Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

I hate Final Cut Express…

Really, I do. I know it’s old and busted but it’s expensive and have yet to determine whether newer software is any better.

I’ve imported video (Flip 640×480 29.97fps), I’ve imported audio (44.1KHz WAV), I’ve edited it and then discovered that although it looks great in the timeline, the export fails because of the formats of the data that I originally imported does not match any of the variety of expected editing formats. The results look variously horrid.

That sucks. Bigtime. Bollocks to the “you are targeting this for PAL Broadcast TV” mentality, when can I have a NLE which works on the basis of preserving as much of the information in original data as possible, and never using an intermediate codec that downsamples?

⊞

Comments

2 responses to “I hate Final Cut Express…”

  1. Clive

    Trouble is, it’s pretty tricky to pull apart a lossy inter-frame compression format, re-order the frames and put it back together again without further deterioration in quality.

    In audio engineering, one uses lossless encodings and surplus dynamic headroom during mastering and only encodes down to the chosen delivery medium at the last moment. While home studios are now more than capable of doing that for audio, it’s still a tall order for video editing.

    Reply
    1. alecm

      WIBNI the lossless intermediate codecs on offer were not frontended by broadcast-focused presets that are like DV-PAL or 1080i when you have 640×480 ?

      Reply

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