While I am on this 2 week hiatus, and working on the pilot, and working at NAB, I am really NOT on hiatus.  I will be working a little bit on the Long Beach Job from my home editing studio.  And while I can’t take ALL of the footage home with me, I was allowed to take some.  What I really needed to do was cut down Acts 1 and 2…tighten them up.  Make them flow better.  I cut them fat for the rough with the intention of going back and smoothing out after I got the first four acts roughed out.  But then I made Act 3 darn tight and good, so now I need to go back and work on 1 and 2.

And there is a small section of an interesting detour from the main story that I found fun, and thought it would work well to break up Act 2.  So I needed to bring home some footage of that to work on too.  So, what I did was make a new bin for each act, and a bin for the selects needed to cut this other section.  I then CONSOLIDATED the footage to a small external drive.  This made a new sequence and new media (with the .new after the new clips) that linked to that consolidated media.

Now, for the FCP people out there, this was basically MEDIA MANAGING.  Taking only what was used in the cut, with handles, and making separate clips on a separate drive that linked to the cut.  BUT, this is an area that FCP really falls behind Avid.  Let me explain how.

So, I take this footage and the bins of the consolidated footage and make a new project.  Avid projects are actually several files, one file for each bin, plus a couple master files.  So I make a new project with the same settings, add the bins to the folder, and they appear in the project. And they point to the media on the external drive.  Now I can cut away to my hearts content, and make the footage shine.

OH!  But now I need to add new interview bytes!  And music!  OK, my assistant back in the office makes a bin of selects from the interview, and consolidates them and will FTP (or YOUSENDIT) me the media and bin.  There’s that.  Now I need music.  No problem, I have the same stock library that we are using for the show, so I just import the same tracks and work from those.

NOW… when I am all done cutting, and I am ready to bring these cuts back to the main sequence… you might think that I need to bring back all this consolidated media too, huh?  I mean, the cut is linked to them, right?  Well, maybe for the music, but the other footage was part of longer MASTER footage already captured by the Avid.  So I don’t need to bring the consolidated media.  I just bring a bin with the new cuts back to the main system, add them to the project, and then hit RELINK.  What this does is create a new sequence that now relinks back to the master clips!

I shit you not.

FCP, you see, looks at the starting timecode, ending timecode, duration, and reel number.  If the clip you have doesn’t start at the same time as the one you are trying to link to, or have the same duration, it goes “sorry dude, this isn’t the same clip.  I mean, it is TOTALLY wrong.  I mean, look at the start time, look at the duration.  Not even close dude.”  Avid, on the other hand, is smart.  It doesn’t look at the start and end and duration and reel ONLY.  No…it looks at those and says “Hey, the timecode range of this clip falls inside that clip, and they have the same reel number.  Let me see…Ahhh!  There is the timecode we are looking for, let me just connect this to that and viola!”  Yup, it connects it.  Back to the original media.

Pretty slick, huh?  Would you like to see this in FCP?  I’m sure you would.  GUESS WHAT!?  Someone made this possible.

I shit you not.

It is called FCP Reconnect and it is from Video Toolshed.  I have tested it and it works.  VERY slick.  Watch the demo.