I’ve found the following workflow useful on recent projects when shooting in AVCHD and Canon E1 (DSLR, h264 video).

#1 is to back up your entire card, or camera hard drive. Consider the SD, or Compact Flash card to be your master tape. Unlike a master tape, you can dump the cards contents and reuse it. However, you do want to make a complete back up. Don’t try to sort through the file structure on the card and pull the media files. You may end up shooting yourself in your foot if you need to recapture, or do online edits later.
On Mac OS, open a finder window for the folder where you want to create a back up. Hold down the ‘Option’ key as you drag the disk icon to your storage folder. This will copy the entire disk to your hard drive.

Open Final Cut Pro and use the Log and Transfer window to ingest the footage from the backup of your camera media that you just made.
Set the video preferences for transfer to Apple ProRes (Proxy).
I find that the ‘proxy’ setting for Apple Pro Res is a great way to save on hard drive space. For most footage, it looks pretty close to the quality of regular ProRes. Once editing is complete you can online your sequence to Apple Pro Res, or another codec.
I find that for most web, or DVD output I don’t ever need to do an online edit, because the video is getting scaled down from HD so the results between scaling down from Apple Pro Res, or ProRes (Proxy) are indistinguishable.

Once editing is complete, create a Quicktime Reference Movie of your sequence.

1. In Render Manager tools delete all old render files. (important step when making a reference movie to make sure the render files being referenced are current)
2. Render the entire sequence with the new sequence settings.
3. Mix down audio.
4. Export a Quicktime reference movie from FCP at the current settings. To export a reference movie export to Quicktime and un-check the box for ‘Make Movie Self-Contained’.

Now you can use the reference movie in Compressor to create any delivery format.
I’ve found that for the a web h264 format, or even as a preview version for clients, the Apple TV, HD for Apple Devices, or SD for Apple Devices all work well.

If you need additional formats for web delivery the Miro Video Converter is a great free download. I use it to convert to WebM and theora.ogv for use with the HTML5 player VideoJS.
Note that Miro Video Converter will not except a QuickTime reference movie as a source. It should be able to use Apple ProRes or Uncompressed 8bit. Double check documentation on the recent version.

Focal Length
The focal length of a lens determines its angle of view, and also how much the subject will be magnified for a given photographic position.
Focal length also determines the perspective of an image.
Longer focal lengths require shorter exposure times to minimize burring caused by the shake of hands.(or use a tripod)
The Focal Length means how much can your camera see.

• Less than 21 mm – extreme wide angle – good for architecture
• 21-35 mm – wide angle – landscape
• 30-70 mm – “normal” – street + documentary, also good for portraits
• 70-135 mm – medium telephoto – portraiture
• 135-300 mm – telephoto – sports, wildlife

Aperture
The aperture range of a lens refers to the amount of light that the diaphragm can let inside the camera to reach the sensor.
Apertures are listed in terms of f-numbers and expresses the diameter of the entrance pupil in terms of the effective focal length of the lens; It is the quantitative measure of lens speed.
On a camera, the f-number is usually adjusted in f-stops. 
Each “stop” is marked with its corresponding f-number, and represents a halving of the light intensity from the previous stop.
The F number can be displayed as 1:X or f/X (like in this example).

Lenses with larger apertures are faster because, for a given ISO speed, the shutter speed can be made faster for the same exposure. A smaller aperture means that objects can be in focus over a wider range of distance (depth of field).

Indoor, theater and low light photography often require lenses with large maximum apertures (lower f-stop) in order to accommodate faster shutter speeds, thus creating less camera shake and less film noise, or gain. 
Larger apertures also increase depth of field, which helps isolate the subject from the background.

Putting first aid ice packs in a projector box actually keeps it from over heating. Let’s hope that no one sprains an ankle, because we are out of ice!

Some of these are obvious. However these notes may save you time, money and headaches.

• 5000 Lumens is the absolute minimum in a show that will have any lights on.
• Professional projection screen makes a huge difference in brightness, contrast and overall sexiness of your projected image.
• Contrast ratio is another important factor. Look for 2200:1 or better
• Lens shift can save you hours of time on a ladder.
• DO NOT try to put a box around a projector unless the person building it has in depth knowledge about cooling hot digital equipment like computers, servers, projectors, etc.
• Projectors can be loud. Make sure your sound designer is aware of the equipment noise during initial planning stages.
• When going into tech rehearsals make sure you have control over the computer or hardware running video. If the operator / assistant is not in the house with you than make sure you can take control and monitor over a network, or KVM.
• Thoroughly test your hardware before finalizing designs. Make sure it can run video at the frame size and frame rate that you plan to output. Test scene transitions and a range of real time effects so you know your limits going into tech.
• Clean projector filters regularly. (weekly, or daily depending on use)
• Projector manufacturers offer online throw distance calculators. Here are a few links:
• Sanyo – http://www.sanyo-lenscalculator.com/
• Panasonic – http://panasonic.net/avc/projector/calculator/html/cal_menu.html
• Canon – http://www.canon.com/lcd-sim/simulator/
• Epson – http://www.epson.com/alf_upload/landing/distance-calculator/
• Above all, remain calm, patient and take the time you need to do things right.
• Set expectations right away. Confirm who is responsible for what on your team.
• Learn how and when to make decisions.
• If you don’t know, ASK.

