FINAL CUT X - THE FIRST EXPERIENCE IN TV COMMERCIALS IN SPAIN

Hi,

just to say that last sunday I presented to agency and client the first commercial in all Spain edited in Final cut X.
Is a fashion commercial for EL CORTE INGLES witch is one of the most important national brand in Spain.

It was an interesting workflow because it was shot in Portugal but edited in madrid at the same time due to the very tight timing.
It was shot on Alexa in 2K HD resolution.
I asked the DIT on set to send me very compressed files in H.264 but with same name and timecode of the originals, so they were able to send me card by card while they were shooting via ftp and I could load them into the final cut and start organizing and selecting. This happened for all the days of shooting.

When the crew came back to madrid I received a disk with the original files that I relinked replacing the low-res files I had.
The first discover in doing this was that FINAL CUT X relink the files based only on the metadata. This means that if the name of the file doesn't match but the timecode does you can relink perfectly as well.
On the other hand if you have a file with same name and duration of the one you want to replace, BUT without timecode the software reject it.

Obviously I did some test before and so I didn't have any bad surprise and everything worked perfectly!

The commercial also has a quite an amount of CGI postproduction made by an other studio here and we set the workflow based only on XML. 2 kind of XML:
1 with all the speed ramps, resizes etc. This one was used for Smoke and Flame.
2 without any kind effect. This one was used for the color grading on Da VInci.

I will tell you more, also putting some images during this days on how it worked and what we did, but just to say as starting point that the production house, the director and even the agency were very surprised on how fast and precise this software is and about some options it has that until now were completely unknown in advertising (like the AUDITION that for a Final cut user is a familiar tool but outside nobody knows it... and when they see it they love it!!)

I'm very happy today because I can say with no doubts that for professional advertising in spain is starting a new age
Long live to final cut X!

Great user story, Presti!!

Pioneering FCPX workflows in the Spanish advertising world and paving the way for many FCPX editors in Spain! Well done!

Maybe when you have time to post some more details about the workflow and pictures, Peter Wiggins will take it to the front page?

I'm glad that FCPX turned out so well for this project. I wasn't expecting less!

Congratulations,

Jesús
@jesus_edits

Thanks a lot Jesus!

I've immediately started today another edit for south africa (unfortunately I was ask to do it int the old way with FCP7), so actually I'm very busy, but I want to share this experience in the next days.

But first I have to thank Thomas Groove Carter because was his story on this web page last year regarding the Xperia commercial that made me say "is really possible to achieve great results with this software" and moved me to tray again and change my mind on FCP X.

This is the reason why I hope that share this experience can move more and more people, and also the industry (cinema, advertising and TV) specially here in Spain where I was told "but nobody except you knows how to edit on this software in advertising". This is not true! a lot of good editors are moving to FCP X but the spain industry doesn't want to make this change.

I think they are like me, they need to know that is possible and can make the difference work with FCP X in advertising, and maybe once they will see it they will change their mind like I did.

In the next days I will put some images and more technical details regarding the last week workflow.
Actually the post house if making all the VFX on the approved cuts, and as the TV commercial will be on air I will share also the finished cut.

bye

presti

Here I am, as I promised.
Sorry for the delay I know I start the topic and I disappeared right after...

In the meanwhile in the U.S. came out Focus witch opens the games for Final cut X in movie editing on big budget project.
My user story is much more smaller, but I hope will help Spanish editors to bring more and more Final X in the professional business.

Two weeks ago I’ve edited the first TV commercial in hole spain with Final Cut X.
The shooting happened in Portugal, while the edit happened at the same time in Madrid.
It was shot in Alexa in 2K HD.
Due to the VFX and a very close on air (scheduled for the next week) the timing was tight.

For this reason I’ve asked for a DIT on set to compress the footage card by card from apple pro res 4444 to H.264 with a small resolution (1024x576) and upload the files via ftp.
The compression was made with Da Vinci Resolve and the compressed files had the same name and the same metadata of the originals.
Doing this I was able to see and start to clean the material immediately after the scene was finished and the card was downloaded.
If you consider that this happened in 2 different countries at the same time is pretty cool.
I worked with the h.264 files until the crew came back after the hole shooting bringing the original files on an hard drive.





Regarding the reconnection my experience with Final X was that the software is able to reconnect using only the metadata of the video files (specially the timecode).
I saw that if the name of files didn’t match but the metadata did final X perfectly reconnect and substitute the files in the project and in the timeline.
Instead if the files have the same name and the same duration but one of them without timecode, the software doesn’t allow the relink, even if you're sure 100% that is the same file.
I want to share this because sometimes for the rush the transcoding is done without the timecode, or using faster softwares like MPEG STREAMCLIP that don’t transfer the metadatas on the new files.
If your workflow will need to reconnect at one stage with the originals media be careful on that.

