FCP workflow suggestion

[Eric Cameron]

I haven't worked enough with Storm yet to be sure this isn't possible somehow, but one hole in the overall FCP Red workflow I see now is this:
Working with animated pan & scan is obscenely difficult.
For example, finishing a project using FCP with a variety of animated zooms and pans at 1080 should go something like this:
Shoot, backup, generate offline media.
Cut with offline media. Now, if the first-light before creating offlines was good, shots with no pan & scan are ready to go to Color.
However, any shots that have been pushed in on would benefit from going back to the R3D's. As far as I know, there is no good way to handle this in the FCP/RCX/Clipfinder/Storm world. You can re-generate these files at a higher resolution appropriate to the extent of the motion you are employing, but that entails a completely split timeline of two different resolutions.
What would be wonderful is this: Storm, when importing an FCP XML, brings in motion tab settings as effects data, and allows you to bake them in on export. Seriously, this would be wonderful. Please, if anyone has an existing workflow that is this simple, let me know, but otherwise this would be an amazing addition to Storm.

Eric Cameron

 

[jake blackstone]

If you'd use AAF from Avid with appropriate grading software (Baselight, FilmMaster), then you wouldn't have this conundrum. The solution is there. It's just not consumer-cheap...

 

[Eric Cameron]

Not particularly helpful Jake. I specifically said in the FCP world. I know there are many far better finishing solutions, but that's simply not where I'm working right now. And Storm is angled pretty heavily at the FCP crowd, so why not see if they can fill this gap in?

 

[Uli Plank]

Well, I'm afraid you'll have to switch to CS5 then or wait and see what "Awesome" may offer on April 12th…

 

[jimhare]

Pretty sure if you use clipfinder and send to Color you could do this.

It goes back to the R3D and I thought I read it now uses the full 4k as a source. If so you could just use the geometry room and keyframe your P&S. Plenty of res to spare. Can someone confirm or correct?

 

[Eric Cameron]

Yes, Color will bake in geometry settings when rendering from R3D, but it doesn't interpret FCP's motion tab settings well. It ends up involving doing things over within Color. Also, Color does half-resolution rendering when source is 4.5k. Look, there's plenty of workarounds for this, but they are all very cumbersome, time consuming and sub-optimal. One would think that a reasonable way to do this would exist. I haven't the foggiest idea of how difficult this would be to achieve, but I sure would like to see it done.

 

[jake blackstone]

Not particularly helpful Jake. I specifically said in the FCP world. I know there are many far better finishing solutions, but that's simply not where I'm working right now. And Storm is angled pretty heavily at the FCP crowd, so why not see if they can fill this gap in?

Please, if anyone has an existing workflow that is this simple, let me know
Eric Cameron

The solution I proposed is THAT simple and it exists, just as you had asked

 

[Eric Cameron]

Jake, your solution is not a solution to the problem I presented. Yes, for an Avid project this is fine. For a project in CS5, also no problem. But when a project comes to me from Final Cut, I'm stuck with cumbersome workarounds. I appreciate that there are other packages out there that don't have the same specific issues as Final Cut. I'm talking about how to work in one in particular, not asking for advice on what I should be using instead. The best advice so far is Uli's statement to see what Apple has in store. But of course that still doesn't help right now. Now does anybody have any other suggestions on how to handle this sort of thing in Final Cut? I posted this in Storm because I have a workflow for this, but it's annoying and I thought that Storm might be an appropriate piece of software to integrate something like this into.