Valentine s Day The edit will

Valentine s Day

The edit will probably be on FCP, and compositing chroma work will be on After Effects. I Valentine s Day have a 45 second 3D animation on 3Ds Max. Probably, Ill be using the ProRes 422 codec to edit in FCP. My editor uses a Macbook Pro and I use a laptop PC. Hence the FCP and AE mix, instead of Shake. What is the best workflow solution? I cant afford Cineform. Ive used the trial version and it works great on the Premiere Pro, but since Im going FCP way and it has its own lossless codec, I figure why bother. So, in all likelihood, there is no way Im changing any of the software I mentioned above, cause Im stuck with it. How do I get files from FCP to After Effects and 3Ds Max and back? Will ProRes hold up and is it compatible with AE and 3D Max? Or should I change ProRes to something else, import the footage into AE and then render out to something else? Ive been reading a lot of posts, and the more I read, the more confused I become. So, I guess Im stuck! I would appreciate any help in this regard. Thanks! Location: Auckland, New Zealand Realistically your biggest concern is ensuring that your edit and tape logging records accurate timecode so you can produce an EDL Valentine s Day will work for a more sophisticated post house if you get the money to do a high end grade/DI at a later date before going to a film out. For DVD release assuming you are handling the duplication/replication ProRes is certainly a good intermediate format that you will not need to go back to an online from, less true if you are looking at doing an expensive DI and film out. Ideally all your graphics and effects should be output in an uncompressed format, then conformed to Prores for your edit. Realistically your biggest concern is ensuring that your edit and tape logging records accurate timecode so you can produce an EDL that will work for a more sophisticated post house if you get the money to do a high end grade/DI at a later date before going to a film out. For DVD release assuming you are handling the duplication/replication ProRes is certainly a good intermediate format that you will not need to go back to an online from, less true if you are looking at doing an expensive DI and film out. Ideally all your graphics and effects should be output in an uncompressed format, then conformed to Prores for your edit. I shot without any records of timecode. I did that after some research on forums that it isnt really a big deal. Can a sophisticated post house manage without it? Anyway, I dont have the experience to log timecode in a way that might help anybody. I dont think Ill be handling the replication process, assuming what you mean by that is producing multiple copies of DVDs for release. That might be outsourced. So should I keep the output format as ProRes? Is that the best possible? Its just a little confusing, but shouldnt my output be MPEG-2 DVD? For graphics/effects, what is an uncompressed format? Since Im using AE, what would that be? And will it be a different format for 3D Max? Can I match various formats in the FCP timeline and still work with ProRes? Location: Auckland, New Zealand Hi Sareesh, this is going to be a bit of a long reply because what you are hoping to achieve is a LONG way from where you are at and as such there is a lot you need to understand. First thing is the importance of timecode in an OFFLINE/ONLINE workflow. You dont necessarily need to have recorded timecode on the day manually as timecode will have been recorded in your camera on your tapes. Even the time code on your tapes will be of a big advantage if you want to Online Edit at a later date in fact doing an Online edit without time code being correctly on the tapes is practically impossible, as it means manually making every single cut again. What I mean by an Online Edit is when you take all your original tapes, footage and media in your edit to a high end production house who then reassembles your entire film using an EDL Edit Decision List or your original Final Cut Project, but instead of ingesting media in a compressed form such as HDV or ProRess its ingested as uncompressed 10Bit Video. The advantage of doing this, is once your entire film has been reassembled in this format, any further alterations or changes such as colour grades, compositing and effects can be handled at the highest quality possible ensuring there will be no further degradation of footage in terms of recompressing already compressed video. This requires very powerful computers and ridiculous amounts of storage but it also requires that there is a way for the computer to automatically reassemble and restore all the origin footage from the tapes this is where numbering your tapes accurately and making sure you capture the timecode from your tapes is VITAL. Without it your EDL wont work, and you will not be able to do an online. If you can not online edit your film you will not be able to do the highest quality transitions, effects etc possible WITHIN the edit because you will be limited to the quality of the compressed codec your original timeline is exported at as your highest possible quality. With ProRes this is not a terrible situation as ProRes is a very good codec but its not the best situation possible the best situation being doing an online edit from uncompressed digitization of the master media.