2009

Stage 1: Preparing Your Final Cut Pro Sequence
To ensure reliability when it comes time to reconform the offline edit of your project in
Final Cut Pro to the source DPX media in Color, you need to be careful not to alter the
timecode or reel numbers of the offline source media in any way.
Because you’ll be exporting an Edit Decision List (EDL) to Color in order to relink your
project to the original DPX image sequences, it’s prudent to be extremely conservative
and eliminate any and all transitions and effects that are not supported by the CMX EDL
format, or by Color itself. You can’t have superimposed clips of any kind, and you should
eliminate any media not originated on film, like generators, still images, freeze frames,
Motion project clips, or other effects. All of these effects need to be created separately
and integrated into the final image sequence that will be printed to film later. There are
two exceptions:
• Color can render cross dissolve transitions. Any other type of transition is automatically
replaced with a cross dissolve of the same length as the original transition, and then
rendered.
• Color can also render Pan & Scan adjustments to clip geometry.
Note: If you plan to export a pull list in order to retransfer the clips used in the offline
edit of your project in Final Cut Pro, do not use the Media Manager to either rename or
delete unused media in your project. If you do, you’ll lose the ability to create accurate
pull lists using the Cinema Tools database.
Stage 2: Organizing the DPX Media to Which You’ll Be Conforming Your Project
How you obtain the DPX media you’ll use for finishing depends on how you proceeded
with the offline edit. Up to this point, there are two general workflows you may have
followed:
• You used offline QuickTime conversions of prescanned DPX media: This assumes that you
created offline-resolution duplicates of the source DPX media in the format most suitable
for your editing system. You’ll be in good shape as long as you ensured that all the
image sequence frames from each film roll were placed in directories that were named
after the roll number, and that the reel number of each converted QuickTime clip
matched the corresponding roll number of the source DPX image sequence. You also
need to make sure that the timecode values stored in the header of each DPX file were
used as each QuickTime file’s timecode. Lastly, the names of the original image sequence
frames should have taken the following form: SequenceName_0123456.dpx.
• You used telecined media for the offline edit : If you used telecined media for the offline
edit, you need to follow a workflow similar to the workflow described in “Reconforming
via Telecine Retransfer.” Assuming you used a Cinema Tools database to track the
correspondence between the original camera negative and the transferred offline video,
you can export a pull list to give to the transfer facility. The facility uses this list to
retransfer the shots in your offline edit as new DPX media using a datacine.
78 Chapter 5 Finishing