Appendix 1

The Filmmaker’s Guide to Final Cut Pro Workfl ow
• Your original HD tapes
• Your project fi le, if it has not been e-mailed in, also on portable drive
What to expect in the online:
• The off-line project fi le will be opened on the HD online system. All of the media will be off-line
(missing). The exception will be any Final Cut Pro titles that are part of the project fi le.
• The HD tapes will be batch captured to the high-speed drive array. If you have a long project, it
makes more sense to leave the HD tapes with the online facility and let them perform this capture
before you arrive. It is a slow process.
• Import your mix into the project. Line up the 2 pop.
• Replace any titles and graphics that are missing with the new HD titles on your portable drive.
At this point, you can start color correction on the online system or render and record to tape for
color correcting tape-to-tape, as in Basic Workfl ow 2. Tape-to-tape is often less expensive, but many
prefer to color correct now, in online. Much will depend on costs and the type of color correction
equipment available in the online facility. Whether you render effects and titles now and color correct
later, or color correct now and then render color, effects, and graphics, you will need to render before
recording out to the master tape. The render is extremely slow, especially if rendering color correction.
Most facilities render after hours or on dedicated machines at greatly reduced cost.
Just as with Basic Workfl ow 2, a fi lm-out from the color-corrected HD tape is simple, yet very
expensive. Here, too, the HD project is recorded at 23.98, the fi lm-out speeding up to 24 FPS. This
is handled by the facility doing the fi lm-out. Depending on their method, they may want to go back
to the composite mix master to perform a pull up.
Basic Workfl ow 5
Shooting on fi lm (35 mm or 16 mm)
Finish on 35 mm or 16 mm fi lm by cutting the camera negative
The fi lm fi nish workfl ow is complicated, with many steps and, as always, there are options along the
way. The fi lm can be shot on 16 mm, super 16 mm, 35 mm with 4 perf pull down or 35 mm with 3
perf pull down, super 35 mm, and this list could go on and on.
It is necessary to choose the editing frame rate before beginning. This can be 23.98 FPS or 24 FPS.
For most projects, 23.98 works better. The disadvantage of 23.98 is that the audio must be pulled
down before syncing and pulled back up before printing the optical sound. But this is simple and
generally more accepted. Video output from 23.98 is simple and audio can be sunc in telecine.
At 24 FPS, the fi lm runs at the true fi lm speed and this seems to be a tremendous advantage. With
24 FPS, there is no need to pull up or down, but syncing in telecine is a trick as the audio will be
out of sync until the footage is reversed to 24 FPS. Most projects will choose to sync after reversing.
This makes managing an audio EDL more complicated as the time code must be entered by hand
instead of importing it with the telecine log. Also, video exports from 24 FPS are tricky and run at
a different speed as the original media.
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