For Intel-based Apple Macintosh systems with Final Cut Pro 6.0.5 or above. The Final Cut Studio RED Installer provides the RED QuickTime Codec (v3.7.0), Log and Transfer (v1.0.0) functionality to import REDCODE RAW clips as either native REDCODE media (R3D’s) wrapped in QuickTime or the option to transcode them directly to Apple’s ProRes 422 codec. There is also a new specialized functionality for color grading native QuickTime wrapped R3D media in Color using the original RAW parameters (REDCODE plugin fro Color v2.7.0). Located in the download is a whitepaper PDF describing in detail this new, advanced way to edit REDCODE media, color grade and finish inside Final Cut Studio.

That means there is a Final Cut Pro update coming to get the app to 6.0.5. There is actually a white paper in the download (which really has been a long time coming) that details this new workflow. There it is in the whitepaper, the FCP Log and Transfer tool supporting Native RED files:

The Final Cut Pro 6.0.5 update includes a number of things. From the Apple documents:

Improved High-Precision Rendering

If you render sequences using the high-precision video processing setting, make sure to update to Final Cut Pro 6.0.5 for improved reliability when rendering still images and footage in high-resolution formats.

Extended Metadata Support for the Panasonic AG-HMC150 Camcorder

Final Cut Pro 6.0.5 captures the additional metadata for footage recorded with the Panasonic AG-HMC150 professional AVCHD camcorder.

Improved Support for the Panasonic HDC-SD9 Camcorder

Final Cut Pro 6.0.5 provides enhanced precision and reliability when ingesting files from the Panasonic HDC-SD9 camcorder.

Improved Support for Metadata Imported from P2 Cards

Final Cut Pro 6.0.5 provides support for extended metadata that is captured on P2 cards.

So that’s few other things. There’s also updates to Compressor, Color and Shake. It’s good to know the Final Cut Studio teams hasn’t been totally asleep lately. This isn’t entirely breaking news since this has been demoed in public before. And this is a wrapping of the .R3D files in a QuickTime wrapper as opposed to a drag and drop of .R3Ds into the FCP browser. And of course you can still transcode to ProRes. I think what is surprising is that it dropped today when Adobe was releasing their Premiere Pro update. According to Adobe, RED was to post a plug-in on their support site to enable native Premiere Pro workflow. As of 6:45 pm, November 20 that plug-in hasn’t been posted and instead RED posted this FCP software. Interesting developments in the RED editing world today huh?

The reconnection dance is a step that an editor really shouldn’t have to go through when they are opening an edit where the location of the media hasn’t change since the last time the project was open. If you are working on a job with another editor in a different location or an editor using the same media on different drives then the reconnection dance will be familiar to you. Let’s think about why this happens. Final Cut Pro looks to a specific path for the location of media:

In this example it’s looking for the drive Hawking > folder Robinson Racing > subfolder Robinson racing in car cam and then other specific subfolders for the media. If I was to give another editor an exact copy of the media for this project then the folder structure would remain mostly the same except for the top level name of the hard drive. In this case Hawking would be replaced with a different drive name and possibly one more subfolder. So when the other editor went to open this project for the first time they would be confronted with the reconnection warning:

That’s not totally unwarranted since FCP doesn’t use any kind of central database to track its files. Since the path where it found the media on longer exists you have to point FCP to the location of the media files for it to be able to reconnect them. It doesn’t have to be a completely manual process as FCP can scan your drive to look for clips that have the same file name:

This helps somewhat but if you have a lot of files scattered over a lot of drives then it can be a pain. Clicking the Search button will scan all the drives and can take time with lots of large drives attached. The Locate button will give you a dialog box to manually find the clip. While FCP will automatically find other files in the same directory that it needs you still have to point it to the first clip it is asking for. Again it can be a long process with many clips on different hard drives. It’s understandable to have to do this once when opening a project for the first time but if you are handing edits off to another editor on a regular basis then this process of always having to reconnect the media gets old … fast. There needs to be a better way.

