Firstly, I am personally finishing a P2 film that cost me 17000 euros using both FCP and MC. I also have worked on 70 million dollar features for hollywood. The only the thing, from an edit point of view, that both projects have in common is the length of the finished product: 90 mins.
So I have a reasonable understanding of what tools are best for what workflow. There is no way that I would recommend, for a Vin Deisel movie shot on 2 to 5 35mm cameras, a FCP workflow. The cutlist for neg pulls are not reliable, particularly in 2 perf. It is not impossible. The Coen brothers seem do it, but you need to have very competent people working the system to make it work reliably. I repeat, reliably because that is what this is all about. A bad neg pull can have terribly expensive consequences for the production.
I have worked on 5 features mixing RED, P2 and even 35mm stills cameras. Nobody is going to seriously tell me that working in RED native with 100 hours of rushes is practical. You have to do an offline copy of the project and then conform it. As soon as you are in this logic, the workflow for FCP or Avid is the same.
I understand why FCP is so attractive to people who want to finalise the film on the same machine. I do it myself all the time ... but that is why I appreciate that there are 2 distinct products on the market. I do not believe that Avid is really interested in home made movies and cheap TV. They want to install enormous ISIS systems into TV stations. They make far more money from maintenance contracts than they do coming out with MC updates. Apple knows this and is trying to get into that domain as well. I often see the sales guys .
Concerning cutting between sequences. Yes, there is a hidden button in the FCP keyboard menus that lets you cut between sequences without it all becoming nested. You can bounce between sequences in the timeline too ... but it is not very practical for a simple reason. You can have one sequence in the viewer and another in the time line and before you know it, you are putting in-out points into the wrong timeline and editing the wrong sequence. That is very tedious when you are making fine cuts in a 90 min film. This would not be an issue with the restricted Avid workflow.
I have been playing with the Avid MC4 multi frame rate timeline. I have a commercial that was on RED at 25fps and Nikon 30fps. GREAT! Except that when it came to the conform, the exports were not in native, the post house had alot of trouble recreating the avid dropfame effect on the original Nikon files. If I was to do it again, I would cut the 2 frame rates seperately. But FCP is no better because the logic is that once you have multi frame rate source, you don't go back to the rushes. Here again, it just confirms my thinking that for those who wish or have to finalise in the desktop environment, all is well. But as soon as you have to start working with other facilities, the difference between the products really shows. So you shout, export QTs and all is well. I say, the rushes are the only gold standard and everything must go back to them.
And finally, here is food for thought on FCP and conforms and why it is not very well designed (for the moment. I hope Apple is reading this). I conformed a feature doco called Babies (coming out at xmas in the US) on FCP. It had been 4 years in the making and I was the 7th editor. Naturally, the project was not very clean. After doing some final fiddling, I was obliged to decompose the sequences to conform the HDCAM elements in the film for a TK. Many of the previous editors (I presume they were Avid editors) had been editing between nested sequences, some as many as 20 sequences deep per shot. In FCP, when you decompose a sequence with nested sequences inside, it not only pulls put the rushes in the upper layer but all the rushes of all the nested sequences. In some cases, just about pulled all the rushes were pulled up. Some idiot assistant had decided to digitize the cassettes as a whole and break them up into shots. It seems that FCP has alot of trouble consolidating nested rushes and has a tendency to just pull up the whole rush. The only solution I found was to open all the 20 sequences to extract the few seconds of rushes. It took me 3 days night and day to extract the bits. (neither XMLs or EDLs exports could solve this problems) On an Avid, this would not have been an issue. But then again, for this project, I feel that FCP was not the best choice. The reason why it was not Avid was because Avid was behind in accepting the P2 at the time.
Must leave ... I have 3 Avid with recurring bus errors (please avid sort this out once and for all) and a FCP Server that has crashed because of an editor has imported mp3 files from a screwy usb device (boy, don't I love cheap usb keys). All this excitement keeps my son fed and clothed though.
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