My experience with FCP X. Need help to improve.

[Sergio Perez]

Hi all,

Just finished a project where I had to go direct to projection to a house with an audience of 3000+ spectators in the local Arts Festival. Video was projected through a Panasonic 16K Lumens 1080p projector (looked great)

The entire video was edited on a Macbook Pro Retina.

The Editing

This video was entirely shot on a Red Epic. What I decided to do was not to use raw but prores 1080p files converted by Redcine-X. The reason was because of speed of editing, the heavy Color correction I was going to do through plugins- no resolve but using Magic Bullet Looks- as well as some compositing with Keyer and some animations.

After a previous experience with a TVC, I was more confortable with the editing in FCPX this time. Understanding the "storyline" concept I actually had a very smooth video editing experience. However, a new unknown and lots of issues where presented to me this time: the audio. The truth is, with the change of "tracks" to "story lines" it was a big mess to arrange everything and make it look sort of "arranged", or organised. Another aspect that I wasn't expecting was the audio levels bar now went beyond 0 to 6db. A bit idiotic but took me some time to understand the new "clipping monitoring" of this sound bar.

I was used to get my dialogue "normalised" on Soundtrack Pro, but it seems like there's a new option called "loudness" that basically is doing this. Working with dialogue, there's an option to "Vocal enhance". I have to do a disclaimer here: Normally I don't do audio . I send it to a professional audio technician that does it for me. I was crazy attempting to do this all alone. It somehow worked but I DO NOT RECOMMEND anyone doing what I did.

Back to audio. One thing I didn't like was the constant need to have to " expand audio components" to see the different tracks of my recording. I had to manually select "dual mono tracks" to have an expanded view of my audio. But it worked.

A very, very important aspect for Apple should be to get the audio exportable to audio software. Any tips on this?

Tomorrow I'll have a mastering session in a big post house and I plan to see how this integrates with Resolve visually.

Just to say the showing was a success, rave reviews in the local press. I was nuts on doing this without much experience on the software but things somehow worked out- audio included. But it could have been better, specially on the audio part, if it was done by someone on protools. Would love to know your experiences with audio in FCPX

Cheers, will keep this thread open as I improve with the software. Am starting to like it more. Had another big problem yesterday with corrupted preview files (I think). I couldn't "share" a master file from a duplicate project. But the original was fine. In old FCP, you could erase render files. What do we do here?

Thanks and do share your experiences,

Sergio

 

[Eric Santiago]

Export Audio as roles.

http://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/tutorials/1039-exporting-audio-components-roles-from-final-cut-pro-x

http://www.larryjordan.biz/fcpx-send-audio-to-audition/

 

[Sergio Perez]

Hi Eric, thanks for the link. Seems like there's a bug with the audio levels in the first link you sent. The second one looks really messy in terms of steps. I don't use audition, I normally send it out for protools as individual audio tracks from the previous FCP- I didn't even send OMF's.

 

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Hi Sergio,

I can imagine reasons to not do this, but my advice would be to work in R3D native but with FCPX generating proxies. Reason being you can reconnect to the originals with one click in your preferences (switching between proxy mode and native mode), you can work very fast (because you are working with Proxy Prores, very lightweight), and every change you make to the transform-tools of the clip (scale, etc. ...) will trickly down in the correct way on your 5K image. Doing this with separate 1080p files is a bit trickier.
Sam Mestman has great tutorials about the RED Workflow, go and check his site WeMakeMovies if you haven't already. He has a bunch of FCPX tutorials, of which about 4 or so are focussing on working with RED material. Also about audio, which I'm sure will interest you.

About the audio: I think Apple is on to some very good concepts in FCPX regarding audio. They have very strong filters (imported from Logic, a full blown DAW),. Working with Roles is in my opinion much stronger then working with tracks, because you are making your identification of your 'track', audio file, purely based on content, and not on a numbered track.

You can also adjust many clips at once in the inspector. In one go, put all your Event Clips of a certain scene in Dual Mono, and in one go give Audio-1 the name of your lead character, and the second mic the other character. Bam. You use those clips in the timeline? Those will trickle down. Sam Mestman, again, has some very good free tutorials who explain this in detail. What to do and what not to do. What's possible and what isn't. (I must seem affiliated with the guy. Believe, I'm not, don't know him, but I think he makes the best FCPX Tutorials out there).

For instance, Larry Jordan has on his tutorials some settings you can use for a Male or Female Voice. Giving them warmth and clarity. Give those specific human frequencies a boost, he uses the FAT EQ filter in FCPX. If you expand audio components you can put one preset for the male on channel one, and the female on channel 2 for instance.

Getting the audio out to audio software is already possible, but unless you want to export them by role, having different AIF's per Role, you need 3rd Party Software.
Depending on to where you need to go, there are a lot of options. Going to Pro Tools is one of the biggest, for which there is: http://www.x2pro.net
They even have a pro version that allows handles and stuff.

But of course there are weak points, some of which you pointed out already. Apple should allow more visual grouping by Roles, and/or allow color coding per role.
A complete audio mixer is something waiting to happen (and/or a new Logic X with great round-tripping in FCPX).
I also think you should have a one button solution: expand video/audio and/or expand audio components, and then have it for your full timeline, on every shot that's already in there, but also for every shot that you put in the timeline AFTER you selected to expand audio components/expand video/audio.
I already sent Apple feedback a couple of times about this.

About the Render Files: very easy. Select the Project in your project library. Go to File - Delete Project Render Files. You can to the same with an Event.

I see you are already getting much more used to FCPX. I can only tell you, the more you use it, the more you have to get used to using other NLE's...

Some links to help you, do yourself a favor and watch these. There is some great advice in there.

http://themovieswemake.com/tutorials/

http://themovieswemake.com/2012/11/fcpx-10-6-davinci-resolve-workflow/

http://themovieswemake.com/2012/10/fcpx-compound-clip-workflow/

http://themovieswemake.com/2012/10/fcpx-red-workflow-part-01/
http://themovieswemake.com/2012/10/fcpx-red-workflow-part-02/

http://themovieswemake.com/2012/10/fcpx-grade-raw-fcpx-redcine-pro/

http://themovieswemake.com/2012/10/fcpx-grade-raw-fcpx-redcine-pro/

http://themovieswemake.com/2012/10/fcpx-batch-renaming-advanced-multicam-sync/

 

[Sergio Perez]

Thanks a lot Mathieu. The recent Adobe debacle, your help as well as all the others in the previous thread- and the fact that someone at Apple actually tried to communicate with me to check out what happened the last time- gave me the boost to try again and move forward. Liking it more and more. This audio part, however, is something I really need to look on and would love to see improved. Will look and read your links with interest.

Cheers

Sergio

 

[Frederick Giles]

Xtopro Audio convert works very well at getting your project to protools, $150. When preparing for Resolve V9.1.3 the big thing is to covert all your connected clips and additional storylines into into one storyline only.

 

[Frederick Giles]

A friend of mine, sound engineer who I work with al ot, was not impressed at all with audio in FCPX, but that was a 1.5 years ago, things have improved since. He showed me what protools can do and it is light years ahead of FCPX. The complexity of protools did not impress me, but if I ever felt like I had figure protools out for some reason I think I could.