What to do if you have edited a feature length documentary and after three years of adding multiple video formats to your FCP project you realize that you have a mess on your hands? FInal Cut does a great job of allowing an editor to drop different video formats into one sequence, however you need to take a bit more control if you want to optimize quality and avoid mistakes that can take days to fix.
When I started editing the The Bellman Equation director Gabriel Bellman handed me 100+ hours of footage shot between 1999 and 2009. Of course, he didn’t use the same camera for 10 years. The footage began in SD, bumped up to HD and then spread out into carious flavors of HD with the latest stuff being shot on iphone.
Rather than taking the time to do some conversions and make sure those different formats were going to play nice together I just kept dumping it into the same DV-NTSC sequence. (which would have been an okay format for 1999) Everything was working out fine until we got around to finishing the film and started burning DVDs. We saw a lot of degraded quality and issues with motion estimation when encoding to MPEG2. I couldn’t live with it and had to start working to unravel a knot that was 3+ years in the making.
What I found was that the issue was mainly due to the commingling of progressive with interlaced (both upper and lower) footage.
Read the next post to learn what I had to do to fix it and how to avoid a similar issue.

The best way to avoid most issues with output in FCP is to take the time to match the settings of your clips before starting to cut. Set your sequence settings to match what you need for final output and match your clips to those settings. The reason you do this ahead of time is because you are going to get better results than if you rely on FCP to do frame size, frame rate and interlacing conversions. You will also save time in waiting for your sequence to render out clips with different settings.

Running your footage through Compressor will often yield much better results especially when it comes to de-interlacing.
To de-interlace in Compressor use frame controls. Choosing the ‘Better’ setting will often yield great results.
Choosing ‘Best’ adds an immense amount of time to the processing. Unless for some reason the ‘Better’ setting isn’t cutting it for you, avoid using ‘Best.’ (test this with short segments)

Check out the Creative Cow forums for more detailed workflows about the specific media you are using. I’ll keep this post to the topic of damage control when you’ve already made mistakes.

In my situation, I had already edited the entire film and the media was not logged and stored in such a way that would make it practical to re-capture, or convert all of the footage. What I was looking for is the best compromise in quality between the various formats we were using. In the end I found that it worked best to de-interlace the final edit using compressor. Unfortunately, using the ‘Send to Compressor’ option in FCP would fail after half a day of working. As a workaround I had to output from FCP first and than encode using Compressor.

1. In FCP, I Changed the sequence settings from DV-NTSC to Apple ProRes bottom filed first. Since FCP is not very good at de-interlacing and most of the footage was interlaced I found that it was best to get the majority of the footage output in its naturally interlaced state. The down side is that any progressive footage was going to become interlaced and any of the HDV footage that was interlaced upper field first was also going to get converted and loose some quality. However, in the end this was the better compromise.
   The sequence is now set to Apple ProRes, 720×480, 29.97 fps, lower field first. Motion estimation is set to best. From there I output a reference movie from FCP.
2. In Render manager tools delete all old render files. (important step when making a reference movie to make sure the render files being referenced are current)
3. Render the entire sequence with the new sequence settings.
4. Mix down audio.
5. Export a Quicktime reference movie from FCP at the current settings. To export a reference movie export to Quicktime and un-check the box for ‘Make Movie Self-Contained’.
6. Using Compressor, encode the reference movie to Apple ProRes and use frame controls to de-interlace. Use the progressive setting and choose ‘Better’ quality.
7. Once Compressor is done you will have a QT movie that is Apple ProRes, 720×480, 29.97, progressive.
8. For DVD output, bring the new QT movie back into Compressor and encode it for DVD.

Yes, some of the footage got interlaced and than de-interlaced again. As I said above, this was the best compromise for the footage I was working with. The only footage that was not acceptable after this process were titles that came from outside of FCP. These sections looked pretty bad on a computer monitor. (though they actually looked fine on a video monitor, or TV despite the interlace/de-interlace workflow) The titles I generated in FCP looked fine all around. The difference being that the titles generated by FCP started out as interlaced clips when rendered in FCP. Other titles and graphics came into FCP as progressive and then became interlaced and then de-interlaced again. Luckily there were only a handful of graphics that were effected by this process and none of them were layered over other footage. The following steps allowed me to maintain the quality of these clips:

1. After step 7 above is complete, I brought the QT movie that was output from Compressor back into FCP.
2. I dropped  this clip into a new FCP sequence and let FCP change the sequence settings to match the clip. (which remember is now progressive)
3. I then went through the sequence and added the titles and graphics back in on a new video track, covering up the version that was in the exported QT movie. (this only needed to be done for titles that were not generated by FCP in the final edit)
4. Since the sequence was now progressive, and the titles were generated in the correct frame size of 720×480 there was no distinguishable loss of quality.
5. I output another reference movie of the new sequence using the current settings. (again deleting any old render files and mixing down audio) With the exception of the titles needing a format conversion, nothing else needed to be rendered in FCP.
6. I then used this new reference movie to encode files for DVD, web output, etc in Compressor.

As I said at the beginning, it’s better to get your footage all matched up and properly logged before starting to cut.  But, if you find yourself in a similar situation, this information may prove useful in finding a solution.