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• “Creating Final Broadcast Design Elements and Effects”
• “Color Correction”
• “Final Sound Editing, Design, and Mixing”
Don’t Feel Obligated to Do Everything Yourself
Many of the tasks involved with finishing are highly specialized activities. Final Cut Studio
is used by a wide variety of post-production facilities, boutique shops, and individual
professionals, which means you can easily take your project and media files to a specialist
for reconforming, color correction, audio mixing, effects work, or any other task that you
either don’t have the equipment for or don’t feel comfortable undertaking yourself.
However, if you do enjoy the challenge of learning new skills and tools, Final Cut Studio
provides everything you need to finish and output your programs at high quality.
Finishing Using Compressed Versus Uncompressed Media
When you are deciding how to ingest your media, a common question is how best to
handle compressed formats if you know you want to finish at the highest possible quality
later. One of the advantages of working with compressed formats such as DV-25, HDV,
AVCHD, DVCPRO HD, or XDCAM is that you can ingest them natively, at their original
resolution and quality, with relatively modest storage and processor requirements (at
least with the current generation of Mac computers). However, when the time comes to
finish your program, adding the final titles, design, and effects and doing color correction
prior to mastering your program, questions sometimes arise about whether working with
such highly compressed media is appropriate.
This section addresses why preemptive upconversion (transcoding a compressed media
file to an uncompressed media file) before you start the finishing process may be
unnecessary and when it might provide advantages. It also notes when, at the end of the
finishing process, upconversion is a necessary step.
Does upconverting compressed media from one codec to another improve quality?
From a strictly qualitative standpoint, there is virtually no difference between a highly
compressed media file and the same file transcoded—at the same frame size and frame
rate as the original media—to a higher-quality codec (such as one of the Apple ProRes or
Uncompressed codecs) using one of the Final Cut Studio applications. For the same
reason, there’s no qualitative advantage to simply transcoding to another codec during
ingest.
67Chapter 5 Finishing