Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express

Recently I have been helping students make short films.  Their first steps into filmmaking, and a steep learning curve.  We try, as much as possible, to remove some of the technical complexities.  Allowing the students to concentrate on the storytelling.  The last two weekends have seen 14 shorts in production.  They were all filmed over 2 days (a weekend). Now we're start the post production.  But first the logging and capturing.

One of the decisions we had taken fro the students was to shoot in HDV rather than our usual default, anamorphic DV.  We could see the advantage of the greater resolution - we might need to tweak some of the shots.  We'd project in 'high def' (HD) and drop the films down to standard def (SD) for the DVDs.  The data rate is, after all the same as SD, but with greater image size.  Great!  OK, we know that there's a slight lag from the time you press record to when the camera records.  But thats a small price to pay.  We thought.

If only things were as simple as they looked!  Some of the tapes we issued were pre-stripped. (We were keen to avoid timecode breaks - a perennial problem with novices).  Sadly these were stripped in SD DV.  We subsequently had worse timecode breaks than normal as the decks we were using for capture kept requesting we change format!  We worked around this problem, but there were more.

Some students, tempted by the keen pricing and educational discount, owned FCP Express and were keen to use their own machine to do their edit.  Usually we get the teams to create the master folder with a master FCP project and all the rushes.  Students can then copy this onto external drives or laptops to do their own individual edits.  It normally works fine.  On monday one keen and diligent student, having finished logging and capturing on one of the Uni's Macs, wanted help to transfer it to her own Macbook.  I was pleased to help her and we transferred the data using target disc mode.  We then opened the FCP Pro 6.0 project in FCP Express 4.0.  Problem - all the clips had audio but failed to display the video.  We investigated and discovered that there was a codec issue with FCP Express.  I suggested purchasing QuickTime Pro.  That'll sort it out.  Nope - at a cost of $30 (approx).  The next option was to delete the media and re capture from the master tapes.  That seemed a pity.  Why had this happened?

Its not clever but it would appear that FCP Express encodes HDV (Mpg 2) into Apple Intermediate codec.  FCP Pro allows you to natively edit HDV format.  To solve the problem therefore in FCP Pro we used media manager to 're-compress' the footage into the Apple format (the file size increased only slightly).  This, hopefully would work in FCP Express.  What a pain.  Next time we might set FCP Pro to capture all the films in Apple Intermediate Codec. But I suspect that there's another gotcha lurking in there somewhere!