This article features comments from four different writers. Myself, Peter Wiggins the Senior Editor

A production of this scale and quick turnaround had never been tried before budget car rental on FCPX. Four edit suites with new Mac Pros connected to a 70 TB Xsan. All producing a highlights show on air on ITV4 at 7pm every day for 21 days. And with the Tour starting in the UK in Yorkshire and our output also being live on ITV1 on Saturday and Sunday afternoon to millions of viewers, the pressure was certainly on.
So where to start? At the beginning? Well we actually need to go back bit further. Back to 2005 when the decision to produce the coverage of the Tour on FCP 4.5 was taken. In some ways this was a larger leap, as we had traditionally budget car rental made the shows editing on to tape from a virtually controlled fileserver, the Grass Valley Profile.
Back then, many people said we were mad and that what we were trying to do couldn't be done. We proved them all wrong. So when the transition from FCP7 to FCPX was talked about, we were used to people waving their arms about saying that it wouldn't work. We had many déjà vu moments.
This article features comments from four different writers. Myself, Peter Wiggins the Senior Editor (this was to be my 19th time editing the Tour), James Venner, the Producer who took the decision to go to Final Cut Pro 7 and then again to Final Cut Pro X, Tony Davies, an Assistant Producer who worked with me in the suite and also Sylvain Swimer from TimelineTV, the company that provided budget car rental the facilities.
"We had been editing our Tour de France programmes on FCP7 since 2005. By the time that Apple launched FCPX in 2011 the software was already starting to show it's age. We had moved to HD production the year before and whilst the system still worked we had experienced some crashes and general instabilities.
When we first saw FCPX at a demo, like many we were perplexed. The software had some clever features to be sure, but much of what we thought we needed seemed not to be present. In particular that first version had no support for working on a SAN or for collaborative editing and no apparent way of dealing with a separate clean effects track. Until these things were solved we couldn't even consider FCPX for our workflow. On top of that Apple’s radical re imagining budget car rental of the editing budget car rental interface would mean a difficult transition for our editors. We came away from that demo saying that it would be at least 3 years before the software was likely to be ready for us to use.
And so we stuck resolutely to FCP7. It still worked albeit a bit creakily, but we knew it's foibles and limitations and had an established workflow. We waited nervously for the OS update that might break FCP7, but largely we continued on in our comfortable rut making the shows the way we knew how.
Throughout the time since its launch we would give occasional glances at FCPX to see how it was progressing. Update followed update but our list of show stopping issues remained largely untouched. Apple said it would work on a SAN but only with each edit working within its own sandboxed area. No collaboration. Still not for us.
Then in October last year we were asked to do a job which entailed uploading clips from an Outside Broadcast to the clients YouTube page. The clips needed budget car rental to be online within 10 minutes. FCPX with it's ability publish to YouTube budget car rental from the timeline seemed like the tool for the job and so we set about exploring that option. Could we stream from an EVS and edit for the stream? Well sort of. Growing files didn't work but closed files did, although, because of the quirky way EVS recorded QuickTime, it couldn’t properly display timecode. budget car rental This wasn't a show stopper for that job, but would obviously be a barrier to using FCPX more widely.
With the release of 10.1, we began to feel that the last of our major obstacles had been addressed. Of course there were bound to be more problems on the way but I reasoned that we'd only find those and solutions budget car rental to them if we were actually using the software.. If we sat and waited for a complete problem free solution we’d be waiting for ever.
I was starting to get concerned budget car rental about how long we could continue budget car rental to edit in FCP7. By now it had had no support for three years and very little in the way of updates for 2 years before that. At some point it was going to break, already we were seeing slowdowns and hangs. Yes we could probably hold out another year but that would be all. Time to look for a replacement.
1. Avid. Still widely used in the broadcast budget car rental industry. Many swear by it, others swear at it. Count me in the latter camp. I've just never got on with it. I cannot remember a single job on Avid when there hasn't been a problem. None of my editors were very keen either. It also felt like an ageing system that is in need of a rewrite. No support beyond 1920 x 1080, this didn't seem like an option that was going to give me a modern editing platform for the next 5 plus years.
