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Archiving Video Files & FCPX Questions

T

Tydog07

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 10, 2011
454
2
Ann Arbor, Mi
I saw another thread like this but I don't have the capabilities to do Blue-Ray, nor could I ever play it back if I wanted to.


I am going to start exporting some projects of personal footage over the past couple years and I want some advice on how to archive it.


Right now, everything is on my MBP hard-drive. I have a 500GB drive with a FW800 enclosure coming tomorrow. I plan to move all my projects and "FCP/iMovie Events" over to the external, and leave all the exported/finalized footage over on the external drive as well. I'd like to keep a copy of all the raw footage, as well as the edited projects. I can burn DVD's since I have a very large stack of them, a 4.7GB a piece.

Now how should I go about doing this, should I just burn them as data discs or make them playable through a DVD player? I want to keep this as lossless as possible, I don't care to compress much of my footage. I know a BluRay would be easier, but I just don't have the money right now after purchasing the enclosure/drive. I loved how AVCHD is so compressed, but is lossless, it really is a nice codec in my opinion.


Now onto a few FCPX questions:

1) How do I do cross-disolve on two audio tracks right next to each other, I right clicked and pressed cross dissolve, but nothing happens.

2) How can I view my background tasks at all times? Can I stop this background rendering, it slows down my workflow sometimes because I cannot playback, edit.

3) Running a 2011 highend 15", I'm surprised how slowed down FCPX makes my computer, why is this? I have trouble believing that FCPX runs well on Macs a couple years older if I'm noticing a little bit of a slow down. My free ram drops to about 300MB when I'm using the app, would adding more ram help?

4) What is the highest quality FCPX export setting/format/method?
 
Do you want to keep all of the original video, or just the end result? Do you want to be able to watch it in your DVD player or are you not bothered about that? (A DVD that will play in a DVD player can't be HD, by the way.)

When you talk about AVCHD being lossless, I assume you mean editing it as AVCHD, as opposed to converting it to a more edit-friendly codec, doesn't incur loss? Well, converting to ProRes to edit will not degrade the image. And you're going to have to convert to something else on output anyway.

Editing AVCHD will stress any computer, but FCPX has a checkbox option to convert to ProRes in the background. This means you can start editing straight away, and when FCPX has converted all your video it will switch the files and henceforth you'll be working with ProRes video, which is a lot less processor-intensive.

If you want your end result to keep every morsel of quality, ProRes is a good choice. H.264 at 16Mb/s will probably be pretty close, but a much smaller file size.
 
KeithPratt said:
Do you want to keep all of the original video, or just the end result? Do you want to be able to watch it in your DVD player or are you not bothered about that? (A DVD that will play in a DVD player can't be HD, by the way.)

When you talk about AVCHD being lossless, I assume you mean editing it as AVCHD, as opposed to converting it to a more edit-friendly codec, doesn't incur loss? Well, converting to ProRes to edit will not degrade the image. And you're going to have to convert to something else on output anyway.

Editing AVCHD will stress any computer, but FCPX has a checkbox option to convert to ProRes in the background. This means you can start editing straight away, and when FCPX has converted all your video it will switch the files and henceforth you'll be working with ProRes video, which is a lot less processor-intensive.

If you want your end result to keep every morsel of quality, ProRes is a good choice. H.264 at 16Mb/s will probably be pretty close, but a much smaller file size.
Click to expand...

First off, thank you for the thorough response, it's greatly appreciated!

Now onto the nitty-gritty, I'd like to keep all the raw footage and then a copy of the final result, but being playable in my DVD player is not necessary at all, I'm just using it as an archiving procedure. It sounds like H264 at 16MBPS would be a good output that is almost lossless but is also smaller file size, I'll just have to put all the raw clips together and export in Final Cut.

Unfortunately, I started all this work in iMovie so everything was converted to .MOV as ProRes was unavailable. I'll make sure to convert to ProRes next time. That background transcoding from AVCHD looks like a nice option, I'll keep my eye out!

Does this sound about right?
 
Ideally you'd keep the original AVCHD footage, the FCP project file and a master of your final video. I don't know enough about how FCPX works to detail how you'd go about this.

Most of the time it'll be fine, but you might need to go a little higher than 16Mb/s if you have a "busy" video. By "busy" I mean lots of quick cuts, fast action or a noisy image (though sometimes the resulting noise softening is desirable).
 
KeithPratt said:
Ideally you'd keep the original AVCHD footage, the FCP project file and a master of your final video. I don't know enough about how FCPX works to detail how you'd go about this.

Most of the time it'll be fine, but you might need to go a little higher than 16Mb/s if you have a "busy" video. By "busy" I mean lots of quick cuts, fast action or a noisy image (though sometimes the resulting noise softening is desirable).
Click to expand...

FCPX doesn't archive and keep the AVCHD footage, it just keeps the MOV files, if my stuff is busy, what bit-rate would you move up to?
 
KeithPratt said:
Surely there's an option in FCPX to archive cards as you import?



You'll have to test and gauge the results by eye. Perhaps start with 20Mb/s.
Click to expand...

I bet there is, I just haven't used it in the past. 20MB/s seems like a lot, if I have a half hour of footage, that comes to be about 36GB or about 8 DVD's, but I guess it's the best way for me. I just want to be able to have an app that I drag all the files to, and then it tells me to just keep loading DVD's and it keeps track of where I'm at in the process.


I'm still in the process of hooking up my FW800 500GB 7200RPM HD & Enclosure for my video.
 
Mb/s = Megabits per second
MB/s = Megabytes per second

20Mb/s = 9GB an hour
16Mb/s = 7GB an hour
 
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