Avid has always been known for its rock solid media management. Once a piece of media is in the Avid it always knows where that media is, come hell or high water. When passing off an edit to another editor he/she only needs to rebuild the Avid database once and then Avid will always know where all the media for that edit is located. It does this by building a dedicated media database for all of its media drives:

But one thing the Avid has to do that FCP does not is to copy any imported media into its Avid MediaFiles folder (it’s called the OMFI Media folder on omf based Avids). By doing this it has to create new media in the supported Avid format in that folder. This could be seen as a disadvantage if you had lots of music or a tons of graphics already taking up space on a hard drive. It all depends on perspective I guess as the advantage of Avid’s great media management means you have to use more drive space on occasion. An Avid edit is an amazingly organized thing with the Avid project file usually on the system drive and all media on a few media drives in the Avid MediaFiles folder. Often a Final Cut Pro edit is an incredibly messy pile-of-dung with media, graphics and music scattered from the user’s iTunes folder to the desktop to one firewire drive after another. Try to collect that to send to another editor and you usually forget something. If I had a dime for every FCP project that I’ve opened over the years with missing media from the previous desktop or user’s iTunes folder I’d hire software engineers to write my own personal NLE application! But this totally depends on the organization of the editor to begin with. An organized edit shouldn’t have media scattered here to there as the editor knows what they are doing and how to properly organize and track their media. This goes back to the debate of the younger FCP editor who hasn’t learned proper media management skills. But that’s another debate that has already been debated.

What Final Cut Pro needs is its own database tracking ability to keep track of all imported/captured/digitized media. The best of both worlds between FCP’s easy access of drag-and-drop, no-wait importing and Avid’s database than can recognize when you are opening a previously opened project where the media is on the edit system.

If you think about it, non-linear editing applications are themselves just database managers (at their most basic level) as they look to media on hard drives and play it back in a specifically arranged order that the editor has instructed from the timeline. FCP needs to take this one step further. If it could build a project specific database for each piece of media imported, captured or dragged into the browser and then compare that with its associated project each time it is opened then, at least in theory, that could save the reconnect dance when opening a project that had been changed by another editor. This seems especially do-able when the name of the project hasn’t changed. Since FCP projects can often balloon in size what you might find yourself doing is creating a new project with only one edit sequence. This obviously wouldn’t match the name of the original project so in that case I could see FCP allowing the user to point to a specific database to be associated with that project. While the project name has changed the media file names and attributes  of the clips in the edit would not have changed so pointing that project to the proper database could make reconnection automatic.

One way to lend a hand to FCP’s media management is with a new application from Digital Heaven called Loader that specifically address part of the problem. Loader allows the editor to drag media into the Loader interface and then Loader will copy (and in certain instances convert) the media to a designated media folder for that particular project, be it graphics, audio, etc. At first you might think that this workflow defeats the purpose of FCP being Quicktime based since you don’t want to have to make a copy of every piece of media you bring into FCP, that’s what Avid has to do after all, but this step that Loader takes is a crucial step to making FCP be much more organized in its media management. It puts part of the responsibility of good media management on the software and not the editor. While this may be a bad thing in some people’s minds, an app like Loader can help take even the experienced editor’s mind off the media management task if only for a minute. It’s a must have application if you use FCP, IMHO. But while it gets that media to a more centralized location and can make the reconnection dance a bit less time consuming Final Cut Pro still needs some type of database-based solution to always track its media. Project to project. Version to version. Editor to editor.

Ben at Buttonpusher.tv has posted his own tips and techniques for avoiding the reconnection dance. They are great ideas if you can plan to name the media drives with the same names and paths as those you are sharing the drives with. It may not be possible with permanent, networked drives at a facility but with a little pre-planning his advice is well worth the effort in the time it could save.

At its most simple implementation, a type of FCP project-based database could make the reconnection dance a thing of the past. But at its most advanced maybe it could be smart enough to make the attribute mismatches that often occur when you move clips from one drive to another a thing of the past as well. It could allow for more accurate media manager tasks and remove the stigma of the “media mangler.” And how about if it was smart enough to track all aspects of the timeline, specifically renders in the timeline so you could disable and enable clips and tracks without losing renders. This type of advanced media management would open the eyes of a whole generation of FCP editors who don’t know the joys of rock-solid media management. It’s sad that 6 versions into Final Cut Pro we don’t have something so useful. This new version of FCP, whatever it may be and whenever it may come needs to be a real doozy!

I meant to pop this link up before leaving for NAB but oh well….

This Josh Gracin music video (former American Idol contestant) was the first big RED camera job that I have seen through from pre-production all the way through to final finishing. It was a very quick turn-around with a tight delivery deadline so the plan was to edit with ProResHQ Quicktime files generated by the camera rental house DR&A and then be able to output them to tape for color grading if we couldn’t go back to the raw RED .R3D clips and pull DPX files. Thankfully we had the time to do just that. I bought a copy of Crimson Workflow and it worked very well to generate DPX files that were then conformed in our Quantel eQ using lists pulled from Final Cut Pro via Automatic Duck. The edit was color graded on our DaVinci 2K Plus and now it’s on the air! I love it when a plan comes together. Too bad You Tube quality sucks.