NEED ADVICE!!! We will be editing a feature film on FCP!

[Michael Chase Gordon]

I plan to shoot our indie feature film of about 90 mins on Red One and I have never edited a feature with 4k footage.
My editor has edited 4k, but on smaller projects and we wanted to know what the most important steps are to make sure you can edit at home as well as finish, colorize and up res to 4k at a post house.
I assume its very important to be extremely organized with clips and bins and we want to have a time line and the footage on externals drives so we can move between a post house and home.
I have a brand new 27inch quad core I-Mac, filled with ram and the better video card. I also have a small 1080p lcd tv to use as a as well.
If our goal is to only edit the rough of the movie at home and finalize it at a post house set up for Red footage, what are the most important things you need to do to start the work-flow off so you dont have problems later.

 

[Craig Parkes]

1) Download Clipfinder.
2) Profit.

 

[B Newberry]

1) Download Clipfinder.
2) Profit.

you forgot the first step

1) Donate to Hans
2) Download Clipfinder
3) Profit

:-0

 

[Craig Parkes]

you forgot the first step

1) Donate to Hans
2) Download Clipfinder
3) Profit

:-0

Very true.

 

[Michael Chase Gordon]

Thanks guys but can you be more specific? Profit? Is that a program or part of a joke?
I dont mind donating to Hans LOL

 

[Ben Brainerd]

It's kinda a joke. But at the same time, it's more or less true.

If all you're doing is *editing*, you won't really need to touch the 4K footage except at the beginning.

Basically, your workflow should end up being something like this:

1) Shoot
2) Download Clipfinder (Preferably while donating to Hans)
3) Transcode your footage into something edit-friendly. I use 1/4-Res ProRes 422 files most of the time, though I've also had good results with the new ProRes Proxy.
4) Edit
5) Send XML/EDL/Whatever to your post house along with the footage.
6) Profit. Or not. Can't really help ya with that one.

There are obviously some more details in some of those steps, but that's a basic overview. I'd be happy to go into more detail if you'd like.

 

[Noah Kadner]

Read the FCP white paper that comes with the RED plugin for FCP. That explains a lot. Also my book.

Noah

 

[Mark Allen]

The white paper that Noah mentioned is very helpful and is good if you are going to be using Color to do your correction. I've used it on a PBS special and it worked nicely.