In my case I could reconnect everything witouth problems and change the project settings from 1024x576 in h.264 to 2K HD in apple prores 4444 just in a few clicks.

Immediately right after I deleted the generated files done on the low-res material making my library lighter.




Talking about how I’ve organized my project I decided to create different events: one for the footage, one to collect all the edits (selections, work in progress and finished cuts), one for the music options, one for all the sounds, and one for all the extra stuffs like graphics or animatics or what else.





Inside the events then I’ve used keywords collections and folders to collect them to have a more precize access to the materials and to the cuts.
I know I could create only one event and then use only keywords collections, but an advertising project is much smaller and much shorter than a movie, for this reason to me is more logic to take advantage of the events to separates better all the elements I’m going to use or discard in the process.
And I like to know that in one event I will find only audio files, or only the projects etc. i really like how the browser shows you all the elements inside an event or a keyword collection because makes everything visual, and this makes faster to find stuffs instead to read all the time the names.





More or less is like I used to organize my material in final cut 7, but here in final cut X the Keyword collections is a much better way to access faster at one specific scene, or footage.
Also organize all the footage is very fast and work pretty well. I divided it by scenes based on the slate to have a starting point for the edit.

Just one thing I would like that apple will improve, that is the option to put different labels like in FCP 7.
At the moment all the key symbols of the keywords collections are blue, would be very helpful to have the possibility to choose some different colors for the key symbol if suddendly you have a lot of collections and you need to put one in evidence.

that's all for now.
In the next post I will enter in the editing, how the software responded, how with the post we shared shots and animatics etc.

Thanks a lot for posting this ilpresti! Learning how others are using FCPX will help get the word out!

Thanks a lot for sharing, Giacomo!

I just tweeted about your story, I hope it's OK:
Invalid consumer key/secret in configuration

The guys at Finalcutpro.es replied that it's not the first high-end commercial edited with FCPX in Spain, though. Anyway, I think it's a great story and I'd like to thank you for taking the time to talk about it here.

ilpresti wrote: Regarding the reconnection my experience with Final X was that the software is able to reconnect using only the metadata of the video files (specially the timecode).
I saw that if the name of files didn’t match but the metadata did final X perfectly reconnect and substitute the files in the project and in the timeline.
Instead if the files have the same name and the same duration but one of them without timecode, the software doesn’t allow the relink, even if you're sure 100% that is the same file.
I want to share this because sometimes for the rush the transcoding is done without the timecode, or using faster softwares like MPEG STREAMCLIP that don’t transfer the metadatas on the new files.
If your workflow will need to reconnect at one stage with the originals media be careful on that.

FCP X relink is amazing and very robust, but yes, sometimes it can be tricky. Metadata is really important here like you mentioned, specially timecode. I appreciate your warning.

ilpresti wrote: In my case I could reconnect everything witouth problems and change the project settings from 1024x576 in h.264 to 2K HD in apple prores 4444 just in a few clicks.

This wouldn't have been so easy in Avid... You would have had to create a new project with the new resolution, bring all your footage there... a real mess!

Even in FCP7 this was a bit tricky because of the way it conformed clips to the sequence resolution... You would have to do it manually. I think FCPX's "Spatial Conform" is quite an improvement in this regard.

I liked the way you organized your footage, very clean and tidy.

ilpresti wrote: i really like how the browser shows you all the elements inside an event or a keyword collection because makes everything visual, and this makes faster to find stuffs instead to read all the time the names.
I look forward to reading your next post!

I love the Browser in FCPX. You can see your footage instantly while moving up and down the events (in the Libraries panel) with your arrow keys. Avid's floating bins are just a nightmare compared to that.

ilpresti wrote: Just one thing I would like that apple will improve, that is the option to put different labels like in FCP 7.
At the moment all the key symbols of the keywords collections are blue, would be very helpful to have the possibility to choose some different colors for the key symbol if suddendly you have a lot of collections and you need to put one in evidence.

I don't think that's going to happen. FCPX uses colors to differentiate Smart Collections from Keyword Collections. The key is to not make too many and group them in Folders. Also you can combine them with Favorites.

But yes, I agree that it would be nice to color code some stuff inside the FCPX interface. Maybe some of that will be added in the next update.

I look forward to reading your next post!

