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Getting Started with HD editing

Hal9000

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Here is a screencap of my export window for the file that will be used by FCE. I'm using AIC as the format, at 100% constant quality, and not scaling. I have a few questions for those experienced: Given that I'm trying to use FCE, should I manually specify a framerate of 29.97? Should I select any of the options about deinterlacing? (FCE has presents for HD that have a lowercase "i" in them, but I only saw one with "p" and it was 720.) Are there are any other changes to the settings that I should be advised to make? Thanks; you all are invaluable.
999894_1900617917659_782425981_n.jpg
 

ThrowgnCpr

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why are you forcing 29.97? That is DVD spec, but involves pulldown. Film should be 23.976.
 

Hal9000

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Because evidently Final Cut Express won't export in 23.976.
 

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Yes, you need to put "29.97" in the frame rate. Otherwise FCE won't accept the material. Don't select "deinterlace video" since the source material is progressive. So, you should also deselect "interlaced scaling" (you aren't scaling anyway).

Regarding interlacing, that's going to happen inside FCE. Another unfortunate aspect of FCE -- it only supports 1080i, not 1080p...back when FCE was out, 1080p had yet to become a consumer video standard.

Your source is progressive, and when in FCE it will end up interlaced if you keep the frame size the same...there's no way around this. You could try downsizing to 720p and compare quality (use a short clip that has some action in it). Then you won't have to deal with the interlacing issue.

At this point, it's been so long since I've dealt with interlacing that someone else can hopefully give you some advice on this. I'll also mention that iMovie does support 23.976, and 1080p, though you did say it doesn't perform well on your computer.

Regarding your previous post about the video being "stuck" in Quicktime player while the audio played fine, that usually is a sign of your computer struggling to keep up. You do have an underpowered computer for full HD. So maybe it might not be a bad idea to convert to 720p and work with that.

Finally, I just wanted to note that while FCE only exports stereo, you can edit all the surround sound tracks in the timeline. This is definitely worthwhile to do, as it will give you so much more flexibility in removing unwanted sounds that might appear only on one or two channels. If you start with stereo, you can't remove as many sounds which is usually something you want to do with the PT...

If the source material is AC3 surround sound, you can use MPEG streamclip to export each of the surround channels individually (or, at least, you can export them so that you have 2 stereo and 2 mono tracks...later splitting up the stereo tracks if you want in FCE).

I can explain that process once you've decided on how you are going to deal with the video part.
 

ThrowgnCpr

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Hal9000 said:
Because evidently Final Cut Express won't export in 23.976.

well, that might cause some serious problems. If you hardcode the film framerate to 29.97 you are going to get blending and blurring. could look something like this:

2ivkz76.jpg
 

seciors

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ThrowgnCpr said:
well, that might cause some serious problems. If you hardcode the film framerate to 29.97 you are going to get blending and blurring. could look something like this:
<pic removed>

That's why when you change the frame rate (which again, has to be done if you are going to use FCE), you have to NOT choose frame blending. What you instead get are duplicated frames here and there, which is not great, but ends up being better than the blending which is much more noticeable (IMO). I do have experience with this. But it's also why I abandoned FCE...I'm too much of a perfectionist and really didn't want the jerkiness that sometimes happens due to these extra frames.

EDIT:
Once again, I highly suggest you take a minute or two from your source and test out a few different approaches, both at 1080i and 720p. Also, reconsider using iMovie (you might be able to improve performance by turning off certain things in the app, like the display of audio waveforms...and background rendering if that happens in iMovie...those are tricks people use in FCPX).
 

ThrowgnCpr

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seciors said:
That's why when you change the frame rate (which again, has to be done if you are going to use FCE), you have to NOT choose frame blending. What you instead get are duplicated frames here and there, which is not great, but ends up being better than the blending which is much more noticeable (IMO). I do have experience with this. But it's also why I abandoned FCE...I'm too much of a perfectionist and really didn't want the jerkiness that sometimes happens due to these extra frames.

yes, that is one way around it, but you can still cause weird motion (the jerkiness you alluded to). Any NLE that forces you to force a framerate on your video is dumb.
 

seciors

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ThrowgnCpr said:
yes, that is one way around it, but you can still cause weird motion (the jerkiness you alluded to). Any NLE that forces you to force a framerate on your video is dumb.

Some history:

You have to remember that FCE was squarely aimed at consumers editing content that came from video they shot themselves, and at that time, the best HD cameras shot in 1080i 29.97fps. FCE stopped getting updates from Apple long before they stopped updating FCP. FCE users were eagerly waiting for an update to FCE, and were expecting one when the "new FCP" was going to come out. Well...that ended up being FCPX which replaced both FCP7 and FCE in one fell swoop...with lots of backlash from the pro editing community due to the similarity to the iMovie interface and lack of some major features that existed in FCP7. It was a great upgrade for FCE users, if they were willing to spend the $250 and had a computer that met the pretty high tech spec requirements. As of now, FCPX has added a great many features that were missing (there have been 8 updates) and it is much closer to FCP7 in terms of features. FCP7 still has more flexibility in some areas, but for us (fan editors), FCPX is really a great choice...again, if you have a computer that can run it.
 

