Hi all, new to this software. A really basic question I can’t find mentioned anywhere. I want to use the VEAI software on a short film I’m building in FCPx for a client. Can I use this software ‘after’ the basic timeline build or do I use it on each clip before building the timeline?
Thank you.
Dominic
You could do either, it depends on your needs. If you’re doing color correction/grading in FCPx, or doing anything complicated with effects, then using VEAI on the video clips prior to editing in FCPx will likely give you a better basis to work from. On the other hand, the advantage to using VEAI on the final edit coming out of FCPx is that it will take less time (and consume less power) as you won’t be enhancing video frames/clips that don’t make it into the final edit.
Can you recommend the best workflow for doing the processing after basic timeline edit.
As you have said, preprocessing all the footage will take a huge amount of time - (2TB).
I am working on a miracles documentary for freeandhealed ministry, so sometimes we had the cameras rolling for ages, in badly lit rooms, just to get the short moment where you see the change on someone’s face as they realise that thanks to prayer in the name of Jesus their pain just left.
So now I often have long clips up to 5 mins long but I only need 20 secs from the whole .mov file, how do I organise my workflow - to send only that 20secs to Topaz. At the moment I imagine that I would have a huge amount of manual work to mark each range that I want to enhance, remove all my color treatment, share it in ProRes - send that to Topaz and then drop it back into the edit.
I vaguely remember a command (perhaps in Premiere) where you could package a project keeping only the selected footage with some handles eg + 4 secs either end.
Anyone know if that is an option in Final Cut Pro?
Wondering what the solution was that you settled on? I’m trying to figure out the best FCPX workflow as well. Didn’t realize that Topaz Labs was a standalone platform and not an effects plug in in the DAW.
Sadly no one from Topaz or an admin replied so I have no answer to which gives you better quality. I ended up running one clip through it prior to editing in FCPx and it did the job. Best wishes.
I have found that doing it before ends up being better for some reason. Process your source video first and then run in through FCP. Now, what would be AMAZING is if they eventually turned it into a plugin so you could just process the bits you need cleaned up, but I’ve found that letting FCP render the video with pre-processed video ends up looking more “unprocessed” in the end. I’m in a long term project restoring home videos from the 80s and 90s and so far that’s the best work flow. Just my experience!
It depends largely on the quality of the source video and how you intend to use it.
Is every scene uniform in quality, or do different scenes have different levels of sharpness, motion blur, shake, etc.? There might not be a single enhancement scheme that works for the entire source.
Are you going to use the entire source and just rearrange scenes, or are there sizable portions you’ll be deleting? And are you sure you’ll delete those entire portions without cutting in snippets of them here and there? Trying to enhance a snippet to match something you enhanced days or weeks earlier can be a real pain.
I am mainly working on documentary footage. Because we don’t know what is going to happen when, we end up with very long takes from which we only used a small section. Preprocessing everything was therefore not a viable option. Unless I guess I planned to take some days to do that in the background before starting the main edit.
Instead: I ended up with a fairly manual workflow. I edit then I identified the sections I wanted to denoise - mainly night footage or in car Minicam footage and then just processed the desired sections of the clips.
Alternative
would be to roundtrip to Resolve - consolidate and trim - process that footage and then reimport to FCPX.
Render the sections I want to process as new master files - without any plugins, then bring back in and reapply color grading.
