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Doing a Negative Conform
If you’re finishing a film program by conforming the original negative, in advance of doing
optical color timing and film printing, you should have started out by importing a telecine
log file into Final Cut Pro (or into Cinema Tools). The telecine log file contains the data
necessary to maintain the correspondence between the edge code from the original
camera negative and the timecode used by the telecined video clips that you’ve been
editing. It’s also common practice to put a window burn of the edge code and timecode
at the bottom of every transferred shot, to provide an additional visual reference.
When you finish your edit, you can use this film data to output a negative conform list
from Final Cut Pro. Before doing so, it’s best to go through your sequence to make sure
everything is as organized as possible for the generation of a clean film list. The following
steps will help you reorganize your edited sequence for a clean negative conform:
• Turn on Show Through Edits in the Timeline in Final Cut Pro, and use the Join Through
Edit command to eliminate all unnecessary through edits to avoid accidental cuts to
the negative.
• Make sure all clips that aren’t supposed to be superimposed are moved to track V1.
(You can export only one track at a time as a film list.)
• Check in advance to see if there are any length or type restrictions for transitions, and
make adjustments as necessary.
• Use the Show Duplicate Frames option in the Timeline to make sure that you’re aware
of duplicated clips that may necessitate additional optical printing.
For more information about negative conform workflows, see the Cinema Tools and
Final Cut Pro documentation.
Long-Term Archiving of the Finished Project and Media
After you create your final master and other necessary deliverables, the last step is to
archive your program. When preparing to archive your program, you need to gather every
Final Cut Pro, Motion, Color, and DVD Studio Pro project file and every source media file,
font, still-image file, QuickTime clip, and final rendered output file. In short, make sure
that you archive everything that would be necessary to re-create your project five years
in the future, should the need arise.
• If you’ve been using Final Cut Server: Chances are that your project files and media are
already organized and ready to be archived. In this case, mount the volume you want
to archive your program’s assets to, and then use the Archive To command to write all
files to the archive device. When you later need to retrieve your assets, you can use the
Restore command. For more information, see the Final Cut Server documentation.
115Chapter 7 Output and Delivery