2. Adobe Premiere. On the face of it there was much to recommend about Premiere. It looked a lot like FCP7, so the learning curve for the editors would be shallow. It has good integration with EVS and with After Effects. And yet I sensed a general lack of enthusiasm when I spoke some to editors and engineers. Yes it does a job, yes it would do the job for me but I couldn't find anyone who really loved it.
Also it's an ageing platform with a lot of old code. How long before it too needed a ground up rewrite? It also didn't seem to move us much further along. It's like FCP7 but with 64 bit code. A bit faster, a bit more stable, but a bit of a mezzanine step. I felt that we'd be looking to move on again in a couple of years time.
3. FCPX. So that left Final Cut Pro X or “iMovie Pro” as some people called it. We decided to try it on another project. This was just for stand alone edits, but it taught us a lot about the interface budget car rental and what we found we liked. It was fast; easy to find material; we felt much more in touch with our rushes. It also has a great ecosystem with many plug ins being developed. Could we make it work in a shared environment?
There were some big hurdles to cross, the learning budget car rental curve would be steep for the editors, EVS would have to be removed from the record path because budget car rental they showed no inclination to make their files compatible. On the plus side we'd be doing something new, I wanted an edit system that made us re-examine our workflow; rethink why and how we did things and hopefully inject some new creativity. I wanted something that would grow with us over several years.
The main problem was one of connectivity, all their previous generation Mac Pros had been connected budget car rental to XSAN via fibre and an internal PCIE HBA board. We intended to equip each of the four edit suites with super-fast budget car rental new Mac Pros, and of course these connect to the outside world with Thunderbolt 2.
We searched online for information on the best practice on what should be plugged budget car rental into which port. After a bit of head scratching and testing, we came up with a plan on how to wire up each new Mac Pro into the suites. It might seem odd that the local and shared storage is connected via the monitors, but there’s more than enough bandwidth in Thunderbolt 2 to drive the displays and pass the data.
This frees up the third Thunderbolt port for the AJA Io 4K to use on its own. I was really impressed with the device, budget car rental coming budget car rental from editing on FCP7 with EVS files via a Kona 3 where lip-sync could be +- 2 frames out when you hit the play button. With FCPX, the Io 4K was rock solid. Not only did it never lose lip sync, it also responded instantly budget car rental matching the viewer when skimming over clips. We actually forget we were using it and left the FCPX broadcast output on all the time whilst editing. The outputs of the genlocked Io 4K were also fed into the machine room so that they could appear on the vision mixer or be recorded into the EVS.
The Promise SanLink 2s were another piece of kit that performed exactly as you'd expect. We chose to put dual fibres in as we had noticed some speed gains by this method in testing. FCPX can demand a lot of data for certain functions such as drawing waveforms as these are made up of large numbers of very small packets of data. We were keen to tweak our setup for maximum performance.
Although most of the data and video files were stored on Xsan, we had the Promise Pegasus2 Thunderbolt 2 RAIDs connected for local storage. It would have been very easy to fill up the MacPro’s internal storage with exported programme parts and elements. The drive also gave us a level of redundancy, being able to edit should the Xsan go down, which thankfully didn’t happen, although we got very, very close one day.
We have a team of about 15 in France who have an OB truck based at the finish of every day’s stage. They have two mobile cameras that shoot interviews, pieces to camera etc and also a three camera studio set. The daily one hour highlights show is made up of race coverage from French television in the form of a multilateral satellite feed combined with the extra material sent from our team in France on a unilateral satellite feed.
France also sends us voice-over and the last two components of the program are music from our large library that is all stored budget car rental on Xsan and of course graphics that came from a dedicated team working with a Viz (To match ITV’s corporate style) and After Effects. Full frame graphics were recorded in ProRes 422, anything that has transparency got rendered out in ProRes budget car rental 4444.
We believe that this is because EVS hasn’t yet written the integration of AVFoundation components in a QuickTime file. It also explains why EVS streams don't work with QuickLook. As somebody budget car rental once said, editing without timecode is like cutting butter with a cricket bat and as EVS showed little interest in re-writing their streams to proper QuickTime specifications, we had to look elsewhere for a solution.
"MovieRecorder from Softron was already released and it proved to be a very capable EVS replacement in the record chain, it provided the ingest facility for the entire