Cheers,

Jesús
@jesus_edits

Hey Giacomo,

Thank you for posting your workflow and it is great to see that experienced professionals are promoting FCP X in Spain. It's something I see happening all over Europe these days. Will be looking forward to reading more about how this commercial was made. It would be great if you could add a link to the commercial as well,.

- Ronny

I apologize for the delay but this month was very full of work and travels and I never had the time to finish this properly. On the other hand finally the commercial came out on TV so I’allowed to put here the finished cut.





After orginizing the material I put it in the timeline to make a selection of the moment I liked.
Actually I’ve tried to do it in the browers with the FAVORITE and REJECT option but due to the nature of the footage it wasn’t the most practical way to do it.
Althouth it was a commercial with CGI the shots were not just many takes of the same actions, but instead longer takes with different kind of shots and moments inside, alos improvvisations.
So I preffered to make my selection directly on the timeline, start trying to see how this moment would work near this other one if they match or not.
This for me is a way to keep the edit alive, and see where the material can take us.
I don’t like to do edits where the shots are all defined and you don’t have latitute to play around with the material.
In this process I found the AUDITION an amazing tool. When I had doubts about choosing one moment instead of another I just did an audition to have the chance to change my mind later, but at the same time to speed up the cutting down to arrive on a first cut.
In general in advertising the AUDITION tool is very helpful, specially when the agency or the client ask you to try alternatives on a specific shot.






With audition you don’t need anymore to duplicate the edit and have all those different edits where sometime is changing only one shot.
Is a precious option because happens many times that in the changes process you make a change that then the agency wants to apply in all the previous edits.
In this way you maintain just one project and inside of that you can have all the changes.

For the music I had to re-cut the soundtrack that was chosen not only for rithmic reasons related to the images but also because the song had in the lyrics some explicit content and we had to remove it to convince the client to buy it.
Cut the audio track having to deal not only with frames, but even with the half-frames allowed me to be very precize and do invisible cuts in the melody, Then I’ve melted all those pieces in a secondary storyline and I’ve synchronized it with the first musical appointment in the images.

With the director we found very fast how the software responded during the process, doing by itself the renders while we where talking about the shots. For me was a total liberation the fact that I could completely forget to save, and put my attention only in the edit without stopping every couple of minutes to wait for the render.
Actually from a conversation with the director came out the the Final X is like a modern MOVIOLA.
In those years the editor has to become a sort of computer engineer and learn all the plug ins, the video formats, the graphic cards etc etc. Final Cut X tries to simplify the technical aspect to allow the editor to enter in the material as soon as possible.





This is great, I prefer much more to put my energy to absorb the material, and think witch shot I want to use for that scene, or why this moment works better than the other one instead waste time to set the machine, the A/V output, member to save every 15 minutes, wait for a render to see if what I've done works or not.





I was also very impressed by the Chroma key plug in in the software. How precize it is to detect the chroma in the image, and cropping out the portions of image that I didn’t want to compose I saw that the fade option is not present anymore because the software auto-melt the image.








During those days we exchange shots with the post studio, and they send us some animatic tests also to help us to understand how long more or less the shot had to be if we needed a particular movement in the GCI elements.





I send them XML with and without speed ramps and we never had any kind of problems.
They send us quick times shots with pre-visualizations.
I put in the timeline differents video format for the animatics and I never had to wait a render to see them live, and the software never crushed.

Regarding third party software we used X2-PRO to share the AAF with the protools and the ALEX 4D adjustment layer for some filters and resizes.

We didn’t have any problems with the post workflow at all.

The week after I was offered another commercial but I was requested to edit it in final cut 7 for internal reasons.
I have to admit that after the experience with Final Cut X, going back to the 7 was depressing.
It was a great software, but X is better

I put here the finished commercial, hope you enjoy.



for more jobs I've edited:
www.prestihq.com
vimeo.com/ilpresti


Best


presti

Hey Giacomo,

Thank you for this clear and extensive write-up, I very much enjoyed reading it.
I also had a look at the finished commercial and WOW... very well done.

This story could be front page news

- Ronny

Thanks a lot Ronny!
I'm glad you like it.

I've tried to re-put the link of the commercial on the post, I don't know why it didn't appear... I'm not used to deal with forum interfaces

I hope this will be an help to other editors to move to final cut X (like it was an help for me, reading those kind of stories) and also an help for the software to enter more and more in the professional workflow.

best

presti

Definitely this needs to be on the front page as a feature story. Amazing work, fantastic commercial, love it!

EDIT: I just promoted the link to Presti's post on my fcpxguru FB page and tweeted it. Will also include it in tomorrow's edition of my newsletter. Great work!

Thanks a Lot BenB!

I'm glad you like it.
And thanks for sharing my story.

best