Guh.
I have spent 25 of the last 30 hours editing two new shorts I’m turning in to Scary Cow Round 5, to be screened June 1st at at 3pm at the Victoria Theater. Tickets are available for sale here for $5.
A couple notes on the headaches:
Workflow for Sagar:
- Shot on HD DV
- imported and edited into Final Cut Pro (FCS2) (rendering up to 20 minutes for a single section, an hour for the whole thing)
- written out to Quicktime 720p30 intermediate with all the “hints” for the renderer(2 hours per render!)
- sent to Compressor to convert to MPEG-2 (another 90+ minutes)
- burned to DVD-R with DVD Studio Pro (FCS2) (another… while… to compress. Burning was fast though!)
The painful part was for about 6 hours there I was getting video that was ever so slightly slower than the audio… by the end it was over a full second late. This is BAD mmmkay… The solution was to go to this QuickTime intermediate, which has hints in it (there’s a dialog that talks about “markers”) to keep the audio in sync with the video.
Workflow for The Templetons trailer:
- Shot on miniDV
- imported and edited into Final Cut Pro (FCS2) (rendering typically 5 minutes tops)
- written out to Quicktime intermediate with all the “hints” for the renderer (10 minutes per render)
- sent to Compressor to convert to MPEG-2 (~20 minutes)
- burned to DVD-R with DVD Studio Pro (FCS2) (Like 10 minutes tops)
These were projects that were roughly the same length! Ghastly. I’m going to need a faster system if I’m going to be editing any more HD.
The thing that made the Templetons render so slowly (for miniDV) is the crazy effects I came up with to make them look like drawn comic book characters. Originally I had a workflow that included filters in Shake, and also using Adobe Bridge as a renderer with Illustrator… that would have sucked, because I would have had to separate every single clip out of the project for rendering, and re-assembled them afterwards…
Anyway, now it’s entirely in Final Cut Pro, but still uses a whole pile of video filters, typically 4 layers of video for a simple shot with around a dozen filters.
More notes, buncha Ken Stone: