AVCCAM Road Show

Panasonic is doing a roadshow to show off their AVCCAM products, including the HMC150. Click here to see if it's coming to a town near you. If this presentation is anything like the one they showed at their NAB booth it's extremely impressive, including close up comparisons between HDV and AVCCAM. Hint - AVCCAM wins, hands down.

Final Cut Pro Instability

I know I cannot speak for anybody else when I write this, but FCP is extremely unstable once your project reaches a certain size. I've seen this on multiple machines for several different clients. I've seen my own extremely stable machine because a constant crashfest when the project's size tips the scale north of 50 MB or so.

For a while now I have been editing three documentaries for the PBR (Professional Bullriders) to be distributed on DVD by MTV. The shortest one is about 52 minutes long, the longest just shy of 60 minutes. I have gone from having one big giant project with everything in it (this was a mistake, clearly, and this was months ago when it was a LOT smaller than the three are today) to multiple projects for graphics, music, and cuts. The cuts project itself had grown to over 260 MB and it was simply comprised of the three sequences. So now I'm gone to a "final cut" sequence for each DVD. And yet even with this final step FCP still crashes just as frequently. One example bound to produce a crash is when I copy and paste something as simple as a Title 3D. The file size for each DVD final cut is about 55 MB. Again, north of 50 MB, the theoretical limit I've selected for when FCP becomes unwieldy.

During this long term edit I've had numerous smaller projects come and go, all without major problems. Sure, I occasionally had a crash or two, but nothing like what I'm experiencing with the DVDs. I know another production company that's editing a 1/2 hour series for Speed Channel and they have constant crashes with their larger projects. They have been trying to find creative ways of limiting their file sizes.

I would hope the next version of Final Cut brings about more stability with this app. There are more features I'd love to see as well, but I would just love the app to work the same it does with a small project verses a large. We want to pretend like Final Cut is perfectly acceptable for large projects, but sometimes you have to wonder if it really is. Or maybe it's just me...