use Avid
I do not mean to be insulting, Jeremy, and I apologize for seeming to make light of your situation -- which I am most emphatically not doing. But every time I read people who say that Hollywood filmmakers and New York broadcasters are going FCP, I think of issues like this and I know better. Yes, there are indeed departments and job functions that are and can be handled quite adeptly by Final Cut. But the serious media management functions? Not on your life. For every one situation wherein people can point to Final Cut in a major industry setting, I usually find out that it is for use mainly in a peripheral setting. The media management just isn't there to really support much else. This is the single-most requested and most needed area in which Final Cut can improve, especially if they want to displace Avid in the heart of a true networked and interacting environment.
I am sorry for your pain, Jeremy.
Ron Lindeboom
Please, make light of it
It makes me feel better.
I think I have finally got it all sorted, but not without some pain.
Cheers
Jeremy
Sympathy
Jeremy,
I know your pain.
As a self-contained system, I love FCP. In fact tranferring projects to other machines, and from the past works fine most of the time. However, when the tranfer does not work well, it results in a LOT of wasted time.
Especially sad is XML. I've had very little love using XML to move projects between versions, unless the projects are very simple.
Glad you've got it sorted.
Best,
Tom Meegan
God bless them workarounds!
Over the years, I have said on a number of occasions that the most powerful word in computing is "workaround."
I am glad that you got your problem sorted out.
You gotta love them workarounds.
BTW: That is a great music video. Who is the artist?
Ron
Gnarls
Gnarls Barkley produced by Danger Mouse (of Grey Album fame).
Colorista screwed us recently
I feel your pain Jeremy. We did 3 out of 5 episodes of a documentary series last year using Colorista 1.0 for color correction. Brought the entire series back online two months ago and Colorista is now up to 1.0.1 or maybe 1.0.2.
The plug-in does not translate the new information correctly at all on the Intel machine. It crashes the G5 machine. This is less than one year ago and on the same OS and on the same machines. Required us to spend 6 extra days color grading that we should not have had to do. VERY frustrating.
Ouch
I can feel the pain on this one.
Why can't anything just be perfect? I love FCP's power and flexibility in terms of expandability and format options. Being able to stick a $1000 card in the box and get full HD workflow is fantastic.
Avid, however, is absolutely rock solid on this stuff. Yesterday for example I had a project that had come from another location to us, they had taken the sequence offline (decomposed Avid calls it) and then recaptured. However some shots couldn't be recaptured for one reason or another, however they'd already been captured at 1:1 during the offline (as they knew they wouldn't be able to be recaptured). To bring those clips online all we had to do was select the sequece, choose Relink and then select the resolution we wanted to relink to. Everything is back online, regardless of the length of the original clip, or how much was used in the sequence.
Avid seems to be making some of the right moves in their products (scrapping Xpress Pro and dropping the MC price, offering entry level HD hardware, although it's still pricey) but Apple shows no signs of addressing some of the bigger issues with the basics in FCP.
FCP works differently, which I can adapt to, I'm not as fast on FCP and I find myself lost trying to do somethings, but I can work through all that, but it just plain lacks some of the core stuff. I still can't get over the lack of information when capturing, and the inability to link to a database of media is baffling to me. There's no reason FCP couldn't do it. Hell, iTunes has a better media database than FCP.
I'm really torn, because FCP for us offers a level of power with it's HD features that we really can't justify in Avid (maybe the Mojo DX will change that), but the way we need to use it (as an online tool) makes it's weakness in media management (and even batch capturing) also present some real challenges.
I think Apple really should sit down and look at the way Avid manages and tracks media, as they do it really really well - everything else they can take or leave, but that alone would immediately bring a lot more people to FCP I think. By far the biggest complaint I've ever heard from editors about FCP (even those who use FCP exclusively) is about the media management, and I know of at least a handful of big jobs where that really has been the killer blow for FCP in planning.
A few years ago I had to remake some old masters (for international release) we stil had all the source tapes and the Avid bins from 4 years before. Using Avid Media Composer 1.35 on a PC I opened the bins (created on old Mac Media Composer systems) flawlessly and recaptured all the media without any difficulties. The next day, as the Media Composer was being used for something else, I opened the project on an Xpress Pro system and carried on my work, before finishing and outputting on the Media Composer later. I've never had difficulty opening any Avid bin on any Avid version, backwards, forwards, and even across products. That stuff is solid.
I love how Avid works, and I love what FCP can offer, but overall I still feel that even without a lot of the wizz bang that Avid still is the more robust platform. I hope to see that change a lot.
(My comment is longer than your whole post :) )