2009
Table Of Contents
- Final Cut Studio Workflows
- Contents
- Introduction
- Developing a Post-Production Strategy
- Ingesting and Organizing Your Media
- Integration During Editorial Development
- Client Review
- Finishing
- What Is Finishing?
- Finishing Using Compressed Versus Uncompressed Media
- Format Conversion When Finishing Mixed-Format Sequences
- Reconforming Media to Online Quality
- Creating Final Broadcast Design Elements and Effects
- Color Correction
- Final Sound Editing, Design, and Mixing
- Mastering
- Output and Delivery
Popular Formats
When you create media in another application that you want to use in Final Cut Pro, it’s
best to use the highest-quality codec that your system can handle in order to avoid
compression artifacts in the final program. An additional consideration, especially for
computer-generated imagery (CGI) and broadcast animation, is whether or not you need
to preserve an alpha channel in a media file with regions of transparency in it.
• High-quality codecs with alpha channel support for clips with transparency include
Animation (8-bit) and Apple ProRes 4444 (10-bit). Both of these are RGB color space,
4:4:4 chroma-sampled formats.
• High-quality codecs with no alpha channel support include 8- and 10-bit Uncompressed,
Apple ProRes 422, and Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) (10-bit). All of these are Y′C
B
C
R
color
space, 4:2:2 chroma-subsampled formats.
Method of Ingest
QuickTime files are ingested into Final Cut Pro using the Import command. In Motion,
you use the File Browser to find media that you want to add to your project.
Note: In Final Cut Pro, clips whose media files are encoded using the Animation and
Apple ProRes 4444 codecs are affected by the Imported Still/RGB Video Gamma setting
in the Editing tab of the User Preferences window. This preference setting determines
the level of gamma that is applied to these clips when they’re imported, although you
can always change this setting in the Item Properties or Browser window. For more
information, see the Final Cut Pro documentation.
Clip Organization
You can use Final Cut Server to organize still images to share among multiple Final Cut Pro
users.
Tracking and Organizational Information
QuickTime media files are tracked by filename, reel name, and timecode. QuickTime
supports additional metadata that may or may not be supported by a particular
Final Cut Studio application.
Asset Management and Organization
No matter how you ingest the media you’ll be using for your program, consistent
organization of your project and its assets is a vital part of the post-production process.
The faster you can find the media you need at any given time, the faster you can work.
Furthermore, good organization is critical if you’re working in a collaborative environment
with multiple editors, motion graphics artists, colorists, and sound designers.
44 Chapter 2 Ingesting and Organizing Your Media