Hi all. I'm about to embark on a large audio mix for a film that's just shy of 2 hours. This is considerably longer than projects I've done before, and I will only really have a week in which to finish it.

The film has been edited in Final Cut Pro, which I have experience of, and I've reached the conclusion that the benefits of Final Cut / Soundtrack Pro project integration make SP the best choice for the audio mix. Some of the clips need some serious restorative treatment, which I will be doing in Izotope RX.

As time is a big issue, and it will be easy to get bogged down in detailed editing, I feel the need to approach the mix from the 'top down', probably conducting several passes of process, from start to finish, to ensure that I don't reach the deadline with a half finished mix.

Does anyone have any advice, either to do with the technical aspects of FCP/SP/Izotope RX integration, or project approach and structure?

I need to pull this off, and do it well, so thanks for any help you can give!

Will

Hi Will,

I have virtually no experience of sound to picture, so forgive me if you think I'm "above my station" posting a reply!

Soundtrack Pro could well be the best tool for you, but if you only have a week to do a two hour edit, it might be an idea to stick to a tool you know inside out for this occasion (maybe you use Logic or something normally?). You may find that you are able to breeze through the project more easily than learning a new program.

Hi
Some of the whizzier aspects of the FCP/SP round-trip process become something of a liability when dealing with a long project on a tight deadline.

Because SP gets the FCP timeline clips passed to it there are occasions where if a short edited clip comes from a much longer source clip-file, then SP wants to render the whole of the (mostly unused) source clip if you add effects to it. This becomes unwieldy in a lengthy project.

It can be a lot simpler to work on exact length audio exports from the Final Cut timeline, which are used to replace the original edited clips in a duplicate picture-locked Sequence made specially for the sound editor.

As a video editor who also does the final sound mix I always do the final mix in FCP, using replacement clips sweetened/sub-mixed externally.

But I'm cautious when there is a deadline involved, and my Final Cut installation is rock-solid stable - which SP definitely wasn't in its earlier manifestations

It is becoming increasingly common for different craft specialists to all work on the same workstation to pull together the project - the video editor, the colourist and sometimes the sound designer/mixer.

Music is usually created elsewhere, but the final mix may well be done in the editing workstation.

That gets rid of the OMF-export problems which frequently arose when working in the old workflow of doing all the sound design/mix in an external ProTools suite.

In my experience the final video edit will always benefit from being tweaked to tighten things up once the constraints of the sound design and music track laying have been idenfified, and that is the big benefit of FCP<>SP integration

Hi, thanks for your responses.

I've continued down the SP road as the auto conform functionality would be extremely useful being that we do not have picture lock yet.

However, I've stumbled at the first hurdle and am having no success in sending the project from FCP to SP.

Whether I send the project with "base layer video" or "fully rendered" video, upon opening the project SP tells me that it cannot open the stmp file, then freezes.

The film is ~2hrs long and contains around 1800 movie clips. Does SP have a reputation of being uncomfortable with projects of this size, or is the problem elsewhere?

I'm not sure what the best alternative route is either. OMS export won't work as the audio file length is over the allowed limit. I don't look forward to exporting and manually placing aiffs. Is mixing in FCP the only remaining solution?

Thanks,
Will