FCP into PT - any experiences?

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We are looking into the future regarding our aging equipment and can see that the five avids we have are getting left far behind in the wake of apple/fcp.

All our soundwork is done both on the avids and in our two PT HD suites, and then its all final mixed at a PT Facility. Its all series based animation work that we do.

Do any of you have experience of bouncing projects between FCP and ProTools? Are there any problems, or hiccups we should be aware of?
Are there any arguments for staying with Avid rather than switching?

your thoughts and experiences of such a workflow would be very useful in helping determine which direction we take.

thanks in advance.

adam

[RobMacki]

Do any of you have experience of bouncing projects between FCP and ProTools? Are there any problems, or hiccups we should be aware of?

FCP > OMF/QT > PT/ADVC-100 > Bounce .WAV 16/48 > FCP
No problems.

[minister]

i work with editors who use both. with FCP, they certainly can output an OMF that translates to PT. however, none of the volume automation comes with it. there is a program made by gallery software that will take the XML (an additional output from FCP) and allow you to import it into PT by means of a second import and some futzing. it is some extra steps (and about $800 USD) but it does work. i rarely use it. i don't know about you all, but with all of the gain stage changes that i impose, i rarely keep the editors volume moves -- though, in instances where there is interview and b-roll audio it is hard to know what is supposed to be prominent.

avids are more robust in their omf output. you can get everything you want.

from an audio standpoint, as far i my work is concerned, it doesn't matter. the only difference i can see is how you get picture from them and how you play picture in your audio suite. then, it could make a difference. from a picture perspective, it may matter.

my 2¢

[Don Barto]

No complaints at all about FCP OMF.

Many OMFs I get from Avid Symphony seem to be much larger files than they should be — like twice as big. I used to chalk it up to the editor not consolidating before exporting an OMF, but one particular editor I work with says that he tracked it all down to an admitted bug in the Symphony software that in effect "bloats" the OMFs. Not sure I buy that, but either way, I have never seen such problems with OMFs coming from FCP.

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thanks guys,
just what i was hoping to read!


adam

[Noiz2]

A lot of projects have come in from FCP, other than the volume and pan info not traveling with the OMF everything has been fine. If the picture editor and director know that nothing will travel with the OMF they ,sometimes, don't spend so much time trying to fix things that they should let the sound folks deal with anyway so it's mostly been a plus. The negative is if they don't know and do a bunch of checker-boarding with volume, it sometimes gets challenging trying to unravel it all.

SK

[Don Barto]

Yeah, I would just as soon NOT have all of the "editor automation" to deal with. Not that it doesn't usually sound prety good, but more that sound people can generally work faster and cleaner and solve sound-related problems in much better ways than editors and producer/directors working with editors. Also, the way we tend to setup a session usually lends itself to providing all of the other deliverables that editors and producers at times only seem to have a somewhat rudimentary understanding of. But perhaps more importantly, we uaually have an eye to building sound tracks in such a way that we (or others) can quickly and easilly make any subsequent minor adjustments, changes or total revisions to the program - everything is in its proper place, no train wrecks, no mysteries...

If I'm working with people I don't know that well (or more correctly, with people who's work and methodology I don't know that well), I will usually import the OMF tracks with the editor's levels, take a listen, and then duplicate those tracks, striping all of the level and panning data from the them and using the "unadorned" duplicates to build my own mix from scratch. The originals with the level and panning automation I then assign to the playback voice "None" and hide visually from the rest of the tracks I am working with on the timeline. Then, if I ever need to refer back to the originals to figure out the original intent, the original editor levels are very easy to get back to. With FCP and not really having the ability to access those original levels, an editor reference mix on the Quicktime file or master tape will serve the same purpose just as well.

[RecRoom]

We often find it necessary to use AV Transfer. We get lots of OMFs from lots of different places and it does a great job of making all the OMFs we get the same. It also handles OMFs that aren't embedded, which I believe ProTools doesn't like too much.

[RobMacki]

You should also read through Richard Fairbanks paper on sync issues here.