Hal9000

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FCE is sounding worse all the time. I'm gonna look at other options. I think I know a guy to ask whether FCP7 would install and run on my machine. He might even have an old license I could still use. #determination #exerciseinfutility
 

Hal9000

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Well, hot damn! FCP7 did indeed install and runs just fine on my system! :D:-D
I did a little test clip and it exported beautifully.
 

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That's great news!! FCP7 will definitely serve your needs well! Feel free to continue asking questions, but I would also recommend you get some sort of additional help in learning about FCP7 as it is a complicated piece of software and can be quite overwhelming. If there's a book available by Tom Wolsky you might go with that (he does a very good job with his books - I have his one for FCE and it helped me a great deal). Or just go on amazon and peruse the highest rated ones that help you learn FCP7. finally, I highly recommend you take advantage of the Apple support forum dedicated to FCP7 - you can get a lot of technical questions answered there. Just make sure you use the FCP7 forum and not FCPX - it might be titled FCP Studio.

glad you were able to obtain FCP7 and it works on your computer! Now you won't need to deal with the limitations of FCE.

when encoding, make sure to use prores and not AIC. I would advise prores 422 LT, as it is perfectly suitable for already compressed soure material (even in HD) and it will save you space over prores 422. That will also help with performance given your computer specs.
 

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It seems like I can't actually hear all 6 audio tracks at once, given that I only have headphones with which to monitor them. That's fine. However, I can't seem to export 5.1. Well, not really.
It'll export six discrete (or four, with the L and R front and rear grouped) channels of AIFF audio, but only the first two channels contain any sound. I tried a few clips, to make sure I didn't just happen to export a clip where only two channels are being used. I don't see anything in the settings and couldn't find any support for this particular issue. I just need to export all channels, regardless of whether I can monitor them beforehand.

Also, can anyone advise me on whether it is preferable to upscale the prequel deleted scenes before starting editing, or during export? (Should I tamper with the framerate either way, or leave it at the 29.97 it is now?)

I love this community; I couldn't get this off the ground without your support. I hope you don't mind, seciors, that I've already primed your edit for potential audio mining. These edits, like their Hal900 and JasonN predecessors will merely attempt to create a 'best practice' fan edit that seeks to combine the best of prior edits into one that *I* would prefer to watch. (Mind you, they'll be much more aggressive than my first attempt long ago.)

As you can see in the pic below, only the first two audio tracks show content inside FCP7. Could one not edit in 5.1 at all without a 5.1 system? Surely it would allow me to merely hear two at a time or downmix during editing, and allow me to export proper 5.1.
As I write this, the thought occurs to me that perhaps MPEG Streamclip is not actually filling out all the audio tracks when it exports, even though it does indeed export six tracks. I'll try exporting the tracks individually.

1016125_1901758346169_1677499911_n.jpg
 

seciors

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Hi Hal,
slowly but surely you are making progress! :)

Ok, first, with regards to video...now that you are using FCP7 there is absolutely no reason why you should be using 29.97 any longer. You need to re-encode at 23.976 and make sure to use the prores codec - I suggest using prores 422 LT as it saves space over 422 and is visually equivalent to 422 for the purposes of fan editing. (E.g., since the original source material will always have been encoded at least once, you really gain no benefit going with 422 at this point)

second, in order to get 5.1 audio out of MPEGStreamclip, you need to export the audio separately from the video. MPEGStreamClip can only output at most two channels at a time. so, what you need to do is, on the main screen of MPEGStreamClip, select the audio channel drop down and you should see a bunch of choices. The ones you care about are (doing this from memory so they might not be exact): L/R, Center, LFE, and Ls/Rs. You need to select each of those channels one at a time, and choose "export audio" for each one. For the two stereo channels, make sure to select stereo in the popup. For the mono tracks, select mono. For all of them, select 48k. Then export as AIFF. You can then import those directly to FCP, or, if you have a tool like QuickTime Pro (this is what I use) combine them with the video file first.
When you lay down the audio tracks (either in FCP or QuickTime Pro), the order is important, for final export. They should be in the following order: L,R,C,LFE,Ls,Rs. When it comes to exporting to QuickTime at the end for further post processing, this is the track order QuickTime expects for 5.1. I learned this the hard way when working on my fist edit, and had to remap the channels inside FCP7 for export (which you CAN do, but it's a big pain to do so).

