Independent Feature Film with Final Cut Pro X

Just giving heads up.

I haven't been very active here as you some of you guys can see. But I have good reason I just finished the Enzling project which received very positive feedback!

But now I will be tackling a independent feature film with Final Cut Pro X! :woohoo:
I am bit excited to see what new workflows I find.

Cheers

I edited a independent movie last month. XDCam + Canon Vixia cameras. Created one compound clip for each act, and when the client asked for a new version I just duplicated the compound and changed its name. Then copy the 5 compound clips acts inside a project, break apart everything and those were my versions. X2Pro for ProTools.

This batch renaming workflow was very helpful >

And watch out for a weird bug while syncing multiple audio channels, here is a workaround:

A did a similar workflow last fall but ran into trouble with a very large event (250MB +) holding those compound clips and major slowdowns. Did you run into slowdowns? Where did you store your compound clips?

The Event size is 185 MB (3000 clips aprox) I had a SmartCollection only for compounds. The movie was super easy to edit and hadn't had many changes because the director was very accurate with the footage he recorded. I think I have no more than 25 compounds clips and 4 full projects (versions).

I'm waiting for the audio mix and then we will color grade in Assimilate Scratch.

I had no major slowdowns I can recall, but the system wasn't working very smoothly either (MacPro 2x2.4 Quad 10GB RAM + ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB RAM). I must say that my personal Mac mini 2012 with 16GB RAM works way faster than this Mac Pro.

FYI, this is what I did...

1) Ingest all the media (video+external audio)
2) Add metadata to all the media (camera name, shootdate*, scene*, take*, shot*) *using only numbers
2B) Camera names were DAY1_AUDIO, DAY1_XDCAM, DAY1_VIXIA, this was very helpful when using smart collections to filter the media type and date.
3) Batch rename all the media (D[shootdate]_S[scene_T[take]_S[shot]]
4) Create a SmartCollection for Day1 and start synchronising the audio and video using the workaround .
5) When finished, change the SmartCollection criteria to Day2, synchronise, etc until finishing all the media.
6) When I had everything synchronised I called the director and we made a rough cut of the movie in a day and a half. Nothing specific just adding scene after scene until we had the full movie assembled. It was not important if that was the best take or whatever, he leaved the edit room and I had the time to work every scene and know where it goes. Basically this was because he had a 2 week trip, so I used those weeks to create a first cut from that very preliminary rough cut.
As I said before it was a super easy movie to assemble, so this workflow worked great. I had the first cut when he came back from his trip, we saw it once, he made some changes, saw it again with more people, he took notes, we fixed a few things that were not working, created another cut a few more times and done.
I created 6 acts of 15 minutes each aprox. and worked with compounds for each one, changing their names after duplicating the original, so ACT 1 was untouched, but ACT 3 went to ACT3_v3, etc. When he wanted to see the whole movie I created a project with all the compounds. If he want to make a change, I went to the compound and made it there. And I also have a project with each full lenght cut if we needed to go back to a previous version.

Hope this helps!

That is an excellent tip to use the Camera name as the Shot day.

I'm consulting on an independent movie this summer and I'll definitely implement that.

Great heads up on the multiple channel audio sync issue. I was wrestling with it over at the cow and didn't now about the reported bug:

forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/21236

Yes, the audio sync issue was a PITA. I lost 2 complete days of job, because I had already synced everything as it was supposed to be done, and when I was throwing the clips to the timeline I couldn't see all the audio channels, so I started to investigate the problem. I had to redo all the syncing again following the workaround.

I do a lot of syncing in corporate work but haven't seen it because I always put the synchronized clip inside a compound clip. That way if I ever need to mess with something after the clip is in the timeline it can be fixed on the parent.

However, getting ready for this film workflow (which would be a little silly to create compound clips of each) I quickly found the problem.

I was messing around with it a bit more last night and see that it is a complex issue. How does FCPX know what to do with multiple connected audio? Does it mix it down, or does it separate into channels? I'm sure it is something they are working on and will have a fix for.

Cool tips, I have abit different workflow. I don't use the compound clips for my scenes just for complex composites... I usually would use project for the scenes to keep ever clean and smooth running. Then I would build u a final cut "project" with all the scenes in one.

Yes, from what I have been reading online last week, creating project is better because if your Event gets corrupted, you can keep on working with your project just by building a new event. Is way safer.

I will change my workflow to projects instead of compounds.

Yes, still some kinks to work out with a large complicated project and holding that compound clips.