There might be another way to get the 5.1 tracks into FCP7 - perhaps [MENTION=8664]L8wrtr[/MENTION] might have a better suggestion, since I think he still uses FCP7 and this probably knows it better than I do t this point. But the Above is what I do (even for FCPX)

As for using my edit as a source, feel free to do so, I think most editors here are fine with sharing their work and other ideas with other editors. You should know that I am nearing release of a HD version of my edit (which will also contain high quality versions of two deleted scenes, care of [MENTION=16446]emanswfan[/MENTION]:)). When it is released (should be in the next month or so) you are free to use that as well (it isn't a one to one mapping though, as the length is now 82 minutes instead of 90).
 

seciors

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One more thing about the deleted scenes - you should probably get assistance with those, unless you have better software and the skills to use it. Up scaling using just FCP is not going to look very good, and color correction tools aren't available in FCP7 (the separate application Color handles that, but it's quite complex).

i mentioned that my HD edit will contain two of the deleted scenes (the ones most commonly used - the fight with Greedo and the discovery/destruction of the droid pod) ; you are free to use them if you get permission from emswfan first (I'm sure he will give it).
 

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MPEG Streamclip seems to choke on my files for some reason, so I went ahead and bought Pavtube (not the bluray ripper, since I already can use MakeMKV and Streamclip for that) to convert it to ProRes.

Once that's done, and I have two 5.1 audio sources to play with, I'm going to make sure I can edit audio in the timeline and export it properly. It seems like if I use the pen tool to manually fade into a different 5.1 set of tracks, I'll end up with 12 audio tracks in the timeline. Once I've done that, will there be an option on the left side of each track to specify where that track should go when exported?

Subtitling should be pretty easy to learn, and there's that wonderful Star Wars TSG app that makes it brain-dead simple to make an opening crawl. For end credits, I'll export the blank starfield frame and use some simple image editor to put in all the pre-scroll credits.

Oh, and emanswfan is willing to help me with some deleted scenes once his main computer is back up and running eventually. I guess I can go ahead and make progress with the low-res deleted scenes as placeholders. I'm most looking forward to working on the podrace. I hope to roughly recreate the way I had it several years ago, as you can see here:

Just a progress update; I'm still mired in prep work. And Pavtube's got 12 hours left to render my source.
 

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To answer your question, FCP7 has the flexibility to map as many audio tracks as you want to specific channels. So yes, you can do that. I can't tell you exactly how though, as again, it's been too long since I've used FCP7 for me to remember details like that. But I know you can do it since I remember doing it. Basically I would follow a pattern so that, for example, tracks 1 and 7 would go the the left channel, tracks 2 and 8 would go to the right channel, tracks 3 and 9 go to center, etc. sometimes rarely you might need to go beyond 12 tracks...just keep using the same pattern. The limit is either really high or non existent, so you won't ever reach it, but it's good to know you have plenty of room!

I recall using sequences to split up my edit into scenes. I set up an initial template sequence that had all the audio tracks set up and mapped the way I wanted, and then I would just duplicate that sequence when I wanted a new scene. That way everything would already be set up and be the same as all the other sequences which is kind of important so you don't get some sequences mapping differently than others.

Once you get things into FCP, it's critical you pick the correct settings for your sequence so that FCP shows no need to render your source material. If any sort of bars appear at the top of the material, you've done something wrong. So if this happens, you will need to figure out what you did wrong and next time only render very short clips to keep testing until you get it right. But hopefully you got it right this first time!
 

Hal9000

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The video stream does not contain any black bars. Thus, it's somewhere around 1920x900 resolution, and is not 1080 pixels in height. Quicktime can play the file with the right aspect ratio, before and after being converted to ProRes LT.

However, when exported from FCP, it appears stretched. This is the case whether 16:9 aspect ration is checked. Do you know a way to instruct FCP to export at 1080p and fill the gaps with black bars?
 

seciors

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Ok, so a few things I'm confused by. First, all Star Wars movies are released in the 2.35 aspect ratio, which means the dimensions without black bars should be 1920x816. Are you saying your source is not in that ratio? What are the exact dimensions?

Second, you said "when exported from FCP it appears stretched." So you are implying it looks fine inside FCP, right? It's just when you export that you see a problem?

What are your sequence settings frame size? I'm assuming 1920x1080? When you place source material into your sequence, you should have sort of option that lets you specify whether or not it should remain unstretched. You need to look this up in the FCP7 manual (it's available online). That should center the material and provide you with black bars above and below when you see it in FCP7. However, like I said before, I'm a bit concerned about your source aspect ratio.
 

Hal9000

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Sorry; I had to type the last post in a hurry! The source file is indeed those very dimensions. I was not being precise.
I figured there'd be an option somewhere. If it turns out to be easy to have the source file encoded with such black bars to begin with, would that be worth the time spent encoding it, or does it matter? Whatever software I use to author to a disc should be able to make it anamorphic without stretching, I'd hope.
 
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